As I am writing this, Senator Obama hasn't won the election at this point, but he is the leading candidate. He has an excellent chance here in Georgia, part of the Republican Deep South Bible Belt.
Bill Cosby was probably the single most important reason why us White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants abandoned racism and began to think of the black, hispanic and asian people as just people. As we watched the fictional Huxtable family grow, we saw our own families. While King and Malcom X were important to the cause of racial equality, they were polarizing political figures, who did nothing to quell the fear of the unknown among people who had been raised in an era of racism. Cosby showed us that our fears were unfounded, that people were people, no matter their color. He tempered racism, and moved us much farther along the path toward racial equality.
But nobody thought of Cosby as presidential. The truth is that when the movie Deep Impact premiered 10 years ago, few people would have seriously considered the possibility that the U.S. would have a black president in our lifetimes. Morgan Freeman's performance as a noble, intelligent, moral leader who kept his head in the face of one of the worst catastrophes to ever befall the human race was so powerful that it made many of us wish that we had such a noble President, instead of Monica Lewinski's boyfriend, Bill the Clown in full midlife crisis mode.
Then President Bush won an election on the idea of family values, low taxes and smaller government, and used a "Mandate" of a couple of hundred votes to make the government even bigger, show a complete lack of any sense of morality as he ran roughshod over our freedoms and the very Constitution, and used lies, intimidation and scare tactics to get his way. He made Hitler and Stalin look human in comparison, using torture, abandoning the Geneva Convention, which even Hitler agreed to, holding political prisoners, aspiring to turn America into an empire by attacking countries that were no threat to us but had oil and were in strategic positions, using illegal phone taps to monitor the private conversations of our own citizens and soldiers, allowing covert CIA operatives to be exposed for his political gain, appointing political allies to important positions that normally go to real professionals, corrupting the court system by forcing partisan politics into it, manufacturing an aura of fear, hate, loathing and distrust. But he wasn't even competent at turning the USA into an effective police state; unlike Mussolini, he couldn't even make the trains run on time. AND he wrecked the economy, giving tax breaks and favorable rules to his rich friends and firms which had made multi-million dollar donations to his campaigns, like Lehman, AIG, etc., and did nothing for the other 99% of the population, while he put pro-industry people in charge of the very industries that they were supposed to regulate, fouled the water and food supplies by hampering the ability of the inspections agencies to do their jobs. The list of Bush's scandals, corruption and incompetence goes on and on and on and on AND ON. He did such a horrible job that just 7 years after 9/11, we, the people were willing to elect a black man named Hussein to replace him.
After this scandal-filled, incompetent excuse for a Presidency, practically any change from the status quo would be an improvement. No NeoCon Fundamentalist cut in Bush's cloth would have had a chance in a general election.
Which led the Republican party to nominate somebody who wasn't really a NeoCon. Quite a few people would have liked to see the noble old warrior McCain as president, if he hadn't made one of the worst selections of a vice president in modern history. Palin makes Dan Quayle look smart and the KKK and Jerry Falwell look like moderates. Her hate-filled rallies managed to work the people who attended them into a frenzy of hatred, but they caused millions of people to turn away from the party of angry mobs and lunatics acting like a lynch mob hunting witches during the Spanish Inquisition. Palin played to her base to perfection. The only problem is that her base is a very small percentage of the population. Even some of the most conservative members of the Republican party fled from her brand of NeoCon Fundamentalist rhetoric designed to stir the same fear and loathing that allowed Bush to be re-elected.
If Obama does win the presidency, much of the reason will be his own intelligence, hard work, organizational skills, tenacity, his considerable oratory skills, his ability to convey his plans for the future effectively, and his calm Presidential demeanor. However, he can also thank the NeoCon Fundamentalists who hijacked the Grand Old Party and probably greatly influenced McCain's choice of VP, the total incompetence and lack of any sense of morality or even human decency of George Bush, and Morgan Freeman's performance, which showed us that a black man can be an effective, noble leader, for this opportunity to lead our great country through the host of economic and foreign policy disasters that the Bush and Clinton Administrations left behind.