For a while, when I was in grad school at Duquesne, I lived on campus and sometimes had lunch in the caf with a nun who was getting a master's in English.
We were interestingly simpatico as regards our literary tastes, easily understanding each other's explanations why we liked the novels of author X or didn't care for those of Y.
But she was an ardent Democrat during a period of my life in which I only voted at all because another Democrat offered me a six pack to vote for Bill Clinton.
That was a bit later, I think.
Anyway, the thing is she once remarked with evident, innocent enthusiasm all over her face that she hoped Jesse Jackson would be nominated by her party, and asked my view.
Young fool that I was - I remained a young fool unusually late in life - I blurted the truth that I thought that idea a terrible mistake and that he wouldn't have a prayer of winning.
Clearly distressed, she asked if I meant America was not ready for a black president, a euphemistic way of asking if I thought America too racist.
No, I explained, it wasn't that.
It was that Jackson seemed such an uneducated, ignorant thug with the sound and look of the ghetto criminal all over him.
And that was the last of our charming lunches.
But it was the truth.
In contrast, Obama is smart as a whip, excellently well schooled, and has nothing of the ghetto or the thug about him.
And if anything he's more articulate than most presidents have been, and perhaps usually more comfortable in front of crowds or cameras than anyone since JFK.
Jackson, I may have mentioned to that nun, always sounded like a man talking through a mouthfull of mashed potatoes.
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