Author That Dubbed Clinton ‘First Black President’ Endorses Obama

January 28th, 2008 10:40 AM

The fun in the Obama camp continues.

On Monday, the author who in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky scandal back in 1998 actually dubbed Bill Clinton as "our first black president"  endorsed Barack Obama.

Honestly, you really can't make this stuff up.

As deliciously reported by the Associated Press moments ago:

Author Toni Morrison said her endorsement of the Democratic presidential candidate has little to do with Obama's race - he is the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas - but rather his personal gifts.

Writing with the touch of a poet in a letter to the Illinois senator, Morrison explained why she chose Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton for her first public presidential endorsement.

Morrison, whose acclaimed novels usually concentrate of the lives of black women, said she has admired Clinton for years because of her knowledge and mastery of politics, but then dismissed that experience in favor of Obama's vision.

[...]

In 1998, Morrison wrote a column for the New Yorker magazine in which she wrote of Bill Clinton: "White skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."

I wonder if the recent behavior by the first black president has reduced his tropes of blackness.

Those interested can read Morrison's 1998 New Yorker column here.