Race to the finish

By now you will know the answer to a question lurking behind Barack Obama’s presidential campaign: “Is America ready for a black President?” As I write this, I do not. But I think it is the question, much as religion was the question of John F. Kennedy’s campaign in 1960. Then it was Catholicism that frightened us.

We imagined a country under the tyranny of the Vatican (a much gentler Vatican under Pope John than the one under Benedict now.) That tyranny never materialized, and John Kennedy managed, better than most Protestant Presidents since him, to keep state separate from church.

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