Will racism be the thing that prevents Barack Obama from bringing his audacious hopes into the White House or is there something even worse in store?

A Seattle friend of mine recently took a business trip to the Florida panhandle where she met with a middle-aged Southern gent who exhibited the courtly manner for which his region of the country is traditionally known. During a dinner with the man and his business associates, talk turned to politics. The Southerner suddenly dropped his courtliness and proudly announced he'd not only never vote for Obama, he'd never vote for any African American. The man's friends echoed the same view and it didn't stop there. The racial slurs and Obama slanders started flying. My friend was shocked and sickened. When the Southerners repeated the falsehood that Obama had refused to take his oath of office on the Bible, my friend's business associate, also from Seattle, finally raised his voice in disagreement. The table went uncomfortably silent.

It is indeed shocking and unusual, at least in this far northwest corner of the country, to hear anyone openly state racist views, but, as my friend witnessed, such views have not disappeared. Still, I truly believe we have reached a point where people with such crude biases are a distinct minority. Obama need not worry about the overt racists anyway, since they would never vote for him in the first place. However, the bigger problem may be with people who harbor an unstated but significant measure of discomfort with black people. It is hard to sort out the many impulses that drive the way a person votes, but it seems pretty clear from results in the last few primaries that the color of Obama's skin makes some working class whites and older voters feel uneasy. One of Hillary Clinton's openly stated rationales for staying in the race for the Democratic nomination is that she fares far better with white voters than does Obama. Turn that around and she is saying a certain segment of white folks who would otherwise vote for a Democrat will not vote for a black candidate.

How many white voters feel that way is the question. Are their numbers small enough that they will be outweighed by the young people and African Americans who have been inspired and energized by Obama? My guess is yes, but I could be wrong. My West Coast upbringing has shielded me from direct observation of the racial antagonism that is clearly still alive in the heartland.

Perhaps polls will tell us how this racial factor will play out, but there is another, darker question that polls cannot answer. It is a question that rises up in almost any conversation among people whose hopes have been lifted by the Obama candidacy: When will someone try to assassinate him?

Next month, it will be 40 years since the assassination of another young, charismatic candidate who inspired young people and raised the expectations of racial minorities. The country is certainly in far less turmoil than it was in 1968 when Robert Kennedy was gunned down on the night he won the California primary, but assassins do not necessarily rise out of turmoil. They rise from the darkest corners of human nature and are drawn to those who are most luminous in our public life. Right now, no one is shining quite like Barack Obama and the closer he gets to achieving his goal, the more he will attract the malevolent attentions of sick minds at the fringe of society.

For such people, the motivation for murder does not have to be grand; it can be inspired by the slightest thing. Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy's killer, was a Palestinian American upset about Israel and the 1967 Six Day War, but his diaries indicated his angry focus on Kennedy pre-dated that war. John Hinckley, Jr., shot Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, the actress with whom he was obsessed. Squeaky Fromme, the woman who still resides in prison for pointing a gun at Gerald Ford, was an acolyte of the mad messiah, Charles Manson.

Those who fear for Obama's safety assume that racism would be the motivating factor for a would-be assassin. But, as I said, it doesn't always take that much. A twisted thinker with a growing fixation on Obama might be set off by smaller things -- like the erroneous belief that the candidate once refused to place his hand on a Bible or wear flag pin on his lapel. If those things can get talk radio listeners or a table full of Southern businessmen worked up, imagine what sparks might be ignited in sicker minds.

Two cheers to the Seattle School District for eliminating its Office of Equity, Race and Learning Support.

I'll award the third cheer if a district spokesman's contention that this move is purely a budgetary fix turns out to be a glossing over of the truth. I hope the real story is that someone in charge came to their senses and realized the Office of Equity, Race and Learning Support would have been better titled the Office of Race Propaganda, White Guilt and Bogus Sociology.

The director of the office, Caprice Hollins, gained notoriety for a variety of offensive acts. Most noted was the page she put up on the district's web site that asserted Seattle's public schools bought into the belief that such things as planning for the future, emphasizing individualism and defining standard English were examples of cultural racism. Last year, Hollins got more heat for sending a memo to teachers that declared "Thanksgiving is a time of mourning." She sent along a list of myths about Thanksgiving, some of which were truly myths, others of which were debatable points of history; a list which, if one is going to get into the details of the cultural collision between European settlers and Native Americans, was distinctly incomplete.

Hollins' office got less attention for the "diversity workshops" that all teachers and administrative staff are expected to attend several times a year. One series of workshops was called Courageous Conversations. A better name would have been Cowardly Confessions. Real conversations were not the true purpose of these gatherings. White teachers who work tirelessly year after year to teach a diverse and challenging collection of students were simply lumped together and told by hired "trainers" that the color of their skin inevitably makes them insensitive racists. The "conversation" was expected to be a string of confessions of personal bias from the white teachers. Those who were brave enough to raise dissenting voices got talked to later by their supervisors. Conversations? These sessions have more in common with Vietnamese re-education camps.

There is a radical corner of the African American academic world where outlandish ideas have been nutured and given the patina of scholarship. These are the sort of ideas that recently got Rev. Jeremiah Wright so much press, such as his contention that the U.S. government created AIDS to kill off black people or that the brains of black people and white people are physiologically different. This questionable scholarship is a murky mix of bad history (for instance, the easily refutable contention that ancient Egypt was a black African society from which all of civilization's great ideas emerged) and bad sociology (only white people can be racists; black people are warmer, more communal, non-violent people because of the higher melanin level in their skin). This absurd stew of ideas has been a fine job-creating engine for a few black educators who get to serve it up at workshops or send it out into the world from their offices at school district headquarters, but it has done very little for the African American students who still languish behind their white peers in academic achievement. Those kids still rely most on the dedicated teachers of all races who, despite being given poor resources and insulting salaries, continue to stay at their jobs day after day, year after year.

Here's how one teacher sees it:

These teachers and staff have been made to feel that they are somehow personally responsible for the plight of students of color because of their own hidden racism and white privilege. This vision of whiteness lacks the sensitivity and realization that not all white people are alike; that we, too, come from diverse backgrounds, beliefs and experiences... If the Office of Race, Equity and Learning Support was formed to bring all races together for better understanding, mutual support and respect for one another it has failed in that mission by perpetuating the division of people along racial lines.

Some time ago, I was in a classroom at one Seattle elementary school. It was an overcrowded 5th grade class where "show and tell" was nothing like the displays of new toys and happy vacation stories that I remember from my own grade school days. Instead, the students gathered in a circle with their teacher and talked about the things they were dealing with at home -- a battered mom, a crack-selling older brother, a sexually abusive relative. For many of these children, their teacher was the only stable adult in their lives and their classroom was a refuge. They were of all races and they all had individual stories. They needed attention, education and love.

The one thing they really did not need was to be stereotyped according to their skin color by school bureaucrats building their careers on a pile of racial propaganda.

President George W. Bush is going to continue to live in a fantasy of his own choosing right down to his last day in office. That is made perfectly clear in a Washington Post report by Dan Froomkin.

Froomkin takes a look at Bush's ongoing cluelessness from several angles. Perhaps most revealing are the extensive quotations taken from the president's recent talk with workers at a information technology company near St. Louis. Here's just a snippet of the commander-in-chief's hour-long ramble:

I think it's going to be very important, as you pay attention to the presidential race, to try to come up with not only who you agree with, obviously, but whether that person knows how to delegate; knows how to set up a structure so that good information can make it into the Oval Office in a way that enables good decision-making. The temptation, of course, is to walk in the Oval Office and say, oh, man, you're looking beautiful. And the President doesn't need somebody -- because generally he's not looking beautiful. The President needs somebody to walk in and say, here's what I think.

So when you think about good, solid advisors -- at least in my case -- think about somebody like Condoleezza Rice, or Hank Paulson who used to run Goldman Sachs, or Bob Gates. These are strong, capable people. And my job is to make sure that the environment is such that they can walk in and say, Mr. President, here's what I'm thinking, here's my advice. And their job, by the way, once the President makes up his mind, is say, 'Yes, sir, Mr. President.'

Gosh, I wonder why he failed to mention the several folks who got fired for telling him the Iraq adventure would take many more troops and cost many billion dollars more than predicted by the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld. That seems like sound advice and good information that was dead on arrival in the Oval Office. And speaking of advisors, he failed to mention those who aren't with him anymore, such as Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. Is he glad he delegated a war to them?

The new gallery of all my primary election cartoons is now open for viewing. Check it out!

Just in time for today's big primary showdown, I'm about to put up a new cartoon gallery featuring all my cartoons from this marathon presidential primary season. This gallery will pick up right where the gallery of pre-primary 'toons left off. Watch for it to appear in the next few hours over on the left side of my main page or click on galleries in the banner up above.

As in the movie, Groundhog's Day, each day of this presidential campaign seems like a repeat of the day before.

Day after day, week after week, primary after primary, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton stay locked in the same relative positions -- he, slightly, but not convincingly, ahead in the delegate count; she, winning primaries, refusing to quit, but not finding a way to jump ahead of him. The same tired issues keep recycling -- especially the vituperative rants of Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- with scant serious discussion of the truly meaningful issues confronting our country and world.

This all started out with a much more hopeful scenario. Remember when both parties filled debate stages with squads of candidates offering voters interesting choices? Remember the excitement about electing the first woman to be president? Remember the even greater excitement about a young, mixed-race candidate who seemed poised to transform our politics, our race relations and our image in the world? All that excitement seems to have dissipated as the campaign has become mired in the muck.

True, we are now down to the three candidates who truly stood out from the crowded pack. Republicans, despite themselves, have ended up with the strongest candidate they could have chosen for the general election. John McCain's heroic story and not-entirely-accurate image as a maverick plays well with the independent voters Republicans will need to attract if they hope to win in a year when voters have soured on the Iraq War, are nervous about the economy and are overwhelmingly ready to be rid of the incumbent Republican president. Yet, McCain's luster dulls every time he displays his conventional political side -- as with his pandering proposal to suspend the federal gas tax for the summer.

If that makes him look like a hack, the same can be said for Clinton who has proposed a similar plan. Hillary has certainly shown resilience and an ability to connect with voters on the lower end of the economic scale in her tireless fight to stay alive in this race, but she is also proving that the thrill of electing a woman president is largely illusion. If she should rise to the highest office in the land, she will likely prove only that a woman can be as compromising and conventional as a man. That doesn't seem all that revolutionary.

Obama was the one who appeared to be the incarnation of true change. With the first African American president, Black Americans might finally let go of the culture of victimhood that has held them back. White Americans might finally start paying attention to the economic gap between the races that has sustained resentment in the black community. National politics might be carried out on common ground, not from two ideological camps. The face and voice representing America in the world would be suddenly different and could renew faith in this nation as a force for good on the planet.

All of that was, perhaps, too much to expect of one man. If Hillary Clinton has accomplished anything, it is that she has whittled Obama down to size. Yes, I think he could be a transformative president, but there is now a very big if attached to that premise -- if he has the skills and toughness to survive in the savage battleground of national and international politics. But, if he can't beat Hillary, bury Rev. Wright and quell the suspicions of the white working class, he may not be ready to take on Iran, Vladimir Putin, global warming, the U.S. Congress and the 24-a-day news machine.

That performance of that last entity is the most dispiriting element of this campaign. As a journalist, I am appalled and disgusted on a daily basis by what I see on the cable news channels. Actual reporting seems to have almost entirely been eliminated as a duty of these so-called newsgathering organizations. "News" now consists of talking heads asking each other to analyze poll numbers or the candidates' latest tiny gaffes. Too many of these babbling egotists are not journalists at all, but partisan veterans of past campaigns and prior administrations. Too many of the alleged journalists are mere television pundits who left whatever reporting credentials they may have had far behind. They are spin doctors for their own careers. When these people talk on for hours about the hot issues of this campaign, they are not gabbing about what's on the minds of average Americans, they are simply caught up in the media echo chamber that has distorted and debilitated this exercise in democracy.

Right now, I'm not feeling much hope that the 2008 campaign can be rescued from spin, triviality and cheap shots or from the clutches of a broadcast media in thrall to ratings, personality and gossip. Jefferson would weep.

Like abortion, guns and prayer in schools, karaoke is a social phenomenon that divides people into armed camps.

On one side, those who hate karaoke are armed with the indisputable argument that it only encourages bad singing and embarrassing, flamboyant behavior. On the other side are the karaoke partisans, armed with the equally compellling retort: "Yeah, but it's fun!"

My lovely bride and I fall dangerously on either side of this great divide. When I first offered up the idea of hosting a multi-generational karaoke party with our daughter, Nole Ann received my proposal with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Her tactical error was her failure to crush the idea at inception. Thus, by the time she began to register her complaints, the invitations had already gone out.

The day of the party, I began transforming our living room with glittery party decorations, including a miniature disco ball above the fireplace, while Nole Ann talked about heading downtown to get a room for the night -- by herself. I hoped her enthusiasm might rise when our friend Sally came over to have me draw Amy Winehouse tattoos all over her arms, but, as I was imprinting Sally's husband's name above her left breast, Nole Ann had to go lie down. You see, she's a champagne-and-quiet-conversation kind of gal, not a loud-music-and-whiskey woman. And tattoos don't enter into in her definition of fine art -- even if I'm drawing them.

Sally's fake tattoos were a temporary artifice meant to replicate the persona of a contemporary singer known for her fine voice, drug addictions and propensity to cut up her body just to see herself bleed. As a high school teacher, Sally likes to stay as culturally current as her students, which influenced her choice of artist to emulate. In my invitation, I had encouraged invitees show up dressed as a prominent performer. I did this, of course, so that I would have an excuse to dress up myself. I wanted to be Jon Bon Jovi. I had gone out to Display and Costume near Northgate to accessorize myself with an '80s hair band look. I tried on several wigs and found a fantastic honey-blonde thatch that stretched past my shoulders. I liked it so much, I wore it in the car, just to see if people would stare. When I got home, Nole Ann stared, alright -- in something approximating horror. At such moments, when it is clear I am a little weirder than she had bargained for, I remind her it's her own fault for marrying a cartoonist.

Despite her karaoke phobia, Nole Ann resolved to stay stoic through the evening's festivities (although she said if I couldn't find her later in the night, she'd be up in the bedroom with a pillow over her head). I put on my tightest jeans, black muscle shirt, studded wrist band and boots. With the fake hair in place, I wrapped a red bandana around my head and stared at the result: scary, it was so good. Although I was more Axl Rose than Bon Jovi, it was close enough.

Then, it was time for a pre-party run for ice at QFC. I took along a young friend visiting from L.A. who was very authentically dressed as Joan Jett in black leather and silver spikes. We figured everyone would gawk and point and ask for autographs. No such luck. Not a head turned. Seattle's just too full of eccentric characters. We were merely part of the parade. Or maybe it was the Dave Matthews effect. I live only blocks from his house, so maybe people in the neighborhood are just used seeing rock stars in the produce aisle.

To power the party, I rented a karaoke machine from Seattle Karaoke that came equipped with more than 1,000 songs. I plugged that sucker right into my home stereo and TV and was set to go. But, for the party's first couple of hours, nobody stepped up to the microphone. My guests were just standing around in the kitchen, talking and eating and drinking. They were having fun, but I wasn't. I could feel the $175 rental fee wasting away. Desperate to get the music rolling, I dragged several friends into the living room, cranked up Bon Jovi's "Lay Your Hands On Me," and urged them to dance. The opening drum solo shook the floor, I hit the first lyrics on time and pretty much in tune and, from then on, the room was rocking and rolling.

I then learned the bigger challenge in hosting a karaoke party was not getting things started, it was supplying the sudden demand. Song requests piled up. When someone did a ballad, others were clamoring for something they could dance to. If one guy was singing Garth Brooks, somebody else urged anything but Country. The star of the evening was my friend Bob, a former Post-Intelligencer photographer who could earn a living as a lounge lizard. He nails Sinatra and loves an audience (even more than I do, which is saying a lot). By the time he got to the climax of "New York, New York," he had thrown off his jacket, unbuttoned his shirt and was starting on his pants as women shrieked. A young woman named Eleanor came over as Bob basked in the attention and she quietly asked for an old standard. I gave Bob a break, handed her the mike and she broke into lovely song. When Bob and Eleanor teamed up for a duet later, it was karaoke at its best. He was probably the oldest person in the room, she was almost 40 years younger, but they made beautiful music together.

My moment in the spotlight came performing Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead Or Alive." I've aged into a raspy voice that works pretty well on carefully selected rock anthems. I have also discovered the most important karaoke secret: there are controls on the karaoke machine that give echo to your voice and allow you to drop the key to a singable level -- use them.

At about 1 AM, most folks had gone home and my wife was still awake. She'd actually had a good time. No one made her sing or dress funny and she got to spend time with a lot of good friends. I, of course, got to sing and toss my store-bought hair. We were both happy. If we could find common ground on karaoke, perhaps there is hope for the world. Maybe all the contending factions on our planet should just start singing karaoke together. After working their way through 1,000 songs, they'll be too hoarse to yell at each other and too happy to hold a grudge.

I was just standing on my front porch in the warm sunlight, watching the snow turn to hail.

It has been that kind of week in Seattle. Peter Donnelly, the grand poobah of the Seattle arts community, once said to me that the reality of this city's weather is that there is no weather. By that he meant there are few extremes. Cloudy and 50 degrees is the usual weather report in this town -- no deep snows, no scorching heat, no hurricanes or twisters or droughts.

Well, this April, we've gotten weather. April showers have brought more than May flowers. As the tulips have blossomed, temperatures have dropped toward freezing. There has been such a dumping of snow in the mountains that some ski areas have chosen to stay open indefinitely. Saturday night, I was at a Passover dinner with a couple of women who had been skiing earlier in the day in fresh powder. I went through sunshine, rain and an attack of pelting hail on my 20-minute drive to the gathering. Sitting at the Seder table and hearing about the visitation of 10 plagues on ancient Egypt, I glanced out the window to see if frogs might be falling from the sky. Had amphibians been thumping to the ground, I would have been only mildly surprised.

This orgy of goofy weather followed the one-day, summer-like meteorological orgasm of last weekend and it has gotten a little confusing. A couple of days ago, my wife was parking her Miata in what she took to be a sudden snow flurry. When she got out of the car, she realized the white stuff was not snow, it was blossoms falling from the cherry trees.

Weather has come to Seattle. The frogs can't be far behind.

Are American marriages really as bland and trivial as reading about them makes it seem? And are American men really obsessed with nothing but sports and farting?

MSN ran a little feature a few days ago that made me want to gag. Two of their columnists posted a Husband's Bill of Rights and a Wife's Bill of Rights. Presumably, these are the things that the wives and husbands of this great nation see as essential components of marital harmony. The 10 rights a husband must have are:

• The right to go out with his buddies at least once a month.
• The right to dislike the husbands of his wife's friends.
• The right to have a few things of his own in the house.
• The right not to be scolded by his wife.
• The right to teach his sons how to burp and fart.
• The right to teach his children how to defend themselves.
• The right to copious reading material in the bathroom.
• The right to watch the big game.
• The right to control the remote when he's on the couch.
• The right to be chivalrous.

Does this list annoy me? Let me count the ways. Some of the rights conjure an image of a man on a leash -- scolded and brought to heel for wanting to see his friends, for keeping his own possessions in his own home, for trying to be a gentleman. What kind of shrew is this guy married to? Other rights suggest why the wife may have a few complaints. Does this guy really care so much about watching television, burping, farting and spending long hours in the bathroom that such things are equated with Jeffersonian doctrine?

And what about the wife's rights? Here are her ten:

• The right to dislike her husband's buddies.
• The right to experience PMS in all its glory
• The right to demand he finish a household job.
• The right to hear an honest answer to the question "What's wrong?"
• The right to keep her secrets.
• The right to clean air (meaning: no farting).
• The right to tons of girly bathroom products.
• The right to talk with girlfriends every day.
• The right to flirt.
• The right to foreplay.

Gag me again. A big part of what bothers me about these rights is what is being inferred about men. Apparently, the husband is a crappy lover who is in a constant state of flatulence. Strangely, while the husband is accused of being non-communicative when asked what's wrong, the wife gets to keep her secrets. She also gets to flirt while he, apparently, should be busy finishing household chores.

Ultimately, what I hate about these "rights" is that they portray marriage as a state of entrapment in which niggling little concerns dominate the relationship. Is that really what American marriages are all about? And are men truly such louts? If so, I question the sanity of those gay couples agitating for the right to get married. Why in the world would you want to buy into such a tedious institution -- especially if it means being married to a man?

Saturday, a young woman was stretched out in the grass on the slope of Kite Hill reading a book titled, Tantric Orgasm for Women. She seemed oblivious to the activity around her -- the little kids hopping up the hillside path, the couples lolling together on blankets, the folks in biking gear resting with their bikes at the top of the hill, the frisbees flying, the kites bobbing in the caressing breeze. Whatever hold the book had on her, the glorious day was surely enough to make her body feel more warm and alive.

Somebody finally flipped a switch in Seattle. After weeks of gray skies and unusually chilly days, the sun was suddenly back and the air was warm. Windbreakers and fleece were instantly replaced by shorts and t-shirts and even a bikini or two. I went down to Gas Works Park to wallow in the weather, climb Kite Hill and see my fellow citizens liberated from a winter that has held on too long. It was the kind of day that reminds us locals there's no place finer than Seattle on a sunny day. In the distance to the east and west stretched snow-capped mountains. Between the park and the skyscrapers of downtown, Lake Union sparkled. Sailboats, yachts, ski boats and kyaks cut across the water from every direction. Float planes landed every few minutes, somehow finding a stretch of lake to land on amid the bobbing traffic.

Later in the day, my wife and I drove over to Madison Park and, after a pleasant walk through the neighborhood where we lived in our DINK days (Double Income, No Kids), we had a fine meal outdoors at Sostanza Trattoria. The Italian beer was good and cold and I gulped it down the way you do on a hot summer day.

I realize it's not summer, yet, and I've lived in this town long enough to know the dependably warm weather is still two or three months away. In fact, the gray skies were back on Sunday. Still, Saturday was a reminder of what I call The Amnesia Season, those days of July, August and September when it's easy to forget the long weeks of damp gray. It's those dazzling days that seduce us Seattle folk with the sensual gorgeousness of this city.

It's a little like a tantric orgasm on a metropolitan scale.