You know the messiah is in trouble when they have to go this far to play the race card
Now, calling Obama skinny is racist
When "Skinny" Means "Black"
The Journal stumbles over racial subtext.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, Aug. 4, 2008, at 6:06 PM ET
In the Aug. 1 Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick asked, "[C]ould Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability?" Most Americans, Chozick points out, aren't skinny. Fully 66 percent of all citizens who've reached voting age are overweight, and 32 percent are obese. To be thin is to be different physically. Not that there's anything wrong, mind you, with being a skinny person. But would you want your sister to marry one? Would you want a whole family of skinny people to move in next door? "I won't vote for any beanpole guy," an "unnamed Clinton supporter" wrote on a Yahoo politics message board. My point is that any discussion of Obama's "skinniness" and its impact on the typical American voter can't avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race.
Chozick insists that she didn't intend her playful feature about Obama's physique as potential electoral liability to carry any racial subtext. "I can't even respond to that," she told me. "That's ridiculous." Bob Christie, Dow Jones' vice president of communications, phoned me in a flash to reaffirm that message. I believe Chozick and Christie when they say that the Journal never intended skinniness to serve as a proxy for race. (Full disclosure: I was a reporter in the Journal's Washington bureau a dozen years ago. I know neither Chozick nor Christie. Fuller disclosure: I phoned my former Journal colleague, Michel Martin, an African-American journalist who is now host of NPR's "Tell Me More," which frequently addresses matters of race, to ask whether she was offended. She was not. )
But I firmly disagree that a racial reading of Chozick's story is "ridiculous," and I would counter that any failure on Chozick's part to recognize such is just a wee bit clueless