Herman Cain

The spooky spirits of Halloween season find us a mere year away from the next presidential election, and our rotting republic faces a scenario unthinkable a generation ago: Both the Republican and Democratic nominees may be black.

A recent Rasmussen Reports telephone survey showed Herman Cain edging Barack Obama 43-41 percent in a hypothetical matchup. Cain is crushing his Republican competitors on Gallup’s “Positive Intensity Score” among voters. Suddenly, the GOP has a big black elephant in the room. (I chose that metaphor instead of “800-pound gorilla” to prove I’m not racist.)

Since America is now a post-racial society where racists and anti-racists share a need to, you know, not compulsively make everything on Earth and its mother racial, we are now free to focus on each candidate’s policies rather than their skin color.

SIKE!

Americans dimly know that Obama’s about “Hope and Change” and Cain’s about some “9-9-9” thing, but the main topic has, as if violently uprooted from the ground and ripped sideways by nature’s hurricane forces, been shunted off to deciding which of these brothas is “authentically” black and which one is fakin’ it. Since elections are now waged and won on television, this is a reality show: America’s Next Blackest President or maybe Who Is the Blackest One of All? In a nation where it’s impossible to be too black but highly likely that at any given time, any given black person may not be quite black enough, next year may become a ratings bonanza, an intra-black race-baiting extravaganza—The Great Blackoff of 2012.

So who’s blacker?

In matters of pigmentation, of CMYK and grayscale values, it’s nolo contendere—Herman Cain is by far the blacker man. He obliterates Obama when it comes to the Brown Paper Bag Test. I’ve seen estimates that claim Obama is 50 percent white, over forty percent Kenyan Arab, and barely six percent black African. If that’s true, he’s not even a mulatto…he’s more like a mulittlo. This is all likely due to the fact that baby Herman’s fetus was the zero-admixture product of parents whose hues were likely as dark as roasted coffee beans, whereas Mr. Obama’s coal-burnin’ mama had skin as light as the fairest summer marshmallow.

In matters of acculturation, Cain was born in the Jim Crow South and once snuck a drink from a whites-only water fountain to see what it tasted like (the same). To counter accusations that he’s an “Oreo,” he refers to himself instead as “black-walnut ice cream.” His accent is naturally Southern Black Sharecropper, so he never needs to “turn up the black” in his inflection as Obama is wont to do. I suspect that if one were to stand near the man, one might even catch a faint whiff of turnip greens.

Whoopsy-daisy—almost forgot!—unlike Obama, Herman Cain is descended from black American slaves. Obama’s wife Michelle is also descended from slaves, so when the Obamas are having sex, there is at least a little slave blood involved, but let’s make it clear that Barack’s ancestors never rode with that there chain gang.

Cain doesn’t hesitate to make things racial and has aimed his fangs straight at Obama’s far paler jugular. He has said that Obama has “never been a part of the black experience in America,” that the establishment is “doubly scared that a real black man might run against Barack Obama,” and that Obama is not a “strong black man” in the MLK mold.