What's Wrong with Whiteness ?

No really. Mr. Lee Siegel's piece here says so much more about his fears -- does he think America's greatness of the past, combined with her ill treatment of racial minorities, is a package deal? -- than of the real America so many of us still live in.

Contrast that with Mr. Romney’s meticulously cultivated whiteness. He is nearly always in immaculate white shirt sleeves. He is implacably polite, tossing off phrases like “oh gosh” with Stepford bonhomie. He has mastered Benjamin Franklin’s honesty as the “best policy”: a practiced insincerity, an instant sunniness that, though evidently inauthentic, provides a bland bass note that keeps everyone calm. This is the bygone world of Babbitt, of small-town Rotarians.

Mr. Romney does not merely use the past as an inspirational reference point, as the other candidates often do. He conjures it as a total social, cultural and political experience that must be resurrected and reinhabited. He speaks of the founding fathers and the Declaration of Independence as phases of national creativity that we are destined to live through again. He frequently accompanies his recitative with verses from “America the Beautiful.”

And while Mr. Romney may, in some people’s eyes, be a non-Christian, he is better than any of his opponents at synching his worldview with that of the evangelicals. He likes to present, with theological urgency, a stark choice between, in his words, President Obama’s “entitlement society” and the true American freedom of an “opportunity society.”

Why does he fear small towns, back to the basics, and an honest assessment of political times?

Despite a general revulsion against George W. Bush and his policies, despite John McCain’s lack of ideas and his remoteness from contemporary American problems, the Republican ticket was ahead of Mr. Obama by several points in September 2008. Then came the fall: Lehman Brothers, the stock-market plunge and skyrocketing unemployment (not to mention Sarah Palin).

By the iron law of elections, the country threw the bums out and rejected anyone even remotely tied to them. The result? America’s first black president.

Would he feel better if one of the Romney clan had adopted a dark-skinned baby, as the McCain's and Huntsman's have done? What's wrong with being white?

If Mitt Romney, like Tim Tebow, is authentic in his personal beliefs, what's wrong -- by gawrsh, Mickey -- with that, exactly? Not your culture? Cool, but if it's his ... so what? Vanilla is a flavor too, and plenty of Americans still enjoy it, they tell me.

Don't forget: Mitt had his eyes set on the prize of the presidency long before he learned his opponent's skin color.

Mitt Romney knows this. He knows that he offers to these people the white solution to the problem of a black president. I am sure that Mr. Romney is not a racist. But I am also sure that, for the many Americans who find the thought of a black president unbearable, he is an ideal candidate. For these sudden outsiders, Mitt Romney is the conventional man with the outsider faith — an apocalyptic pragmatist — who will wrest the country back from the unconventional man with the intolerable outsider color.

Don't tell me he's "the great white hope" in any eyes other than those who can't stand to think a black man running for president might get honestly beaten by another of a different color. That's not backwards progress. There's nothing "regressive" about the idea that both black people and white people still too, qualify to compete to lead this great nation made up of many people. E pluribus unum. Divided, we fall.

There's always some, who will stand to profit, by stirring up racial fears and viewing every action through a racial prism. Today, Mr. Lee Siegel apparently wants to play that part.

Keep an eye cocked towards what's coming... first Rosenthal, now this.

Let's don't let him, this time around.