Obama's long road ahead

Sen. Barack Obama should beware of his media embrace as the right stuff for the nation's "first black president." It is a slick joke America finds a need to play on itself every decade or so.

This illusion is staged not as a remedy but as a measure of just how terribly things are going in the republic. The political will, however, won't likely relent and quarter a man such as Obama in the White House, and certainly not in '08.

This space would have warned Sen. Obama away from such expectations until I read his new book, "The Audacity of Hope." Possibilities, even the White House, spring eternal for a man, and a thinker-writer, such as the junior senator from Illinois. It may well be within his grasp, but first he must give himself over to seasoning and the mastery of his craft.

No U.S. senator since John Kennedy has been elected to the White House, going back nearly a half century. No black, of course, has been elected going back to forever. Obama can change that.

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