Betty Winston Baye': Inspecting The Elephant In The Living Room.

Inspecting the elephant in the living room

John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate has given American feminists their own Clarence Thomas moment.

You wanted a woman, you've got one. Now deal with it. And never mind that this particular woman is about almost nothing that the feminists have been about for lo these many years.

If you don't buy what Palin is selling, even though you're a woman, you're a sexist. Right?

It's great political theater.

I call this a Clarence Thomas moment because many African Americans also were labeled racists and hypocrites when they told what they believed to be the truth, which is that Clarence Thomas was not the best and the brightest that black America had to offer to fill the big shoes of Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Marshall was an icon in American jurisprudence. He was one of the great legal minds behind the 1950s efforts in the courts to desegregate public education in America.

Thomas benefited from those struggles, but he opted later to cast his lot with the old enemies of civil rights and affirmative action. And for the most part, at least on the U.S. Supreme Court, Thomas has obliged the anti-civil rights interests of the people who put him there.

Today's notion that any woman will do, just like any black, is an affront to feminists who have struggled and suffered for raising the issues that powerful men simply don't want to hear.

I've had many Sojourner Truth "And ain't I a woman?" moments since the rise of Sarah Palin. I hear all this shouting about how Palin has been energizing "women."

I want to shout back, "Which women?"

It's taken awhile, but some in the media finally are getting down to the specifics, without which Palin's impact is difficult to gauge.

More journalists are starting to explain that the target audience for McCain's choice of Palin is white women. But then not even white women in general.

Veteran political writer Karen Tumulty explained in a Time/CNN article who the Palin enthusiasts really are.

They're white and they're "slightly older than soccer moms." They're "less upscale." They're "lacking in college degrees," and they're more likely "to be feeling the brunt of an array of economic problems that now includes high energy prices, rising unemployment, soaring health-care costs and housing foreclosures."

Tumulty cited a Democratic pollster who broke it down even further. These particular women, who clap and cheer when Palin rails against increases in death taxes, as if they actually would have to pay them, are "Wal-Mart moms" and "Wal-Mart grandmas," who are "conflicted on Obama" and who are "more racially sensitive, honestly, than younger, more educated women."

That's a gentler way of putting it than Michael Grunwald did in his Time/CNN article.

"Race is the elephant in the living room of the 2008 campaign," he wrote.

Grunwald discusses how pundits use various adjectives to play the race card without seeming to do so. When they refer to "working class," "blue-collar" and "small town" voters, he said, it "still means white people."

"White America," Grunwald added, "has shown an abundant willingness to support no-demands blacks like Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell and Will Smith, but a race man like Malcolm X would be another story."

I bring articles like this to readers' attention because, let's face it, it sometimes can be easier for some people to hear such things from a white observer than from me, a black woman.

What I believe I have seen in the course of this campaign is that John McCain and his supporters are able to race-bait until the cows come home. They can, on the one hand, brag about Sarah Palin being a pistol-packing, moose-hunting, lipstick-wearing pit bull, but then turn right around and say "hands off the lady" when Palin's lies and contradictions are exposed.

Where I come from, whether you're a woman or a man, if you act like a pit bull, you tend to get treated like one.

So, yes, I share the frustration of those who want Barack Obama to fight back, but Grunwald is right that an angry Obama would scare the heebie jeebies out of many voters.

He said, "If you believe that contemporary America is color-blind, you probably also believe the Georgia congressman who recently called Obama 'uppity,' then claimed he had no idea it was a traditional Southern slur for blacks who didn't know their place."

My hope is that, if nothing else, this funky economy will induce hard-working Americans of all kinds to ignore peripheral concerns and consider deeply what is in their economic interests, and then vote accordingly.

Betty Winston Bayé is a Courier-Journal editorial writer and columnist. Her column appears Thursdays in Community Forum. Read her online at www.courier-journal.com; her e-mail address is bbaye@courier-journal.com.