For some people, the most important issue facing a potential United States president is, is...

Gay marriage:

A prominent Christian leader whose radio and magazine outreaches are solidly in support of biblically-based marriages - and keeps in touch with millions of constituents daily - says he cannot consider Arizona Sen. John McCain a viable candidate for president.

"Speaking as a private individual, I would not vote for John McCain under any circumstances," said James Dobson, founder of the Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family as well as the Focus Action cultural action organization set up specifically to provide a platform for informing and rallying constituents.

Thus, even if Giuliani and McCain were both in favor of gay marriage (which neither of them is), as president neither could do anything about it, because marriage laws remain matters for the states. Same sex marriage is a huge matter mainly for gay activists and antigay activists, and while the masses of middle class voters might have opinions one way or the other about it, unless I am reading them wrong it does not direct their voting patterns. They're more worried about economic security and national security.

At the risk of sounding culturally insensitive, whether nutcases like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are allowed to have the bomb is more of a worry than whether the two guys who bought the house next door have a government issued license for their relationship.

As pressing presidential issues go, same sex marriage is barely on the radar. Whatever it is that gives the antigay radar so much power to determine who gets to be president is one of the contradictions of our democracy.

But every time the antigay radar (or other single issue thinking) seems ridiculous, all I have to do is look across at the Democratic side.

Right now, the big argument which is shaping up seems to be over whether Barack Obama is, to put it bluntly, sufficiently black. Veteran black activists like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Stalinist Harry Belafonte seem quite threatened by him, although they've stopped just short of issuing Dobson-style condemnations:

Civil rights leaders who have dominated black politics for much of the past two decades have pointedly failed to embrace the 45-year-old Illinois senator who is considering a bid to become America's first black president.

At a meeting of activists in New York last week, the Rev Jesse Jackson, the first black candidate to run for president, declined to endorse Obama. "Our focus right now is not on who's running, because there are a number of allies running," Jackson said.

The Rev Al Sharpton, the fiery New York preacher who joined the Democratic primary race in 2004, said he was considering another presidential run of his own. And Harry Belafonte, the calypso singer who became an influential civil rights activist, said America needed to be "careful" about Obama: "We don't know what he's truly about."

The unexpected coolness between the old civil rights guard and the new Democratic hopeful has added an intriguing twist to the budding rivalry between Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton, who hopes to emulate her husband, former president Bill Clinton, in attracting support from black voters.

Other than color, Obama did not - does not - share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves.

Are activists in charge of American thought or do they only think they are?

UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein has a great Martin Luther King Jr. Day post which explores the mechanism by which race has been redefined as culture. Concludes Jeff,

....to think of race as somehow socially constructed is to think of race, ultimately, as something essentially essential. Because what makes your memories yours, what makes your heritage yours, and what makes your culture yours is your insistence, ultimately, that it is yours by right, yours by birth, yours by essence. And so race, as it turns out, is either an essence or an illusion. Those who believe race to be an essence (say, the KKK, who base their ideas on bad science) have no need for a project of qualifying race as a social construct; and those who believe race to be non-essential have no grounds, theoretically, for promoting racial identity other than that same bad science (which, it turns out, underlies the constructivist argument), or else their social concern that we somehow need to continue the project of racial identity, for whatever the political reasons.

AND PERHAPS they are right. But maybe it's time to seize on the lessons learned in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks; that is, maybe it's time we put aside our differences in order to construct a singular American identity. After all, we are each individuals, which is what makes us, ultimately, a nation.

I think Barack Obama is a lot closer to Martin Luther King's dream than Jackson, Sharpton or Belafonte.

MORE: If you click on the link to Harry Belafonte's Wikipedia entry, you'll see this picture of Belafonte with Charlton Heston.

I guess the country was naive in those days.

AND MORE: Jeff Soyer is not going to vote for Obama or McCain. Or for that matter, Clinton, Kerry, Edwards, Dodd, Giuliani, Romney, or Bloomberg. I'd be delighted if none of them were on the ticket. But I still prefer Obama or McCain to Clinton. Simply because of his stance against identity politics, Obama breathes fresh air into the Democratic Party. I say this in full awareness of Obama's horrendous anti-gun record, including, I might add, his status as a Director of the notoriously anti-gun Joyce Foundation.

(In general, politics simply consists of bad choices. I hope we'll never have to choose between Dobson and Clinton....)

UPDATE (01/16/07): If Barack Obama is, as many have suggested, a stalking horse for Hillary Clinton, the attacks on him by longtime black leaders for being not being "really black" makes a lot of sense. The idea might be to limit the political fallout which might result if overwhelming black support developed, followed by entry of Hillary Clinton as a serious "opponent." Thus, preventing the emergence of solid black support might be a form of preemptive form of Clintonian damage control.

Sheesh.

How cynical can I get?