Well, not exactly. They love Obama. But he's moderate and exudes Harvard (and to concede part of your point, only half black).
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Not being in his neck of the woods I can't claim to be an Obama expert though he seems, at this stage in his career, fairly cool as Dems go.
I have to take the slightest of exceptions to the 'half black' thing though.
You see, I don't think Americans actually see half black - they see black and that's it. This isn't Brazil after all - we like our ideas, and our racial divisions, simple: on/off, crazy/sane, terrorist/freedom lover, good neighborhood/bad, black/white, zero sum game all the way.
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In my old neighborhood there was me - part Cuban, all scientifically tuned trouble, longing for robots to end human rule - my immediate neighbors on the left side who had Irish grandparentage, the girl up the street whose mom was Italian (a very exciting tale of family woe, disownership, clandestine meetings and secretly supportive uncles behind that) and the cool comic dude who was half Korean and liked to claim he was a boat person to spice up a dull party.
Now, every single one of us, when interacting with white people, were understood to be black - differing shades of color and facial structures and the grand, ethnic kaleidoscope notwithstanding, we were all just plain old black folk in the mint julep sipping, lazily relaxing on the front porch minds of America's proudly euro-spawned majority.
So I think the MSNBC zero-thought jerkoff squad dig Obama's Harvard aura (everyone loves a Harvard man except perhaps you Yalies) as opposed to Shaprton's preacher man style but the fact of being 'half black' probably never crosses their television addled minds.
.d.