my post-pennsylvania primary salve is ALICE WALKER.

the number crunchers will wrestle to the end with delegate counts and popular vote percentages and the like. team clinton will flog tonight's pennsylvania "win" like the dead horse it very well may be. meanwhile, i take comfort by taking stock of all the reasons i want OBAMA to win, all the challenges he has had to overcome and still must, and how good it feels to know he is still IN IT, and still ahead in EVERY WAY.

to help, i return to perhaps the best commentary i've read during the whole sordid democratic leadership race. in a piece published april 2nd, alice walker sprinkles an important OBAMA endorsement over a moving racial analysis as only she can.

AS IF ALICE WALKER ISN'T THE KIND OF WRITER, WOMAN, AND THINKER I HOPE TO BE WHEN I GROW UP.

white people have a racial history too [excerpts]

How dishonest it is to portray Obama as the only candidate with a racial inheritance...

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known, the plantations, because they attempted to exercise their "democratic" right to vote. I wish I could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men did, but I cannot. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of their fathers and their brothers, and in the South, especially in Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to register voters in Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were gender-free.

I made my first white women friends in college; they were women who loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered...

I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans -- black, white, yellow, red and brown -- choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.

When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required. Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves...

It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always referred to as "a black man." One would think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.

I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking, person to person, with any leader, woman, man, child or common person, in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks. I cannot see the same scenario with Mrs. Clinton, who would drag into 21st century American leadership the same image of white privilege and distance from the reality of others' lives that has so marred our country's contacts with the rest of the world.

And yes, I would adore having a woman president of the United States. My choice would be Rep. Barbara Lee, who alone voted in Congress five years ago not to make war on Iraq. That to me is leadership, morality and courage; if she had been white, I would have cheered just as hard. But she is not running for the highest office in the land, Mrs. Clinton is. And because Mrs. Clinton is a woman, and because she may be very good at what she does, many people, including some younger women in my own family, originally favored her over Obama. I understand this, almost...

Imagine, if he [Obama] wins the presidency we will have not one but three black women in the White House; one tall, two somewhat shorter, none of them carrying the washing in and out of the back door. The bottom line for most of us is: With whom do we have a better chance of surviving the madness and fear we are presently enduring, and with whom do we wish to set off on a journey of new possibility?

FULL COMMENTARY IS HERE.