Any day now I expect George Stephanopoulos, Sean Hannity, Hillary Clinton and John McCain to pressure Barrack Obama to renounce my endorsement.
Mind you, Obama woudn't know me from the man in the moon since I 've never actually met him. But that's splitting hairs. I've watched him on TV: I want him to win, and I have some unsavory associations. For example, I was a year behind the notorious Weather Underground bomber, Catherine Wilkerson, at Swarthmore and had a crush on her. The fact that this happened in 1963, when Obama was two years old, and that I haven't seen Wilkerson since does not dilute its significance.
Rumor has it that Hannity's crack research team is delving into the issue and that Stephanopoulos plans to query Obama about my support if there's another debate and that Clinton is claiming that it's the sort of connection that makes Obama unelectable.
Then there's my links to the notorious Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Min. Louis Farrakhan, which dates back to Jesse Jackson's first presidential campaign in 1984.
As a correspondent for TIME, I covered Jackson's journey to Syria to free captive Navy Pilot Robert Goodman, and Farrakhan was part of his delegation."
I've been one of the Nation of Islam leader's harshest journalistic critics since then, and have described Wright as a loud-mouth extremist in a piece I wrote for TheRoot, but you never know: I had nice things to say about Farrakhan's stirring rendition of the Muslim call to prayer, which impressed the Syrian mullahs. And I most confess to shouting "God- Damn Bush" at the TV a couple of times while watching the evening news, as if echoing one of Wright's sermons. If that doesn't make my support of Obama suspect, what would?
Why, of course, my shifting position on the American flag! I pasted an Old Glory decal in the rear window of my car the day after 9/11. But the thing was scrubbed off in a car wash and I didn't bother to replace it. Put that together with my candidate's refusal to wear a flag pin in his lapel and you've got an ironclad case of un-patriotism by association. Perhaps Obama should renounce me preemptively right now and spare Clinton, McCain and their journalistic allies the trouble of calling on him to condemn me.
Jack White is a regular contributor to The Root.
is a former columnist for TIME magazine and a regular contributor to The Root.