Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Barack Obama a “light-skinned” African-American who lacked a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Since this was revealed in Game Change, a new book out today about the 2008 presidential election, Reid has been apologizing all over the place.

This is understandable, in our current hypocritical climate of political correctness, as Reid needs serious mea culpa to have any hope of saving his political bacon in Nevada. But why? What he said was a very astute assessment of the American political landscape. The Democrats wanted to field a candidate that would appeal to their “plantation black” base while getting past white voters, and Obama was perfect for the reasons cited. And clearly Obama had no other serious qualifications for the executive job beyond his cosmetic appeal and glib oratory, as many of us knew then and the rest are painfully discovering now. Reid’s only mistake was stating the obvious about campaign strategy in a political world where truth should sometimes not be articulated.

But there were also some purely racist remarks. The book credits Bill Clinton as saying, in a conversation with Ted Kennedy:

“A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

And then there is Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois currently indicted for sixteen felonies. In an interview with Esquire Magazine last February, he is quoted as saying that he is “blacker than Barack Obama.” Now he is also backpedalling.

The best part? What do all these loose-lipped take-the-black-vote-for-granted political hacks have in common? Like the Colorado lady who distributed the famous Obama as shoeshine boy photo, they are DEMOCRATS.