Toni Morrison Gets on the O Train, Endorses Obama

The big news, of course, is going to be that the person who started the “Bill Clinton was the first black president” meme is not endorsing his wife’s opponent:

The woman who famously labeled Bill Clinton as the “first black president” is backing Barack Obama to be the second.

That is not her focus, as expected, and I believe her. The best part of all of this is admiring her brilliance with the English language:

“In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don’t see in other candidates,” Morrison wrote. “That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom. It is too bad if we associate it only with gray hair and old age. Or if we call searing vision naivete. Or if we believe cunning is insight. Or if we settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it.

“Wisdom is a gift; you can’t train for it, inherit it, learn it in a class, or earn it in the workplace — that access can foster the acquisition of knowledge, but not wisdom,” Morrison wrote.

Brilliant. Refreshing. Inspiring. Thank you Toni!

More background after the break

It does appear that Toni was wrong back in 1998:

In 1998, Morrison wrote a column for the New Yorker magazine in which she wrote of Bill Clinton: “White skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”

This just HAS to chap Bill’s ass…