Dawn Ritch, Columnist

Jamericans are up in arms. They're sending a firestorm of emails to the Editor, because I pointed out that Barack Obama was an impostor, and Hillary Clinton a victim.

Are these incensed letter-writers born and bred black Americans, or even brown ones? They are most likely the ones, or the descendants of those, who fled the island because of Michael Manley in the early l970s. They are Jamericans, the ones we all can't stand even when they're relatives, or perhaps because they are relatives. They try to rule us with money, either the actual thing or talk of it. Yet, when they die, they all want to be buried here.

Ungrateful people

I don't care much for black Americans either. They are the most ungrateful people on the face of the Earth. Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, set them free. They repaid his party by becoming life-long Democrats. This is an unspeakable historical treachery. So you can keep them, for all I care.

President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, didn't feel that way. Indeed, black Americans themselves used to call him the first black American president. But all of that has been instantly forgotten. Black Americans and young, unemployed intellectuals believe they have a black presidential candidate, and so have been turning up in droves for caucuses which favour Obama. These are usually held for a specific, limited time. The working class who usually support Hillary do not have the time to spare to attend to vote for her.

Nobody said a word about John F. Kennedy's White House affaires, nor Lyndon Johnson's. Nobody breathed a word of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's mistress, and she lived in the White House along with Eleanor, and at the family home. So, why this obsession with Bill Clinton and his intern?

The answer is simple. Because Bill Clinton was lower class. His mother was an alcoholic, and his father died before he was born. She was forced to leave him with his grandparents where he was brought up among poor blacks, while she trained as a nurse.

Let the record show that he is the only United States president, who, upon retirement, put his office in a black neighbourhood, specifically Harlem. I would have thought that this entitled him to some respect among black people. The foundation he set up concentrates its efforts on charitable work in poorer countries, mainly in Africa. He has already done a great deal to increase the availability of treatment and drugs for the sufferers of HIV/AIDS, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean. That, too, ought to entitle him to some respect from Americans, and indeed, all black and brown people everywhere.

'Fairy tale'

Alas, this was not to be! Even such a person was told to shut his mouth, and sit facing the corner because he called Obama's position on the war in Iraq a "fairy tale". Obama wasn't for it, but tells no one that after getting to Washington he voted heavily in support of it. Bill and Hillary Clinton could write a big, fat book on Obama's fairy tales, but it would make them look dirty and racist. Yet, all is fair in love and war and particularly politics, except it seems, when a supposedly black person is involved.

Land values in Harlem have shot through the roof since Bill Clinton put his office down there. Black property owners have become rich, Macy's moved in as well as other department stores, and the place is becoming gentrified. That's what he did for the seat of blackness in America. Now he and his wife are being vilified by elements in their own political party and the length and breath of the press. They just don't want Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic nomination to represent her party in the US presidential elections later this year.

Emailing this newspaper from New York, Ian Christie responded to my column last week by saying, "It was Barack Obama, not Hillary Clinton, who after graduating from a prestigious university, chose to work on the streets of Chicago's South Side as a community organiser. Clinton, for her part, became a corporate lawyer for Wal-Mart."

This is a complete falsehood about Hillary Clinton. After graduation from Yale, she went straight to Washington to work in the child advocacy programme, which she continued to do for years until she married Bill Clinton and eventually went to Arkansas. It was long after that Hillary went to work for a law firm. Somebody had to bring home the bacon, since all Bill has ever done is work for the government, which doesn't pay well. But even then, she continued to work for children's health care in Arkansas.

She was on scholarship at Yale. I don't know what Obama was on at Harvard. She has spent her life working for children and healthcare. The irony is that both are senators, and that any examination of their voting records will show that they have voted equally for almost everything. Their votes are almost parallel, which is why Bill said he was a "fairy tale".

Obama worse than Bruce

I underrated Barack Obama in only one respect last week, when I compared him to Bruce Golding. He is much worse than that. He is like Michael Manley. Golding can talk the hind leg off a donkey, but he does not have charisma. Obama can talk and do so like Martin Luther King. But the latter was responsible only for a civil rights movement, not a country.

This is what makes Obama so potentially dangerous. When Michael Manley took over the government of Jamaica in l972, Jamaica's economy was one of the fastest growing in the world, and Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore was adopting our programmes. Now we're killing each other and selling cigarettes by the side of the road, while Singapore has become a First World country. If Americans want a future like ours, they can vote for Obama. Certainly, Jamericans should remember that is why they emigrated from Jamaica in the first place.

Roy Wilson's email from a local address tests the outer limits of irrelevance. In a letter to the editor he writes: "Dawn, in America you are either white or you are black; there is no in between foolishness about brown. The only exceptions are the Mexicans, who are referred to as brown."

In the first place, Mexicans are a particular type of Indian, not brown. I am unimpressed by American typology on race, considering that the country isn't even civilised yet, not in the way of the French or English. If, as America says, one drop of black blood makes you black, then a prominent white American banking family is black, which would surprise the current members. European royalty would also be black, which would come as a surprise too. Then, everybody would be busily trying to prove to me that because the late great Jamaican statesman and politician, Robert Lightbourne, was an ebony black man, he was really not as white as driven snow. Race is at the bottom a very fluid thing. Above all, it's a state of mind, assuming there is any mind there at all in which one could feign an interest.

The probable Republican nominee, John McCain, has pointed out that since Obama has no policies of his own, he has pilfered Hillary's economic plan and is presenting it as his. It is a painful irony, therefore, that the only justice Hillary can get is from the man her party must defeat for the presidency of the United States.