I'm not even sure how to take Kathryn Lopez's suggestion that we can interpret Colin Powell's endorsement as race-based because Essence and Vibe endorsed Obama.
On the one hand, the inherent racial assumptions are awesome. Because magazines written by black people say something, we can assume all black people are actually saying the same thing, whether they do or not. For instance, I can easily assume that National Review contributor Thomas Sowell agrees fully with the content of Black Men's Swimsuit's "Finest Chocolate Asses" issue.
On the other hand, the inherent racial assumptions are even more awesome, because if you sort of smush together everything that Obama's saying with what any of a half dozen conservatives have said at various points in the past few years, the only real difference he has with them is that he's black. That, of course, says nothing about the fact that GOP has fewer black people in it than a new suburban mall and everything about the fact that Colin Powell is a walking issue of Ebony.
