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Republicans are calling for the resignation of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, over remarks he reportedly made during the 2008 Presidential campaign. In a new book due out this week called Game Change by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, statements made by Reid and other elected officials reflect a view of politicians at odds with their public image. In Reid’s case, the book says that the Democratic Senator “was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama, a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.'” Republicans jumped on the comment, using it to call for Reid’s immediate resignation. RNC chair Michael Steele has invoked the resignation of Republican Trent Lott after he suggested that the world would have been better off if the late racist Senator Strom Thurmond had been elected president on his segregationist platform. Former President Bill Clinton is also paraphrased in the book Game Change as calling Obama’s campaign “the biggest fairytale I’ve seen,” and apparently commenting to the late Senator Edward Kennedy, “A few years ago, this guy [meaning Obama] would have been getting us coffee.” As if this weren’t embarrassing enough for the Democratic Party, the indicted ousted former Democratic governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich apparently told Esquire Magazine in an interview that he was “blacker than Obama.”

GUEST: Bill Fletcher, Executive Editor of The Black Commentator

For more information, visit www.blackcommentator.com.