A reader asks if I would vote for a black candidate in a presidential election.

Sure I would. If, for example, Colin Powell had been the Republican candidate in 1996, I would have voted for him — not very happily, as Powell struck me as not “sound” on a lot of issues. I wouldn’t have been unhappy enough to desert my party, though, and none of the points about Powell that made me dubious had anything to do with his being black. Oh sure, he could “talk black” when he thought it was required of him — in that embarrassing New Yorker piece, for example, when he mumbled something about “the brothers” — a term that plainly did not include me. You could tell the guy’s heart wasn’t in it, though. Powell doesn’t care about being black.

Obama cares a lot about being black. If not, why did he join that wacky church? Why did he subtitle his autobiography A Story of Race and Inheritance?

I would not vote for a black candidate who cared that much about his blackness; nor for a white one who cared that much about his whiteness, nor a yellow one who cared that much about his yellowness. I just think that’s a totally wrong-headed approach to life. I don’t want a race-obsessed President. In Obama’s case it’s academic anyway: I wouldn’t vote for a hard-left liberal of any color, no matter how much “change” and “hope” he promised me.