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Barack Obama is a nice-looking, light-skinned African American who doesn't talk like a man who grew up in the 'hood. On top of that, he's articulate.

There, I've uttered blasphemy, even as the nation pays its tributes to Martin Luther King Jr. and celebrates his efforts in behalf of racial equality. So sue me.

It's a measure of the success of King's efforts that we're down to squabbling over a few ill-chosen words by politicians instead of over the policies of state governments in denying equal rights to people with dark skins.

Dyed-in-the wool liberals were reaching for the smelling salts and self-righteous conservatives were chortling into their mint julips after the unguarded comments of Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, reached Barnes & Noble. Back before Obama had nailed his presidential nomination, Reid reckoned that the candidate had a good shot at the presidency because he was a light-skinned African American who spoke with no Negro accent.

Some compared his remark to the statement by Mississippi Republican Trent Lott, then the Senate minority leader, at a celebration of Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday. Lott said: "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

Now, in terms of racial bias, there's no comparison between what Lott said and what Reid said. In 1948, when Mississippi and other Southern states cast their electoral votes for Thurmond, the States Rights Party (aka "Dixiecrats") left the national Democratic Party over a civil rights plank backed by President Harry Truman. Thurmond was an avowed segregationist at the time and continued to devote his power and influence to fighting the advancement of civil rights until it was no longer politically advisable to do so (or until his half-black daughter shamed him into backing off).

So if Lott believed Thurmond's policies in 1948 would have made things better for the country, he must have believed that continued segregation was in the nation's best interests.

Lott's remarks were delivered on a highly visible public occasion. Reid spoke in a private conversation and delivered himself of an opinion that seems thoroughly justified in the light of history: If you're going to run an African American for president, you're more likely to succeed with one whose skin is not so dark and whose speech is closer to Standard English than the dialect of the ghetto.

Significantly, Reid didn't say that's the way things ought to be; he said that's the way things are. His remarks may have been condescending, but they were realistic. They were not quite as condescending as Joe Biden's comment that in Obama, at last, we had a nice-looking articulate black running for office. Obama repaid Biden for that remark by awarding him a bucket of warm spit: the vice presidency (as Vice President John Nance Garner described it).

Conservative black columnist Ward Connerly wrote in The Wall Street Journal that he was having a hard time determining "what it was that Mr. Reid said that was so offensive."

Liberal black columnist Eugene Robinson wrote in The Washington Post that he was "neither shocked nor outraged" by the remark. Neither was I.

I was in southwest Virginia back in 1989 when L. Douglas Wilder, a descendant of slaves, became the first of his racial lineage to be elected governor of a state. Wilder, like Obama, is light-skinned. If you ask me, he's handsomer than the president. If you close your eyes and listen to him, you'll have a hard time distinguishing his accent from that of a scion of the Virginia aristocracy. Even so, Wilder won the election by the skinniest of margins against a progressive Republican.

Barack Obama was the kind of African American most likely to break through the racial barrier. He is black only by traditional terminology. His mother was white. He did not grow up in the ghetto. He was reared by white grandparents in a middle-class white culture. He is not descended from slaves. He is too young to have been an understudy of Martin Luther King Jr. He did not experience the rough-and-tumble of the civil-rights movement. He is Harvard-educated. He is, without question, articulate.

If Obama gets through his presidency with a reasonable level of success, he may indeed be the game-changer for Americans of color. Just as John F. Kennedy made it possible for Roman Catholics to seek the White House with realistic expectations and just as Ronald Reagan proved that a divorced man could get there unscathed, so Obama could pave the way for future black candidates whose skin is not light and whose speech still bears traces of the ghetto. He could turn out to be a political Jackie Robinson ("a credit to his race," the sportscasters said condescendingly).

It's still an open question as to whether a white politician can say what's on his mind in a private conversation without fear that an eavesdropper might turn his remark into a pretext for a political lynching. Give Reid a break.

Write to Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625. E-mail: Swampscum2@aol.com