"Historian says ex-leaders, would have split on Obama
How would he know? Is he making this up, too?
WASHINGTON - George Washington would have had an easier time than Thomas Jefferson in accepting the possibility of Barack Obama as the country's first black president, said a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian.
Jefferson believed blacks were "biologically inferior" which "led to a kind of permanence to the stain that he imposed on them," said Joseph Ellis, a Mount Holyoke College professor who wrote "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation."
It's possible that Jefferson "would have been able to grow and understand" Obama's candidacy and accept it, Ellis said. "Obama's candidacy is a fulfillment of Jeffersonian values."
Washington wasn't "burdened in the same way," Ellis said in an interview on Bloomberg Television's "Political Capital with Al Hunt," scheduled for broadcast today. Washington believed "over time, that the African-American slaves, once freed, would become equal citizens, and he believed that was entirely possible (Bloomberg News)."
Gee, I haven't lied about my record and I don't make it on the TV!
