Pro-Con: Does Barack Obama offer a real possibility for change? NO

I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him.

The Obama campaign has even put out a misleading bio of Michelle Obama, representing her as having grown up in poverty on the South Side, when, in fact, her parents were city workers, and her father was a Daley machine precinct captain. In Obama’s case, the license taken underscores how much this campaign depends on selling an image rather than substance.

Obama’s campaign has been very clever in carving out a strategy to amass Democratic delegate votes, but its momentum is in some ways a Potemkin construction — built largely on victories in states that no Democrat will win in November—that will fall apart under Republican pressure. And then where will we be?

Adolph Reed Jr., professor of political science, University of Pennsylvania, for The Progressive .