Toni Morrison Endorses Obama

Obama's picked up a couple of big endorsements over the past few days, notably Caroline and Ted Kennedy (JFK's daughter and brother, respectively), and now Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison (who's one of my favorite authors, as an aside) has endorsed him, too, citing his vision and wisdom.

"In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates," Morrison wrote. "That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom. It is too bad if we associate it only with gray hair and old age. Or if we call searing vision naivete. Or if we believe cunning is insight. Or if we settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it.

"Wisdom is a gift; you can't train for it, inherit it, learn it in a class, or earn it in the workplace - that access can foster the acquisition of knowledge, but not wisdom," Morrison wrote.

Certainly the most lovely endorsement any candidate's going to get.

In 1998, Morrison wrote of Bill Clinton in the New Yorker: "White skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime." If she gets her wish, and Obama gets the Democratic Party nomination, let us fervently hope she was wrong about that!