"I was for Obama at that time. But the Farrakhan thing changed that."

What Farrakhan thing, he was friendly with someone who once praised someone you are mistrustful of? I don't know if you're being disingenuous or being naive about your position on what qualifies or disqualifies a person for the presidency. At least the conservatives have a clear and acceptable motivation for their bias.

Nevertheless, I am sure that you are aware that your point of view disenfranchises almost all, if not all, and any black candidate that has been active in the political arena for a number of years. This technique of damnation by association has been used successfully by politicians down through the years. If not Farrakhan, it would be someone else, if not a zealot then a criminal, if not a criminal then a moral bankrupt. It matters not how sterling the overt character of the individual is, it is simply enough that a line can be drawn from the man to his pastor then from his pastor to some other easily dismissed individual.

"I do feel my concern in a visceral(feeling) sense." Of course you do, and you can't be expected to vote for someone you recoil from even if others don't share the same distaste. There's no accounting for tastes, but that statement alone, belies your assertion of using a rational process.

It's not your fault, you just don't like people from another tribe. It's in the genes. It's not merely a human trait, it's biological. Luckily for most of us nurture overcomes these lower impulses, but not for all obviously.

Have you any idea how easy it would have been to draw a line of association between Kennedy and the Mafia? In fact it has been done, but it didn't disqualify him from the presidency, thank goodness. The Reverend Wright was invited into the White House to give his blessings to the President for goodness sake!

Sure, you choose your pastor and you choose your friends; but not all of us use the same calculating process to vet our associates for as far back as you are demanding of our candidates; and you have even gone one step further, you are pretending that it's the associates of his associates that disqualify Obama in your mind!

Come on now, have you even done the math? If each of 100 close associates has another hundred close associates then you would have a pool of 10,000 people to chose from who could disqualify a man for the presidency. For a politician it's not even a hundred close associates, its thousands; a thousand associates of a thousand associates is a round million people in the pool you are drawing from! Now if that isn't prejudice I don't know the meaning of the word.