About a week after the 2008 presidential election, I was having dinner with a Republican friend, and we were talking about how to explain to our far-left friends (we lived in New York City, after all) the fact that we had not jumped on board the historic-vote trend that had swept the nation.  I told her that if anyone asked whom I voted for, I'd just tell him, "I voted for the candidate that Martin Luther King would have voted for."

My friend looked at me and said, "You think King would have voted for John McCain?"  And I said, "Well, give me one reason – just one – why King would have voted for Barack Obama."

My friend, of course, responded as most people would: "Obama's black."  But once she said that, she immediately realized how wrong her answer was.

Do we need to remind people that Reverend King marched and died for equality among all people?  He championed "content of character" over "color of skin."  (Obama's rabid pro-abortion record, for instance, would have been a deal-breaker for Reverend King.)

A couple of days after her recent defeat to Donald Trump, when Hillary complained that Obama was one of the reasons she lost, could she have been thinking not only of Obama 2016, but also of Obama 2008?

The always politically astute Bill Clinton recognized instantly back in early 2008 that Obama was defeating Hillary in the primaries because of his race.  Bill complained about "playing the race card" because he knew back then that Hillary had indeed been (excuse the word) trumped.

Common sense tells us that if Hillary had been running against a half dozen white men in 2008, she would have easily won the nomination.

Consider Obama as a white Democratic candidate.  The press would have been forced to examine his qualifications and background on an equal basis with all the other candidates.  Would his connections with Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright withstood even tepid scrutiny?  How about his abysmal record of absenteeism in the Illinois state senate?  What about his drug use in college?  And how would Christians have reacted to his provocative, proactive support of partial-birth abortion?

All these associations and questions evaporated because he was, as only Uncle Joe Biden in that avuncular way of his could have put it, a "clean, articulate black man."

Equally true would have been if Barack Obama, as a black candidate, had been running on the Republican side of the aisle.  The press would have dug into his background (didn't we hear how the media happily went after Herman Cain in 2012?) and accused the Republicans of offering a token black man with nefarious associations.  His candidacy would have been quickly nipped in the bud.

The funny thing is, had Hillary Clinton been president for the past eight years instead of Barack Obama, Obama would most likely have been the Democrats’ 2016 candidate and, perhaps, easily won the election.  Could America have then survived a Clinton – followed by an Obama – presidency? 

The Reverend Martin Luther King loved this country and worked tirelessly to serve it and to save it.  You have to wonder if, somewhere in the Sweet By-and-By, MLK is looking at America and smiling once again.