In order to win the House, however, Republicans would need to pick up 40 seats. That’s roughly double their current projected pickups. It is also more than Democrats managed to win in the 2006 elections or 2008 elections. In those years, with President Bush’s approval rating in the high 20s to low 30s, Democrats won 31 seats and 21 seats, respectively. President Obama’s approval rating stands around 50 percent, where it has been stabilizing for several months. Unless there is a significant drop in the president’s approval rating, it seems highly unlikely that Congress will switch hands.

The chairman of the Republican Party, Michael Steele, agrees with me. In an interview with that same Fox Conservative Opinion Channel, Michael Steele shut the door on the possibility. Sean Hannity asked him if Republicans would win back the House. His response: “Not this year.” He went on to cast doubt on whether Republicans should even return to power. “If we do that, are we ready? I don’t know. That’s what I’m assessing and evaluating now.”

The professor in question is Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard. Returning home from a trip to China, the professor found that he had locked himself out of the house and forced his way in. A neighbor, who evidently did not recognize the man, called the police. When the police arrived they asked the professor to step outside of his house. According to reports from Boston, the professor presented his driver’s license as well as a Harvard ID, yet the police arrested him anyway.

This is not the first incident to happen, either. According to the Boston Globe, Professor S. Allen Counter of Harvard “faced a similar situation himself. The well-known neuroscience professor, who is also black, was stopped by two Harvard police officers in 2004 after being mistaken for a robbery suspect as he crossed Harvard Yard. They threatened to arrest him when he could not produce identification.”

The national media picked up the Gates controversy almost immediately. A debate raged on the airwaves as to whether the police had racially profiled the professor, whether the arrest was appropriate and whether Professor Gates should have just “shut his mouth”. President Obama, giving a press conference on healthcare, was asked a question on the subject at the tail end of the press conference. Instead of avoiding the question, he responded in defense of the professor.

This created an uproar among conservative Republicans, who went so far as demanding an apology to the police officer on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. The Republican Party response was to quickly politicize the event. Glenn Beck of Fox News went on national television calling President Obama a “racist” that had a “deep-seated hatred for white people.”

Inconveniently for the Republican Party, the law is on the side of the professor – not the officer’s. The charges were dropped for a reason. They would not have held in a court of law. As some have suggested, “running your mouth”, is not grounds for arrest when you are inside of your own home. The police overstepped their bounds and the officer should have apologized. Period. End of story. After the officer established that Mr. Gates was the lawful owner of the home he should have left it at that.

I think that a part of this has to do with the fact that it occurred in Massachusetts. Had this happened at say, the University of South Carolina, Alabama or Georgia, I think that the public would be more sympathetic with the professor. The white Southern cop would have immediately been labeled a racist and that would have been that. Because it occurred in liberal Massachusetts, it is immediately assumed that racism does not exist in the North.

Reality has it that racism exists everywhere. I am not saying that the police officer himself is a racist. I don’t know the guy. Clearly he acted in a manner that raises suspicions over his conduct. He should, at the very least, be investigated and perhaps disciplined for his actions. This won’t happen, of course, since our culture sympathizes with police and immediately assumes the guilt of minorities. In the case of Mr. Gates, perhaps it would have been wise for the professor to take this to civil court. It might be the only way to get the full truth of what actually happened.

Washington High School in South Bend, Ind., brags about its state championship girls basketball team. A banner across the gym reads “Pride of the West Side.” Wednesday night a boisterous crowd filled the Washington High gym, but they were there for politics, not basketball. It was the kickoff rally for Sen. Barack Obama’s three-day Indiana bus tour that ends on Saturday at Ball State University in Muncie.

A local minister led a prayer and then the crowd joined in the Pledge of Allegiance. John McCormick of The Chicago Tribune, who has been covering the Obama campaign since it started more than a year ago, told me that those were relatively new additions to the standard Obama rally, becoming common after the public criticism of Obama’s pastor.

A few hours earlier, John had joined our table at Trio, a popular South Bend restaurant. I was with Anand Ramanujan, the chief technical officer of Real Clear Politics, and Don Wycliff, a former Tribune writer who now teaches journalism at Notre Dame.

A group of Obama supporters gathered in a Trio back room, including former Rep. Tim Roemer of South Bend, an early Obama backer, and Mayor Stephen Luecke of South Bend, who had been neutral in the presidential primary until Wednesday.

At the gym, Roemer warmed up the crowd and introduced Luecke, who won more cheers and applause when he took to the small stage in the middle of the floor and went public with his endorsement.

The Senator’s arrival brought forth even louder roars of approval. One section erupted with cheers when Obama asked if there were any Notre Dame students in the crowd. Obama joked about the late hour and said that when he was in college, “sometimes I’d wake up about this time.”

CBS 2 Chicago was also in town:

The Indiana primary is less than a month away and voters there will have a major voice in selecting the Democratic nominee for president.

CBS 2 Chief Correspondent Jay Levine reports Sen. Barack Obama is in South Bend, Ind., hoping to drum up support.

The energy from the crowd Wednesday night may well have helped energize Obama, who at that point was likely running on fumes after a very full day of campaigning.

He spoke about investing in America and in American workers, among other things.

Obama was greeted by some who’d been waiting for as long as seven hours, while he was making several stops in Pennsylvania. The Keystone State’s primary is two weeks before Indiana’s.

And while Obama’s given Clinton a head start here, the most recent poll indicates he may actually be ahead in Indiana.

Reuters, CBS, Fox News, ABC News and the New York Times all covered the South Bend visit.

Later in the day, on Special Report with Brit Hume, Mort Kondracke said that, “I think some of us on the panel have sympathized with taxi drivers who won’t pick up a black person because they’re afraid of the neighborhood that they might be going to.” Whoa, whoa whoa. If this network is going to run a day long stint of Obama bashing, calling him a racist for rightly pointing out in his speech that many white people psychologically look differently at black people than whites on the street, why is it alright for their own guests to say that they sympathize with racial profiling? It’s hard to argue with a network that has so many double standards.

This is exactly what Fox News, Hillary Clinton and the Republicans want us to be talking about. Instead of talking about how they got us into Iraq, how the economy is in the tank, how we are having record foreclosures, how the dollar is sinking at an alarming pace, how we are spending more money than we can print and how tens of millions are without health insurance, we’re talking about whether Barack Obama meant something sinister by calling his grandmother a “typical white person”, without even putting his quote in context.

I’ll let Obama speak for himself, though. He told a radio host that, “The point I was making was not that grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, you know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred in our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.”

All of this, is quite frankly, fucking stupid. Everyone knows – and I mean everyone – that white people have a fear of black people that is not present with non-blacks. It is a fact of life. Through our culture, family and media, blacks have been portrayed in a stereotypically negative way. It is ingrained in our psyche. It may not be conscious, yet it is there. Walking down the street at night, seeing a black person may raise suspicions that a white person would not.

Similarly, our reaction to a black person (that we do not know) interacting with us is often different, even in the most subtle ways, than when it is someone of our own race. How is it racist to point that out? It IS racist, however, to say you sympathize with taxi drivers who refuse to pick up a black person out of fear of either being robbed or going to a bad neighborhood. That’s part of their job! You can’t racially profile people and determine what neighborhood they live in based on skin color. It’s clear who the real racists are.

That video goes to show why Fox News is not a source that many college professors will allow you to use for a paper. Anyone who works for Fox News should never be employed by another news network. You cannot hire a tabloid journalist and expect them to become a professional.