Rich Benjamin

The GOP doesn't woo minorities just for their own sake, but also to reel in the larger, more desired prize: the national mass of moderate white voters. It's like flattering the pizza-face girl leaning on the bar to get to her knockout friend.

As we all know, the opposite of love is not hate. It's indifference.

As more voters decamp to the outer suburbs and exurbs, those places command premium attention from politicians as vote-rich target environments perceived to be competitive. White woters in the emerging suburbs and exurbs, strategists believe, hold the keys to future general elections. The rest of America, beware: Politics in Whitopia may transform its voters' hobbyhorses - school "choice", taxpayer and private property rights, gated communities, and "color-blind" indifference - into sacred cows.

Real estate is my only porn. Like the village drunk caressing his "Penthouse", I take the "New York Times" and "New York" magazine real estate sections to bed at night. I thumb their pages, ogling each lurid image of wide-plank hard-wood floors, crema marfil mosaic inlay tiling, rooftop access, and location, location, location. Size matters. The bigger the square footage, the longer my eyes linger on the centerfold on sale.

Growing up in a lily-white suburban neighborhood in Potomac, Maryland, during the 1980s, I remember suffocating on endless conversations about "The Brady Bunch" reruns, my second-grade English teacher doubting that I could read, and a band of white kids often cornering me to bounce rectangular pencil erasers off my Afro. "Boing", they said, "let's try it from this angle".