Joe Walsh believes that if Jesse Jackson had been nominated in 1984, he would have defeated Reagan in a landslide. OK.
It's of course silly to claim that being black gives a politician an insurmountable advantage. But I'm pretty sure Walsh wasn't claiming that. Indeed, it can be the case that blackness is a disadvantage a large majority of the time, but that Obama was one of the few cases in which it was an advantage. I doubt it made much of a net difference in the general, but I'm pretty sure it was a deciding factor in the primary, where winning as the underdog requires you to differentiate yourself from the crowd of other compotent politicians.
