Okay, I was going to upload an image of Romney at his recent Florida victory, swiped from the front page of Real Salon. Sorry, not copyright allowed. But I bet you can play the game I was going to offer with any photo from Salon or any other news source. Try to find the black person in the crowd.

As correspondents are noting all over the place, Romney is the probable nominee for the Republicans, but Gingrich isn't going to go down easy. I was present to see many of the commercials run - in saturation - on TV. They were some of the nastiest I've seen in decades.

 The Romney and Gingrich ads all tried to identify the other guy as Obama in disguise, an Obama puppet, someone mind-controlled by Obama or some such paranoid nonsense. They attacked each other's positions. Romney attacked Gingrich for his taking money from Federal housing programs. Gingrich attacked Romney for his multiple wives and his rich speaking fees.

Many of the writers over on Real Salon believe that this will damage the ultimate Republican candidate, Romney or Gingrich or someone else. They don't think 2012 will be a cakewalk for Obama, but they believe this will make it easier for him. Except there's one major flaw in that prediction.

Romney, Gingrich and the other existing Republican candidates are white.

This may be invisible to many of the Salon writers, but if they lived in Real America - the part of America that isn't New York or Los Angeles - they'd realize that we are still far from a colorblind society. Yes, you can see blacks and whites walking hand in hand, even dating, even bringing their kids to the theme parks, but if you're actually there you can see the furtive looks and the whispers after they pass. And that's just Florida. Imagine the reaction in the bootheel of Missouri, for example. A place where black faces had better keep off the streets after dark, especially on Saturday night.

Racism, direct or not, has always been part of the Republican and Teabagger attack against Obama. And it's going to be more overt than covert in the months to come. Republicans have shown they will use tooth and claw against each other, in open forums and in their ads. What will they do when faced with the man they have cast as the ultimate enemy?

Already, in the comments section of Real Salon, I've detected a "vote suppression" poster. Unlike the other paid trolls there, he doesn't attack Obama for his "foolish socialist Negro ideas." He attacks him for not being liberal enough. There are many people who feel that way, but they don't feel that way in two-sentence posts. The Vote Suppressor is trying to keep Obama's numbers down in the intellectual class.

Don't worry about the non-intellectual class that doesn't read Salon. There's robo-calls and direct mail to do that, giving people an election date two days after the real election date, telling people that they will be arrested at the polls if they have even a parking ticket and try to vote, and giving wrong addresses for polling places.

It isn't going to be easy for Obama at all. Certainly not as easy as 2008 was. And his big hope of instituting real change (whatever change he decides he wants to implement) depends on getting more Democrats elected to the House and Senate. That will be very difficult when the Obama brand name gets...well, tarred.