The elephant in the room is that Barack Obama has at least a fifty-fifty chance to be the next president of the United States, and as an African American in that position, his life is in extraordinary peril. Each time he wades into a crowd where dozens of hands are thrusting cell phones out to photograph him, any one of those hands might hold a gun. Can you say that any president is in similar danger each time he works a rope line? Of course, and you’d be right. But who are we kidding to deny that the serious possibility of a black man as president takes the odds to a dark and scary place none of us wants to contemplate. In choosing the person who would succeed him if he becomes the victim of political murder, Obama had to think about it on a level no one in his position ever had to struggle with before.

Barack Obama is a black man who is now in a dead heat to become president of a country where white supremacy is our original sin. What academics tiptoe around as “the problem of race” is really just a history of white people using violence to stay in charge. The reality of Obama’s presidential odds has brought us all to a moment of truth. If someone of his charismatic and historic stature is assassinated as president, this country will be traumatized to its knees. And the racial nature of such an attack will simply be assumed, in a climate of tensions that will resemble a room sloshed ankle-deep in gasoline, with lots of crying people holding matches. In such a political moment, where our oldest dread surfaces instantly to demoralize and terrify us, the person who must step before us as president would need to be a steady hand with both grief and government.

In my opinion, Obama did not pick Biden because he needed a Roman Catholic or a good debater. He picked a man who had already faced the instantaneous shock of losing his wife and child, on a day that left his other two children in the hospital. Biden faced this as a young man. Only those who have been through such a storm could possibly understand what it takes for any human being to survive it. Obama surely knows what kind of storm we will face, as a nation with profound and active racial issues, if our first black president is ripped from us in an instant of violence. The Biden decision shows us something. I believe he picked Biden, ultimately, for one reason: because more than anyone else he could see on deck, Obama thought that if necessary, Biden could get America through a disaster of immeasurable proportions. In making such a decision, Obama reveals a possible greatness.