Elizabeth Alexander in Salon.com reminds us that Toni Morrison’s anointing of Bill Clinton as “the first black president” 10 years ago never meant what people have lately taken it to mean. He didn’t get that moniker because of what he did for black people; he got it because of the way he was mistreated by the establishment.

Morrison wrote at the height of the Lewinsky scandal in the fall of 1998, when the House was considering impeachment proceedings.

African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear: “No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and—who knows?—maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us.”

P.S. Morrison endorsed Obama today.

Reading this weekend that Caroline Kennedy and Ted Kennedy were endorsing Barack Obama, I got to thinking about what might have been.

What could JFK Jr. have become if he had lived?

Would he have continued coasting along as a socialite, perhaps founding another magazine or dabbling in philanthropy? Or would he eventually have entered politics, perhaps running for the U.S. Senate from New York and eventually for the presidency?

Today, JFK Jr. would be the same age as Barack Obama. The two men were born only about 8 months apart. Instead of someone who reminds people of John F. Kennedy, could we have had the real deal?

JFK Jr. never showed much academic achievement. He didn’t have a great academic record and it took him three tries to pass the New York bar exam. If he’d entered politics, he might have been a Democratic George W. Bush, a scion of a rich family who wouldn’t have amounted to much without his connections and didn’t want to work very hard (but without W’s scary messianic certainty and faux-hokiness).

But perhaps not.

We’ll never know.