This election cycle has been a bit juicy, for all the wrong reasons. Among other things, we learned that former Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum’s wife–Karen Santorum–shacked up with her abortion-providing boyfriend before she met Rick, fell in love with Jesus and then became a vocal pro-lifer. And now, in a new book titled ‘Barack Obama: The Story’ written by David Maraniss we get to hear about how Barack Obama was writing intellectual love letters to his white female college classmates in his pre-Michelle Obama days.

The fact that Obama dated a white woman shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone–Obama admitted as much about himself in his autobiography “Dreams from my Father: A story of race and inheritance.” And since Barack has a white mother I don’t think it can be surprising that he, at the very least, wasn’t prejudiced against dating white women. According to Barack he broke up with one white girlfriend because he didn’t think he would find acceptance–from whom?–if he had stayed with her. Barack eventually graduated from law school, went to work at the firm where his future wife was already a practicing, and the rest–as the old cliche goes–was history. America got it’s first black president.

But what if?

Had Barack married one of the white women he dated would he have become president? Honestly, I doubt it. Yeah, everybody was drinking the ‘hope and change’ koolaid when Barack was running his election campaign and plenty of people would have voted for a ham sandwich rather than elect another Republican after Bush, but Barack received a tremendous amount of support from black people, black women in particular–a first. Black women weren’t just showing up at the polls to vote their politics, they were turning out in droves to support the good-looking black man who had married an equally good-looking and accomplished black women.

Had Barack Obama been married a white women I don’t think the Black female support and worship that has been bestowed upon this man would have been so strong. Black women would have voted for him because black women reliably vote Democratic, but it cannot be denied that the level of support Obama received was unprecedented among that demographic.

And perhaps Barack knew, many years ago, when he chose to stop dating white women and affirm his identity as a black man that he was making a personal as well as a political choice: If he was ever to be accepted, welcomed, and celebrated among black community activists and within the pro-black church where he worshiped for over a decade–Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s south side—he would need a black woman by his side. I doubt that Black women would have supported Obama’s rise within the Chicago political machine and to the position of leader of the free world if he had chosen otherwise.