So Senator Obama gave Hillary the one-fingered salute.

Search You Tube for “Obama” and “Finger,” and watch The Man Who Would Save Us All scratch his face.

Was that two fingers or just one? Is the crowd reacting to his words or to the salute-like gesture?

Maybe I should give Senator Obama a pass, since he wants to be bring about national healing and unity. To nitpick trivial items like him sitting under hate-spewing preachers, rubbing shoulders with an unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist, and dissing small-town America in front of uppity San Francisco Democrats would make me a divider, not a uniter.  

And I don’t want to be a divider, no sir.

“Unity is the great need of the hour,” Obama said recently, quoting words of Martin Luther King Jr.

I agree. After eight years of George W. Bush, America needs to be a unified nation.

Let’s start with taking out our frustration over gas prices and groceries on The Rich. Raising income taxes on The Rich would unify most of us, since few of us are rich, even fewer of us will ever be rich, and those few of us who are rich don’t need that much money anyway.

The exception of course is Senator Obama and his wife, Michelle, since they’re struggling to pay their student loans and had to fork out $10,000 last year for their kids’ activities, all with a paltry income of $4.6 million in 2007.

So making an exception for Mr. and Mrs. Obama, let’s give The Rich a one-finger salute and use their money to improve our schools, protect the elderly, make healthcare more affordable, etc. etc.

I’ve seen enough episodes of “The Fresh Prince” to know that “Republican” is just another name for “rich,” which means The Rich must be supporting the Republican candidate, Senator John McCain. In fact, his top contributors begin with $221,250 from law firm Blank Rome, LLP, and from there continue with contributions from financial advisor Merrill Lynch, international banking conglomerate Citigroup Inc., international business office Greenberg Traurig LLP, then global investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Unlike McCain, contributions for Barack Obama are pouring in from The People, helping his campaign spread a message of unity and healing, and a hope for tomorrow.

So Obama’s top contribution so far, $523,478, is from some guy named Goldman Sachs, who is probably some retired postal worker and widower from Water Valley who has to choose between buying groceries and paying for his seven prescriptions.

It’s certainly not the same Goldman Sachs who is contributing to that icky Republican, John McCain, is it? Senator Obama’s next-highest contributions come from the University of California, international financial firm UBS AG, global investment bank JP Morgan and Chase, and global investment bank Lehman Brothers.

Well, scratch that rich-vote-for-the-Republicans thing. But I’m sure The Senator is just using The Rich to fund his campaign until he gets in office then – WHAM! When Obama begins his first term in 2009, we’ll cheer him on when he turns the tables on The Rich.

I propose that President Obama demand that the IRS take as much as a third of their income by creating what I call a “progressive income tax.”

Here’s some more parting advice for your campaign:

•Don’t spend another minute explaining your relationship with your former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, because your explanation was clear and the American people are an understanding people.

 Just because you defended his remarks before you denounced them, that doesn’t mean you were there to hear them, even though you later admitted you were, and even if you were there to hear them, that doesn’t mean you agreed with them, even if you defended the remarks that you later denounced but claim you never heard.

 •Keep talking about your struggles as a young married couple. Even though the right-wingers want to talk about your $4.6 million income last year, they never mention your income in 2006, which was only $991,296. That doesn’t even qualify you as a millionaire.  

•The next time The Media accuses you of being “elitist” for trashing small-town Americans as gun-holding, Holy Spirit-hugging, anti-immigrant rednecks, calmly explain that you must talk that way in order to raise campaign dollars for your campaign. When you make your next campaign stop in the South, just be sure to talk about what those people in San Francisco “cling to” in order to even out the insults.

On second thought, I’ve seen photos of the parades there. You may want to skip that.

Finally, anybody who has the audacity to get in the way of your hope needs to be squashed like a bug, all in the name of unity, of course.

“We believe we can be one people reaching for what’s possible,” The Senator proclaims on his Web site.

Except for the Klan, and those evil right-wing Republicans, who wouldn’t want that?