Prominent Democrats are defending Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada after a new book revealed racial remarks he made about Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. In that book, Reid described Obama as a “light-skinned” African-American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

Reid apologized to Obama on Saturday, and the president issued a statement accepting the apology and saying the matter was closed.

How nice.

We wonder if Obama would have been so accepting if, say, the comment and aplogy had come from Rush Limbaugh or a Republican member of Congress.

But Obama’s ability to get over things that come out of the mouths of Democrats didn’t start with Reid. Go back a little more than two years and there was then-candidate Joe Biden, who in 2007 said Obama was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

Biden came under criticism for the comment, but the controversy didn't endure — and Biden, of course, has gone on to have a pretty close relationship with Obama.

This might all sit well with folks like the Rev. Al Sharpton and Democrats who have spent the past week chastizing Republicans who are rightly calling for Reid’s ouster from Congress, but we wonder how Reid’s comments are sitting with another black politician who once enjoyed presidential possibilities.

J.C. Watts Jr. was a politician and Canadian Football League player from Oklahoma. Watts served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003 as a Republican, representing the 4th Congressional District in south-central Oklahoma.

Watts was born and raised in Eufaula, Okla., in a rural impoverished neighborhood. After being one of the first children to attend an integrated elementary school, he became a high school quarterback and gained a football scholarship to the University of Oklahoma. He graduated in 1981 with a degree in journalism and became a football player in the CFL until his retirement in 1986.

Watts became a Baptist minister and was elected in 1990 to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission as the first black in Oklahoma to win statewide office. He successfully ran for Congress in 1994 and was re-elected to three additional terms with increasing vote margins. Watts delivered the Republican response to President Clinton's 1997 State of the Union address and was elected chair of the House Republican Conference in 1998.

He has since retired from politics and turned to lobbying and business work.

But during his time in Congress, Watts was considered — right there alongside Colin Powell — as a potential black candidate for presiednt.

What happened?

We can’t say, but could Reid’s and Biden’s comments be taken to mean that Watts was too dark-skinned and not nice-looking enough for America?