It’s no wonder Rev. Jesse Jackson wants to neuter Barack Obama — after all, that’s exactly what Obama has done to him.

He may be apologizing for his remarks, claiming lamely that he didn’t know there was a live microphone eavesdropping on what he said, but he meant exactly what he was overheard saying because that’s exactly what he’d like to do.

In his mind, he has every reason to want to take a cutting knife to Obama’s private parts in retribution for his own public loss of manhood at Obama’s hands.

Thanks to the ascendency of Barrack Obama, Jesse’s long reign as the black leader — a position he more or less shared with the Rev. Al Sharpton all these years — has finally come to an end. He’s been dethroned by, and lost his political manhood to, an upstart politician barely dry behind the ears but clever beyond his years.

Jesse has long been the self-appointed leader of black America, a race baiter who has used race baiting to feather his own nest, bludgeoning cowardly American businessmen to pay him tribute in the form of contributions to his Rainbow Coalition and sundry other causes.

That’s all over now. The king is dead, long live the new king; and the old king is seething with resentment over his loss of the monarchy he occupied for so long.

By achieving the exalted status as the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party — which along with the media has long groveled at Jesse’s feet — Obama has in one painful stroke lopped off Jesse’s manhood. He is the man of the hour, in one cruel stroke making Jesse a thing of the past.

How that must hurt the self-appointed leader of the nation’s African-American community, which despite Jesse’s attempts to keep them enslaved on his plantation have made enough huge strides as to have one of their number striding confidently toward the presidency of the United States.

Rooted in the past, Jesse is mad. Jesse is angry. Jesse is upset. It drives him up a wall when Obama echoes Bill Cosby by demanding that his fellow African-American men assume the responsibilities of fatherhood.

By so doing, Obama neuters Jesse, who always blames an alleged racist white America for the failure of many black fathers to act like fathers.

That’s not talking down to blacks, that’s telling his fellow blacks what they need to hear. After all, all of us, black and white men alike, need to be real fathers in our homes. It’s not a race issue, it’s not a political issue. It’s a moral issue. Obama sees that. Jesse can’t.

Obama neuters Jesse when he echoes the hated George Bush in favoring a faith-based initiative. The fact that a black American is taking such positions that are counter-intuitive to Jesse’s emasculates Jesse, especially when many black Americans applaud Obama for doing so.

Obama has not only neutered Jesse, he has for the most part gagged him by making just about everything Jesse says sound irrelevant and passé. Obama looks ahead. Jesse looks back on a now-dead past.

Jesse’s fellow blacks have bolted Jesse’s plantation and moved so far ahead that are on the verge of having one of their number win the White House, and doing it by winning the votes of vast numbers of white Americans, an affront to Jesse who would have us believe that white America is a racist America that would never cast a vote for an African American.

That can’t happen in Jesse’s world, and the fact that it might well happen in November has rendered Jesse’s voice a voice from a now-dead past that Barack Obama has forever silenced.

It’s not Obama’s manhood that’s been sliced off; it’s Jesse’s and he doesn’t like it one little bit. Obama has foreclosed on his plantation, and freed his fellow blacks from Jesse’s grip.

Bye-bye, Jesse.

Mike Reagan, the elder son of the late President Ronald Reagan, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Radio America Network. Look for Mike’s newest book, “Twice Adopted” and other info at www.Reagan.com. E-mail comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com.