The story quoted Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, who could take only one night on an Obama phone bank in the nearly all-white Susquehanna County, Pa.: “One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: ‘Hang that darky from a tree!’ ”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote about complaints of racism after a bar in Marietta, Ga., began selling an Obama 2008 T-shirt with a picture of Curious George peeling a banana.

-- Maureen Dowd for The New York Times

Obama lost West Virginia yesterday to Hillary by two to one votes, an important swing state. Race has been growing as a factor in this presidential contest. It's too easy to blow off the hardcore racists; a lot more white voters are distrustful of Obama's associations and what his deep beliefs may be.

The Obama people are going to need to get creative and effective in trying to win over more white voters, because you're not going to win the general election with only blacks and white liberals. One look at the Supreme Court should tell you that this election is too important to glory in the idea of losing as a matter of high principle. Sometimes you really have to win, which is a principle that the Republicans understand all too well.

( Dowd )

Obama's dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.

-- George F. Will for The Washington Post

Mr. Will takes his own shot at using Obama's 'bitter' controversy to take a broadside at liberalism, further confounding it with Marxism, and deconstructing it as the politics of condescension. Poverty and fundamentalism can be basic American values, I guess.

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David Brooks on the rivalries and tensions in McCain's inner-circle

This week a potential scandal broke out threatening the McCain candidacy. Another hawt blonde: Vicki Iseman. Blondes are deadly to political careers.

One angle that I found interesting involves some remarks by Rush Limbaugh. I usually dismiss him as just someone who throws red meat to the hardcore Republican masses, but his remarks about the lesson that McCain should take from the Times reporting may be telling. He said that McCain should understand that this is why he shouldn't have any dealings with liberal media such as the Times, because they are supposedly just about breaking down conservatives, suggesting that our Culture War may run even deeper than I would have thought. This also explains why Dubya seems to give interviews only to Fox News. In any case, regarding the Iseman scandal, Brooks concludes:

At his press conference Thursday, McCain went all-in. He didn’t just say he didn’t remember a meeting about Iseman. He said there was no meeting. If it turns out that there is evidence of an affair and a meeting, then his presidential hopes will be over.

The 2008 election just keeps getting interestinger and interestinger.

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David Brooks on Obama Comedown Syndrome

"The afflicted had already been through the phases of Obama-mania — fainting at rallies, weeping over their touch screens while watching Obama videos, spending hours making folk crafts featuring Michelle Obama’s face. These patients had experienced intense surges of hope-amine, the brain chemical that fuels euphoric sensations of historic change and personal salvation."

How do you keep the music playing? Why can't the magic ever last?

This isn't to say that his electoral strength, at least among Democrats, is coming down. As Brooks notes, "some invisible connection seems to persist."

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This kind of sale is hardly new. Organized religion has been offering a similar commodity -- salvation -- for millennia. Which is why the Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revival with, as writer James Wolcott observed, a "salvational fervor" and "idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria."

"We are the hope of the future," sayeth Obama. We can "remake this world as it should be." Believe in me and I shall redeem not just you but your country -- nay, we can become "a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest."

... ABC's Jake Tapper notes the "Helter-Skelter cult-ish qualities" of "Obama worshipers," what Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times calls "the Cult of Obama." Obama's Super Tuesday victory speech was a classic of the genre. Its effect was electric, eliciting a rhythmic fervor in the audience -- to such rhetorical nonsense as "We are the ones we've been waiting for. (Cheers, applause.) We are the change that we seek."

That was too much for Time's Joe Klein. "There was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism," he wrote. "The message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is."

-- Charles Krauthammer for The Washington Post

I have this gnawing suspicion that the Republicans are going to tear this inspirational zeal apart. And what if the Democrats do lose this opportunity to get the White House? After eight years of Bush! In that event, the party should just fold up shop and be gone.

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In a webcast, prestidigitator Penn Jillette talks about a joke he has begun telling in his show. He thinks the thunderous reaction it gets from audiences shows that Hillary no longer has a shot.

The joke goes: “Obama is just creaming Hillary. You know, all these primaries, you know. And Hillary says it’s not fair, because they’re being held in February, and February is Black History Month. And unfortunately for Hillary, there’s no White Bitch Month.”

-- Maureen Dowd for The New York Times

Hillary has lost the last ten or so primaries and caucuses straight, and she looks down for the count. Her last chance seems to be Ohio and Texas on March fourth. I realized how bad things are going for her when I saw her today giving a speech promising to raise the minimum wage to nine dollars and change. When you are reduced to buying votes that brazenly, you cannot be too confident.

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♠
As William J. Stuntz of Harvard Law School wrote in The Weekly Standard, the Democrats have conducted their race amid unconstrained “Yes We Can!” unreality. Because the Democratic candidates appear to agree on so much, they’ve never tested each other’s policy proposals or exposed each other’s assumptions. But governing means choosing, and reality will be unkind. The artificial unity between the Democratic center and the Democratic left would be smashed by the harsh choices of 2009.

-- David Brooks for The New York Times

Brooks notes that it is not going to be as easy to withdraw from Iraq as both Obama and Hillary make out, as non-partisan military leaders cry out against squandering what gains have been made over the last year, now that the situation is supposedly stabilizing, especially when pulling out will precipitate a surge in violence and perhaps a collapse of this stability.

Brooks also argues that it will prove foolhardy to try to carry out the big spending promises that both Obama and Hillary have been making, in light of the enormous debt piled up during Bush's eight years in office.

In sum, don't set your hearts on a new golden age. And you probably shouldn't expect a new kind of politics. It promises to be as hard fought and cut-throat as ever.

On the other hand, it's not like McCain would be a trip to the Promise Land. We could perhaps use some Democratic priorities at this point, after eight years of Christian fundamentalism and Bush's neo-conservative macho foolhardiness - with the unreality of the "faith-based community" as opposed to the "reality-based community".

Though, I do wonder if Obama would be able to invoke the military option when it should be called for, and I expect it is a question of 'when' and not 'if'. I would hate to see him become just a hip Jimmy Carter.

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♠
I've come across this parody of the "Yes, we can" video, mocking McCain:



One cannot help laughing. Yet, one also cannot help appreciating that there may be something to be said about hard truths not making good democratic appeals. Of course, whether it is a hard truth that we need to be in Iraq for another hundred years, or a genuinely mistaken and tragic vision is not so clear. But you should be wary of someone offering rainbows and sunshine; America's challenges are tougher than that.

One thing about an Obama candidacy is that it should make for a more fascinating race against McCain, particularly if the Iraq question becomes ascendent again.

But, hell, even conservative Republicans don't like the guy!

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♠
You are embarrassing yourselves. With your "Yes We Can" music video, your "Fired Up, Ready to Go" song, your endless chatter about how he's the first one to inspire you, to make you really feel something -- it's as if you're tacking photos of Barack Obama to your locker, secretly slipping him little notes that read, "Do you like me? Check yes or no." Some of you even cry at his speeches. If I were Obama, and you voted for me, I would so never call you again.

Obamaphilia has gotten creepy.

-- Joel Stein for The Los Angeles Times

Here is some counterveiling sentiment to our Obama dreaming. You do want to be wary about these kinds of things. We are risking more than a bad date, though I can appreciate the sentiment that, after Bush, anything with a 'D' will do.

( column )

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♠
Interest in al-Qaida is waning in the Muslim world?

These terrorists have been so quiet for so long, I'm beginning to think we really did overblow the Islamist threat, at least as far as America is concerned. The thought also leads one to wonder whether we indeed may be able to turn over a new page with a new Administration, and truly get back to the business of building ourselves up as well as becoming a more unequivocally positive force in the world at large. Or is this just an Indian summer?

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