Go Obama!

Here's a bit of Hendrik Hertzberg's commentary on Barack Obama's "world tour" in this week's New Yorker: 

Obama gained nothing in the polls during his nearly flawless, arguably triumphant grand tour. Still, after seven years during which, even among our closest allies, contempt for Bush bled into resentment of the country that returned him to office, one would have to be an awful grouch not to be gratified by the sight of a sea of delighted Europeans waving American flags instead of burning them and cheering an American politician instead of demonstrating against one.

Back home, one such grouch had ample reason to be grouchy. McCain’s luck last week was as bad as Obama’s was good. McCain rode in a golf cart with Bush senior; Obama rode in a helicopter with General David Petraeus. Obama was hailed by the German multitudes; McCain, his planned photo op at an offshore rig preëmpted by an oil spill and rained out by Hurricane Dolly, held a press gaggle in front of Schmidt’s Fudge Haus, in Columbus, Ohio. Obama got a big kiss (“Obama? C’est mon copain!”) from the new President of France, a dashing conservative with an exotic background and an unusual name; McCain stood athwart the cheese aisle of a supermarket, complaining.

Go Obama!

I don't know where my brother finds this stuff (click here for more Abraham Obama).

Left Wondering about the Upper Hand?

Today's New York Sun hones in on an interesting bit of trivia that unites John McCain and Barack Obama: They're both left-handed. Which means that the next president -- like every president since 1974 (except for George W. and Jimmy Carter) -- will once again be a leftie. That's right: Ford, Reagan, H. W. Bush, Clinton and our next president-to-be're all lefties. So what? Well, since only 10% of the population is left-handed, the recent spree of lefties in the Oval Office is a statistical anomolie that may very well have a biological explanation.   The Sun pokes around for evidence linking left-handedness to other presidential traits like ambition or problem-solving skills but comes up only with ... hair whorls:

[Amar Klar's] research shows that the whorl for right-handers curls clockwise in 92% of cases. In left-handers, the distribution is random, with half exhibiting clockwise whorl and the other half spinning counterclockwise. Mr. Klar said he could spot a counterclockwise whorl from seeing Mr. McCain and Mr. Clinton on television and looking at the way they appear to comb their hair.

Also? Apparently those hair whorls have been linked not only to electability in recent decades but also to sexual orientation. This all must mean something, but I'm not really sure what. 

Oh Doo Da Day

From Mark Halperin's blog via my brother (of course):

Hillary Clinton enthusiastically picked a filly named Eight Belles to win the Kentucky Derby and compared herself to the horse. Eight Belles finished second. The winner was the
favorite, Big Brown. Eight Belles collapsed immediately after crossing the finish line, and was euthanized shortly thereafter.

From First Lady to Lady Macbeth

From an article in The Nation entitled "Why Hillary Makes My Wife Scream":

It is as if Hillary Clinton is engaged in a toxic transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and accusation ever inflicted on her by the American Right over the decades. She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.

Go Obama!

From my brother: Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's first Secretary of Labor, is going to formally announce his endorsement of Barack Obama later today. "She's an old friend," Reich told New York magazine (on the subject of Hillary Clinton), "I've known her 40 years. I was absolutely dead set against getting into the whole endorsement thing. I've struggled with it. I've not wanted to do it. Out of loyalty to her, I just felt it would be inappropriate." What pushed Reich over the edge was the Clinton campaign's ad response to Obama's "small town" comments:

We have three terrible traditions that we've developed in American campaigns. One is outright meanness and negativity. The second is taking out of context something your opponent said, maybe inartfully, and blowing it up into something your opponent doesn't possibly believe and doesn't possibly represent. And third is a kind of tradition of distraction, of getting off the big subject with sideshows that have nothing to do with what matters. And these three aspects of the old politics I've seen growing in Hillary's campaign. And I've come to the point, after seeing those ads, where I can't in good conscience not say out loud what I believe about who should be president. Those ads are nothing but Republicanism. They're lending legitimacy to a Republican message that's wrong to begin with, and they harken back to the past 20 years of demagoguery on guns and religion. It's old politics at its worst — and old Republican politics, not even old Democratic politics. It's just so deeply cynical.

Go Obama!

From George Packer, writing in this week's New Yorker:

Obama’s ability to contemplate the contradictions in Americans of all colors without going mad—to be made stronger by them—accounts for his power as a politician. He also pays the electorate the supreme compliment of assuming that it, too, can appreciate complexity. ... But it was Nixon’s Checkers speech, with its cheesy confession that he owed his parents thirty-five hundred dollars with interest (and loved America), that carried the day in 1952, and has more or less defined successful campaign rhetoric ever since. It isn’t clear that Obama’s elevated dialogue last week is in the long-term interest of his campaign. ... Obama is a black candidate who can tell Americans of all races to move beyond race. As such, he is uniquely positioned to put an end to this era, and uniquely vulnerable to becoming its latest victim.

Go Obama!

Because there's no such thing as too much weird feel-good Obama detritus. Or too many Ben and Jerry's flavors. Or too many bad puns! Pictured: The winner of Slate's Barack Obama ice cream flavor contest (graphic by Audience of Two).  Yes, Pecan!  (Much better than Conan O'Brien's suggested "Baracky Road.")  Tiramisuperdelegate, anyone?

Go Obama!

Since Valentine's Day -- like supporting Obama -- is so over. Via my brother, Dalia Lithwick's low concept, dubious and far-fetched (George Costanza -style) break-up letter to Barack! Because that lame-o Potomac hat trick was just the last straw.

Go Obama!

Let's call today's installment of "Go Obama!" The Backlash Edition. You know what I'm talking about -- the way the modifier "cultish" has become the new "unelectable" or "inexperienced" in NObama-speak. This ABC round-up observes TPM's Kathleen Geier "getting increasingly weirded out by some of Obama's supporters," Time magazine's Joe Klein finding "something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism" and MSNBC's Chris Matthews resorting to Biblical comparisons. But I liked Joel Stein's account of this phenomenon in the LA Times best:

Obamaphilia has gotten creepy. I couldn't figure out if the two canvassers who came to my door Sunday had taken Ecstasy or were just fantasizing about an Obama presidency, but I feared they were going to hug me. Scarlett Johansson called me twice, asking me to vote for him. She'd never even called me once about anything else. Not even to see "The Island."

The campaign dispatches of ex-Gawker man -- and Obama vote-caster -- Choire Sicha show a similar eye for the comedy of fanaticism ("They sure like to chant 'yes we can!' " he writes of one Obama drinking event). It has something to do with the issue of Obama's "coolness," summed up by the New York Times as a choice heavy with aesthetic/lifestyle connotations: "Is Obama A Mac And Clinton A PC?" The comparison is fun but worrisome -- not only is it "not clear that aligning with the trendy Mac aesthetic is good politics," those commericals are kind of annoying anyway.

"People want to vote for him because it feels like a dare," Sicha writes. "It feels like a treat. It’s just so crazy, they’re thinking! And why not? Everyone’s doing it!" Enthusiasm (and even a little pump-up music) is great -- if it's backed with substance. But there's a lot to be said for playing it cool, too. As Stein concludes:

... The best we Obamaphiles can do is to refrain from embarrassing ourselves. And I do believe that we can resist making more "We Are the World"-type videos. [BP: My brother calls the Will.i.am video "the kiss of death."] We can resist crying jags. We can resist, in every dinner argument and every e-mail, the word "inspiration." Yes, we can.

Go Obama!

From Michael Chabon in the Washington Post:

... I admit that I'm getting tired of listening to rationales from people who know that Obama is a remarkable, even an extraordinary politician, the kind who comes along, in this era of snakes and empty smiles, no more than once a generation.

Oh, sure, most of these people tell me they would like to see Obama become president. No question, he comes off as at once brilliant and sensible, vibrant and measured, engaged and engaging, talented, forthright, quick-witted, passionate, thoughtful and, as with all remarkable people whom experience has taught both the extent and the bitter limits of their gifts, reasonably humble. In a better world, people tell me, in theory, sure, having a president like Barack Obama sounds great. But not, you know, for real. Not in the base, corrupt, morally spent, toxic and reeling rats' nest that we like to call home.

... To support Obama, we must permit ourselves to feel hope, to acknowledge the possibility that we can aspire as a nation to be more than merely secure or predominant. We must allow ourselves to believe in Obama, not blindly or unquestioningly as we might believe in some demagogue or figurehead but as we believe in the comfort we take in our families, in the pleasure of good company, in the blessings of peace and liberty, in any thing that requires us to put our trust in the best part of ourselves and others. That kind of belief is a revolutionary act. It holds the power, in time, to overturn and repair all the damage that our fear has driven us to inflict on ourselves and the world.

And when we all wake up on Nov. 5, 2008, to find that we have made Barack Obama the president of the United States, the world is already going to feel, to all of us, a little different, a little truer to its, and our, better nature. It is part of the world's nature and of our own to break, ruin and destroy; but it is also our nature and the world's to find ways to mend what has been broken. We can do that. Come on. Don't be afraid.

Go Obama!

Check out Toni Morrison's glowing endorsement of Barack Obama, sent my way by my brother. It's written as a letter to Obama, and like Caroline Kennedy's recent endorsement (and The New York Observer's Obama endorsement), is completely unequivocal in its support. Some highlights:

In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom. It is too bad if we associate it only with gray hair and old age. Or if we call searing vision naivete. Or if we believe cunning is insight. Or if we settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it ... Wisdom is a gift; you can't train for it, inherit it, learn it in a class, or earn it in the workplace -- that access can foster the acquisition of knowledge, but not wisdom.

Go Obama!

(click to enlarge)

Odd Couples

This short video from The New Yorker shows cartoonist Steve Brodner riffing on the idea that there's an adversarial partnership -- a cartoonish coupling, even -- in Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's rivalry. "They're not just competitors," says Brodner. "There's a kind of antagonism, there's a kind of tension between these two." Felix and Oscar? Homer and Marge? Ricky and Lucy? Convincing or not, it's a fresh train of thought (with countless possibilities). I for one think I'd like to sketch them as Calvin and Susie. Other ideas?

Go Obama!

My brother emailed me an assortment of interesting Obama bits today, including this attack of a letter to the editor ("I hope the voters of this country take a good hard look at Barack Hussein Obama's past before we dare to elect him president") from today's Memphis newspaper, and the smear campaign from which it takes its apparent origins. He writes, "Prepare for more of this stuff if Obama wins today," and I think unfortunately he's right. He also emailed a few more uplifting finds, including this great Washington Post dispatch from New Hampshire, but my favorite is this lovely observation from Slate's Dahlia Lithwick, who writes (in response to today's New York Times op-ed by Gloria Steinem):

In the end, it seems to me, Obama faces easier sledding today not because its easier to be a black man in American than it is to be a woman, but because he's modeled -- and rather beautifully -- how much simpler it is to be yourself than to become a piece of precision machinery, comprised of polls and talking points.