Able Archer

The Arugula Libel

One more thing about "elitism."

What is most interesting, and least mentioned, in any discussion of this or that candidate's supposed "elitism" is the profound condescension it often shows toward the knowledge of the Average Man.

Take, for instance, the Arugula Libel.

Last year, Obama was addressing some Iowans and he said: "Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?" he asked. "I mean, they're charging a lot of money for this stuff."

This was taken as evidence of Obama's "elitism," that he is out of touch because he was talking about a supposedly exotic vegetable and a high-end supermarket in Jus' Folks Iowa. "Doesn't he know," went the response from the opinion factories of the East, "they only grow corn in Iowa and shop at the Hy-Vee, which certainly wouldn't stock something as highfalutin as arugula?"

The sentiment was repeated in today's Wall Street Journal by John Fund:

Democrats have been worrying about defending Mr. Obama's highly liberal voting record in a general election. Now they need to fret that he makes too many mistakes, from ignoring the Rev. Wright time bomb until the videotapes blew up in front of him, to his careless condescension towards salt-of-the-earth Democrats. Mr. Obama has a tendency to make such cultural miscues. Speaking to small-town voters in Iowa last year, he asked, "Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?"

Michelle Malkin, who long ago abandoned all debate tactics but the ad hominem smear, ran with the Arugula Libel, even producing a cute faux-poster depicting Obama with an arugula leaf.

This would all be real trouble for Obama if Americans actually were as stupid and parochial as writers like Fund and Malkin believe they are. But they are not. Arugula, far from exotic, is grown in Iowa and is widely available at supermarkets and farmers' markets in the state. You can even get it at the Hy-Vee. If you're in Ames, you can buy arugula at the farmers' market there. In Mingo? Head to Cleverly Farms, which has abundant arugula.

It is also telling that no article quoting Obama's arugula remark provides any context. Was he just bullshitting with the crowd about the price of foodstuffs? Or could it be that he knew farmers in Iowa grow arugula, and was trying, despite the constant clatter of nonsense he needs to speak over, to talk to them about their business, how generally they don't make a lot of money on their crops while companies like Whole Foods charge whatever they can get in a given market for their produce? I guess we'll never know, because long ago "reporters" decided the remark could only be used to characterize Obama as a salad snob.

Do these guys even know what they're doing? Do they even stop to think that maybe, just maybe, despite it's several syllables, most Americans know what arugula is? And that by pretending to be shocked that a candidate would be so out-of-touch as to mention the leafy green in Iowa, they are insulting the intelligence of the American Everymen they are usually trying so hard to impress?

The right-wing disinformation apparatus, and the pathetic individuals in the press and on television who continue to be intimidated by it—for example, everyone on CNN—have already settled on their tale of Obama, and, surprise, it sounds just like the tale of Kerry, which sounded just like the tales of Dukakis and Mondale. He's an "elitist." He likes fancy things plain folks don't get to have, like wine and salads not made of iceberg lettuce.

If only the Democrats were smart enough to put out there a true man of the people. A heroic brush-clearer like George W. Bush, or an honest-to-God cowboy like Ronald Reagan. The Democrats just don't understand regular folks.

It's starting to feel like a long, long way to November.

Addendum

Credit where it's due: Thomas Frank discusses at-length the Latte Libel in his amazing book, What's the Matter with Kansas? Obviously, the term was the inspiration for the Arugula Libel.

—Douglas Carlucci

Rove slanders Professor Obama

The other day, I watched Fox News "analyst" Karl Rove (that's really how they introduce him) literally go through the entire list of conservative distortions and lies about Barack Obama. Of course, Rove was not challenged on any of the statements by the host of the show he was on, On the Record with Greta van Susteren.

One lie popped out at me. Rove said (I'm roughly quoting) "Obama told us he was a constitutional law professor, that turned out not to be true." This stuck out because it was his academic career that proved to me Obama's intellectual merit. Since I don't know him personally, I took as proof of a high level of intelligence Obama's tenure as editor of the Harvard Law Review and his job teaching at the University of Chicago School of Law. I don't have absolute faith in academics, but I know they don't let just anyone edit the Harvard Law Review.

Since the claim came out of Rove's mouth I did not believe it, but I checked to make sure.

My hunch was correct. It is an entirely bogus claim. The supposed justification for saying Obama is lying about his status as a professor is that he was a Senior Lecturer at the law school, not a full-time, tenure-track faculty member. The implication is Obama didn't do a whole lot of teaching, but wants to take credit as a pedagogue. Here's the University of Chicago Law School's statement on the matter:

From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School's Senior Lecturers have high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined. [Emphasis mine]

So although to the law school Senior Lecturer is as good as professor, Obama's description of himself as a professor doesn't quite meet Rove's exacting standards for accuracy.

Obama's former colleague at the University of Chicago Law School, Cass R. Sunstein, vouches for the candidate's intellectual diligence and ability to profess law in this essay.

—Douglas Carlucci

Whom is Jeremiah Wright dividing?

I want to make one brief point about Barack Obama and his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. I had a moment of clarity on the subject this afternoon that I’d like to share.

The controversy reveals to us the last acceptable white privilege in the U.S: controlling the very discussion of race.

Allow me to explain. Ignore for a moment Wright’s most incredible statements: that the U.S. government was somehow complicit in developing AIDS and crack cocaine as a means of destroying African-Americans. These statements are demonstrably false, and Wright deserves to be criticized for making them. (I’m not including the nonsense about Wright and September 11 in this discussion, because, having listened to Wright’s sermon, it’s apparent that he wasn’t saying America’s “chickens had come home to roost” on that day, but was merely quoting such a statement made by someone else—on Fox News, by the way—for the rhetorical purpose of holding together his own thoughts on the subject.)

The statements on AIDS and cocaine are not the essence of Wright’s sermons. The essence is Wright’s anger at the long and indisputable history of racism and racial violence in the U.S, and the U.S.’s willingness to use violence to achieve its ends in foreign nations.

Wright is a black man. He understands this personally. You might not like him, but you can’t deny that when he speaks on racism, he speaks as a black man who grew up in the twentieth century U.S., and so he speaks on the subject with the authority of experience.

Yet most media criticism of Wright has been based on the premise that he is somehow irresponsible and demagogic in discussing race. The most basic implication of the criticism—what they mean when they say Wright is inflammatory and divisive—is that Wright should not be making the statements he made.

Distill the sentiment a little more, and it comes down to this: We don’t want to hear what this black man has to say about the way race is lived in the U.S. Simply by stating that racial relations are not “improving” or “progressing” in America—which the media is apparently required to say in any of its discussions of race—Wright is “divisive.”

But what does divisive mean? The media wants the term to be interpreted this way: Wright is emphasizing the differences between black and white in order to better control the black people in his parish, and this is wrong. I disagree. I think they are using the term this way: Wright is expressing ideas that are outside what is acceptable in mainstream media discussions of race; therefore, he is divisive because we disagree with him. This is the division they are citing: between Wright’s statements and the accepted media myth of race relations in the U.S.

And this is my point: the discussion of race is the one place in American life where whites are still allowed to maintain a privilege over black people. Discussions of race must conform to mainstream white sentiments, which basically come down to this: sorry about slavery and segregation, but things are better now and getting better, and we really don’t want to hear otherwise. Opinions to the contrary are “divisive” or the work of “demagogues.” Only a “demagogue” would point out that most young black men in American cities are either unemployed or in prison. Only a man who cared only for his own power would talk about how most black children still have to face the fact that more than any other group in this country, they are likely to die violently or be in prison by their eighteenth birthday.

Never mind that as a black man, Wright is not simply speculating on race relations: as a pastor in South Chicago, he has lived his race. He is challenging the white privilege to discuss race on white people’s terms, and so he is “divisive.”

To discuss race as it is lived by black Americans, in the view of mainstream opinion-makers, is to engage in “divisiveness.” Next time you hear this, don’t let the thought stop there: who is being divided? If someone said I was being divisive, and they meant I was dividing the public from the complacent and obnoxious opinions of professional talking heads, I would thank them for the compliment.

As I have said before, one doesn’t have to agree with Wright. I have heard him say many things with which I deeply disagree. But none of the mainstream criticism of Wright is willing to take his arguments on their own terms. The criticism does not even engage his arguments, it merely reminds the public that simply by making the arguments, Wright is “divisive.”

—Douglas Carlucci

Obama's Philadelphia speech

Today in Philadelphia Barack Obama delivered a speech about his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Or, that's what the news will say; in truth, it was a speech on the whole of America, and it was the most sincere and instructive speech I have ever heard uttered by a politician.

I consider myself a cynical watcher of politicians, but I am not afraid to say I was truly moved by Obama's speech. More than anything he has said previously, it has convinced me that he has an intuitive understanding of this nation's people; that he is not simply smart, but has deep wisdom.

Here is the text of the speech. I am not posting it strictly as a political document. It is would be worth reading if Obama had never run for an office.

Speech delivered by Senator Barack Obama in Philadelphia, March 18, 2008

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

On Obama and Wright

Sorry I've been absent for a few days.

I've been wanting to write about Barack Obama and his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. I read this article by Christopher Hayes in the Nation and he made many of the points I was trying to argue in my mind.

Imagine for a moment that you are pro-life. You believe that each abortion represents the murder of an innocent child. And as it stands despite protests and lawsuits and bills passed in the state legislatures, and organizing and marching and lobbying and petitioning, abortion in America remains legal and each year over 1 million innocent children are murdered. Yet America continues to stand idly by and allow this mass slaughter. If you were religious, you might think that God judged America harshly for this crime, for the nation's continuing indifference, and you might even think that God damns America for its tolerance of a holocaust.

It's hard to imagine, though, that if a Republican presidential candidate were running for president and had a preacher with the views spelled out above, that it would cause much of a stir, or even register a blip in the brain-dead oscillations of the twenty-four-hour, scandal-cycle EKG. And yet here we are, five or six news cycles into an ongoing firestorm over a few seconds of two different sermons delivered by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Barack Obama's (and Oprah Winfrey's) Chicago church, and a man who Obama says "brought me to Jesus." Just five minutes watching cable news coverage of the "scandal" and it's hard not to conclude the episode represents just about everything repellent and degraded about the nation's public discourse on religion, politics and race.

Read the whole article here.

—Douglas Carlucci

Fairness doctrine

All right. It’s time for a little change.

I’m certainly not going to vote for John McCain, but the man has done a lot of positive things as a Senator. I have voted for and will continue to support Barack Obama, but he’s hardly perfect.

In the spirit of fairness, I want to post an article about McCain’s good work in support of media diversity, and another about Obama’s skirting the truth on lobbyist money.

Robert Scheer reminds us of McCain’s work against the 1996 Telecommunications Act. McCain was the only Republican among a team of Democrats who worked against the law, which allowed for unprecedented media consolidation:

As Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain twisted briefly in the wind kicked up by that New York Times story suggesting he had swapped political favors for the personal favors of an attractive lobbyist for the telecommunications industry, I kept waiting for the public policy punch line. Surely the Times would spell out just what it was that McCain had delivered to big media beyond what the paper originally reported: an all-too-typical congressional request that the FCC speed up its review of a broadcast licensing dispute.

Vicki Iseman, the lobbyist in question, is praised on her company's Web site for her "extensive experience in telecommunications, representing corporations before the House and Senate Commerce Committees," and for "her work on the landmark 1992 and 1996 communications bills." Now that's a biggie, because the 1996 legislation, although you would never have learned this from the mainstream media at the time, opened the floodgates for massive media consolidation, thus rewarding media moguls for their many millions in campaign contributions. McCain was a big player on that Commerce Committee at the time, and I expected a Times revelation as to just how Iseman got McCain to help gift the media barons with their dream legislation.

The revelation never came, because the annoying reality is that McCain was one of the rare Senate opponents of the telecom bill that Iseman was pushing--as opposed to the New York Times, which, like every other major media outlet pushed for the legislation (in the case of the Times, without ever conceding its own corporation's financial bias in the matter). McCain was one of five senators (and the sole Republican) who, along with Democrats Russ Feingold, Patrick Leahy, Paul Simon and the great Paul Wellstone, who voted against the atrocious legislation, which President Bill Clinton signed into law.

The Times, which now has the temerity to question McCain's integrity on telecommunications policy, ran a shameful editorial back then, under the headline "A Victory for Viewers," insisting after the passage of the legislation that "there was one clear winner--the consumer." Seven years later, the paper's "Editorial Observer," Brent Staples, bemoaned one direct consequence of the passage of the Telecom Act, under the title "The Trouble with Corporate Radio: The Day the Protest Music Died." Noting that "corporate ownership has changed what gets played--and who plays it," Staples observed that the top two radio owners went from having a total of 115 stations before the act was passed to 1,400 between them afterward.

Read the whole article here.

Trudy Lieberman in the Columbia Journalism Review rebuts Obama’s line that he doesn’t take money from corporate lobbyists.

The word “lobbyist” seems to have a particular meaning in Obama’s campaign vocabulary. His stump speeches imply that he is not taking money from people who want things from the government and push for them. The reality is that he has.

To explain: Opensecrets.org, the Web site of the Center for Responsive Politics, is the most authoritative source on campaign finances. Basing its reports on data from the Federal Election Commission, the Center shows that Obama indeed doesn’t take much money from a sector the Center calls “lobbyists.” Through the end of December, Clinton received more than $800,000 and McCain around $400,000 from this group, which the Center says includes people who work for lobbying firms at the local, state, and federal level and their relatives who are not otherwise employed, as well as those who are officially registered as Washington lobbyists. Obama received contributions of about just $86,000 from this group. Obama’s Web site says he doesn’t take money from Washington lobbyists or political action committees,and the Center says that if his campaign finds that the money came from registered Washington lobbyists, it does get returned. …

Significantly, the Center’s lobbyist sector excludes in-house lobbyists who work solely for one company, union, trade association, or other group. These people may lobby, but their contributions are grouped in the totals for the various industries they represent, along with contributions from other employees in the sector, their relatives, whatever PAC money has been raised, and donations from trade and professional associations which, of course, carry lots of weight in the horse trading that occurs when legislation is drafted. (Corporations cannot contribute directly to candidates.)

Contributions made by the various industry sectors tell the real story in a presidential race. And Opensecrets.org shows that Obama is picking up gobs of money put on the table by these special interests—including those involved in health care, which will surely have a lot riding on the outcome of the election and will expect to be heard after the election is over.

Consider the sector called lawyers and law firms. Clearly, lawyers and law firms lobby on behalf of their own interests—like fighting malpractice reform, which could again surface as a thorny issue for the new administration. Clinton and Obama have raised similar amounts from lawyers and law firms—$11.8 and $9.5 million. McCain and Huckabee have taken far less. The health sector has also given to Obama, Clinton, and McCain. In the pharmaceutical and health product industries, contributions to Clinton total $349,000 and $338,000 to Obama. Again, McCain trails in donations at about $98,000, an indication that the sector sees the real action on the Democratic side of the ballot. Health professionals, which include doctors, nurses, and dentists, have given Clinton some $2.3 million and Obama $1.7 million.

Read the whole article here.

—Douglas Carlucci

More Obama innuendo

Is Hillary Clinton’s campaign responsible for circulating this photo of Barack Obama?

Campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson says no (well, kind of, maybe, no):

Asked if the campaign had any role, Wolfson said, "No, not to my knowledge...I've never seen that picture before. I'm not aware that anyone else here has. I'm not aware that anyone here has circulated this e-mail."

It’s almost impossible to say at this point what happened. Even if you take Wolfson at his word, the Clinton campaign is thousands-strong, including full-time staffers, volunteers in every state, and surrogates in all sorts of elected and unelected political positions—and any one of them could be behind this without the executive-level staff and advisers knowing.

Whoever is responsible for circulating the photograph, though, had a very clear statement: this Obama is not like us.

It needs to be said this is pure nonsense. First of all, Congressional and executive branch delegations (the photo is apparently from a 2006 trip Obama made to Africa as a Senator) regularly engage in this sort of ceremony. Trading tokens of local culture is a diplomatic tradition which probably goes back to the first Homo sapiens taking a walk and finding another settlement of Homo sapiens.

Take a look at some of these photos:

That’s President Bush, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Chinese President Hu Jintao dressed in Vietnamese robes during an official visit to that country. Does this prove Bush is a secret Buddhist? Or Viet Cong? No, I don’t think you can draw either of those conclusions.

Here’s Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi wearing a scarf over her head during a trip to Syria. Surely, if her sympathies are suspect…

Than so are President Bush’s, who is seen here laughing with an Arab and holding a sword.

Barack Obama is not a Muslim, no matter how many times Michelle Malkin insists it is so. I love how writers such as Malkin get to trade attitudes according to the latest petty scandal they are writing about. When a Republican is accused of something, all of a sudden Malkin finds her gumshoes and becomes determined to get to the bottom of the rumors and innuendoes and find the hard rock of truth. Then something like this comes up, and she’s eleven years old again: no matter how obvious it is she’s wrong, no matter how much contrary proof is offered to her to show she’s wrong, she thinks she’s right, because, you know, his name is Barack Obama… what the hell kind of a name is that? What a horrible life for a mind.

The intentional ignorance is astounding. Right now, my favorite thing is the way all the right-wing blogs are saying Obama is wearing “Muslim garb.” How stupid can you be? I thought these people were all experts on Islamofascism. Well, have they ever seen Ayman al-Zawahiri in an outfit like that? What about Ayatollah Khameini. No, they haven’t, because in the photo Obama is wearing clothing very specific to a certain part of Africa, and the reason he is wearing it is because that is where he is. You see, Bush and Obama have something in common: they both follow diplomatic protocol and gracefully accept the ceremonies they are made part of as representatives of the United States of America. To do less would be a real scandal.

If Obama was a white politician we wouldn’t have to deal with this nonsense. But because he’s black, and has a foreign-sounding name, the media repeats any libel about Obama and Islam and acts as though it is all part of due-diligence. It is not; it is abetting nativist slander. Obama is the most purely American political leader in a very long time. He used his mind and his natural energy and charisma not simply to build his own advantage, but to help his community and now his country. He rose from obscurity to be a leader, and in my lifetime he is the first such person who I feel is working not for his own glorification but rather to leave the country better off than he found it as a young man. His story is a microcosm of the American ideal.

The is nothing wrong with the photograph of Obama in Somalia. To me it shows he will be a dignified representative of his country to any part of the world. But the message implicit in the way the photograph was circulated today by a political rival—sotto voce and with a wink about this Obama fellow—is poison. If the Clinton campaign is responsible for this, whomever in the organization had knowledge of the plan to circulate the photo in such a way should no longer be hired by Democratic politicians. I think anyone with regard for that party would agree. If Clinton herself was aware of this, and approved it, I do not think I would be able to vote for her should she become the Democratic nominee. I see the difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party as clear as black and white, but there is no difference between a Republican leading by fear and hate and a Democrat doing the same.

Update

This photo is the strongest proof to date Obama is a secret cattle rustler:

Second Update

One more point on this topic. Implicit in all the whispering about Obama's supposed foreignness is that the man has something to hide, even if it isn't quite something so big as the right-wing margins of American politics seem to hope. But pause for a second and take a look at Obama's background. He has been a public person for his entire professional life. He was the editor of the Harvard Law Review. He was a professor at the University of Chicago law school, one of the best in the country. He was a community organizer in Chicago and was elected to the Illinois Senate.

Soon after, he was recruited by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (at the time, headed by then-Senator and present New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine) to run for an open U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, which was vacated by Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald. Although his Republican opponent's campaign infamously burned out and Obama ended up routing replacement-candidate Alan Keyes—who was actually a resident of Maryland until days before he announced his candidacy—when the DCCC recruited Obama to run, it had every reason to think he would be in for a tough campaign. If this is true, then presumably the DCCC did its homework and found nothing in Obama's past that would prevent him from running a statewide campaign in moderate-to-conservative Illinois. (Remember, his first book, Dreams from My Father, in which Obama unabashedly describes his origins and youth, was published in 1995)

As hard as it is for some people to imagine, it is more than likely Barack Hussein Obama is just another regular American Joe. It could be that the only way he's different than the great American rabble is that most of its members aren't smart and hard-working enough to do all the things he has in his young life.

—Douglas Carlucci

You know you're a Communist when...

Here’s a good preview of what Obama will be in for this summer and fall should he become the Democratic nominee.

Lisa Shiffren writes in the National Review Online about her deduction that Obama’s parents must have been Communists, because mixed-race couples only met through the Communist Youth League. Shiffren’s is an paranoid screed; it informs the reader of nothing but the writer’s ignorance of American life.

I’m going to reprint most of the article, with criticism (in italics) between the paragraphs:

But maybe it's not so simple. Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics. (During the Clinton Administration we were all introduced to then U. of Pennsylvania Professor Lani Guinier — also a half black/half Jewish, red diaper baby.)

Never mind that Obama’s parents met at the University of Hawaii, as culturally and geographically far from New York as you can get in the United States—that doesn’t matter, because Shiffren remembers that most mixed-race couples, when she was young, were affiliated with Communists. Therefore, all mixed race couples must have been affiliated with Communists, and their offspring, regardless of the facts of the lives they have lived since they were born in the 1960s, must be secret Reds.

I don't know how Barak Obama's parents met. But the Kincaid article referenced above makes a very convincing case that Obama's family, later, (mid 1970s) in Hawaii, had close relations with a known black Communist intellectual. And, according to what Obama wrote in his first autobiography, the man in question — Frank Marshall Davis — appears to have been Barack's own mentor, and even a father figure. Of course, since the Soviet Union itself no longer exists, it's an open question what it means practically to have been politically mentored by an official Communist. Ideologically, the implications are clearer.

So Shiffren was so lazy she couldn’t spend two minutes finding out that Obama’s parents met at the University of Hawaii, but she’s certain—because she read it in an article—they had “close relations” (note the double entendre) with a “known” (as opposed to a phantom) black Communist intellectual. She would also have read in the article that it accuses Obama of keeping company with this man “at some point in time” between 1971 and 1979—when Barack was between 10 and 18 years old, or, as a thinking person would recognize, before he went off to college and law school and met the people and did the things which made him a mature man.

Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from persuing the questions which might arise about how Senator Obama's mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate student. Love? Sure, why not? But what else was going on around them that made it feasible? Before readers level cheap accusations of racism — let's recall that the very question of interracial marriage only became a big issue later in the 1960s. The notion of a large group of mixed race Americans became an issue during and after the Vietnam War. Even the civil-rights movement kept this culturally explosive matter at arm's distance.

It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution. To be sure, there was much to be discontented about, for black Americans, prior to the civil-rights revolution. To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn't buy the commie line — and showed more faith in the possibilities of democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display in Moscow.

Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family's background, now that his chances of being president have increased so much.

Years ago, someone invented “political correctness” because they knew one day Obama would run for President and he would need its cover? Sounds implausible. All right, cheap shot, I suppose; I stick to the execrable substance and not the execrable structure of Shiffren’s writing. But her point is just as ridiculous. She’s saying the only reason the “mainstream liberal media” won’t call Obama’s parents Communists is because of the doctrine of political correctness—in other words, there’s no chance the charge might be false, they can only be concealing the facts. Perhaps Shiffren has a better grasp of Communism than I give her credit for; she certainly reasons like a apparatchik.

The rest of the article doesn’t make any sense. Shiffren says what makes the Obama’s marriage “feasible” was the Communists’ agitating among American blacks. They might have married for love, but it was such agitation that allowed them to marry. Therefore—Shiffren seems to be saying this, one can’t be sure—they owe a debt to the Communists. I suppose I’ll end this by saying it’s apparent Shiffren does not even know Obama’s father was not a black American from Newark or Detroit, but a Kenyan who came to study in Hawaii in the early 1960s.

More right-wing Obama smears will be rebutted tomorrow.

Bonus Smear

The National Review Online needs help. I'm clearly not a conservative, but I used to enjoy this publication. Lately, though, it's been like a friend whose mind is slowly deteriorating into a few repetitive, paranoid thought patterns. It's gotten so bad that most of the magazine is dedicated to supposing that anything any "liberal" does is motivated by either self-love or hatred of America. I won't even get into the editor's hilarious new book.

Here's white-as-flourescent-light Englishman John Derbyshire opining that the Obamas can't get over their blackness. Again, criticism is in italics between Derbyshire's paragraphs:

I know, I know, Barack Obama is the post-racial candidate — he, and we, are past all that deplorable old race stuff, went through it and came out the other side, doesn't matter, don't care, couldn't possibly be less important.

Yet the evidence is plain that Barack and Michelle Obama both belong to that subset of educated black Americans to whom their own blackness is of obsessive interest, or at very least was up through their college years. Barack famously wrote "A Story of Race and Inheritance", about his own long struggles with his racial identity.

I know Derbyshire is English, but he is a writer on American politics, so he must have some sense of the racial experience in this country. He is either ignorant or disingenuous. I would wager the latter. Anyone who has known real African-American men and women knows it still means something in this country to be born black. Thinking and analyzing one's group identity, particularly when that identity is as strong as it is for African-Americans, is not "obsessive." It shows a desire for self-knowledge Derbyshire ought to emulate.

Now here's Michelle Obama in the current Newsweek cover story. She graduated from Princeton in 1985 with a major in sociology and a minor in African-American Studies. Sociology, huh? At first sight that's encouraging — I mean, at least she didn't spend her entire college career obsessing about her blackness. Then Newsweek tells us the title of her senior sociology thesis: "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." (I have this mental image of her thesis adviser saying: "Michelle, isn't there some way we can squeeze another 'black' into that title?")

Look, I'm willing to make allowances. Both these people grew up in the Me Decade when self-obsession was for a brief horrible moment as American as apple pie. Still, 1985 was over two decades on from the Civil Rights Act, three from Brown v. Board of Ed.. Far from being barred from life opportunities, black Americans were being given a hand up — affirmative action was in full swing. Countless black Americans of the Obamas' generation found something better and more useful to do with their lives than fret 24/7 about their own blackness. Some of them even went into politics.

Maybe I misread, but Mrs. Obama's thesis was not titled "Princeton-Educated Michelle Obama and the Black Community," so it's hard to see what her scholarly work has to do with the "Me Decade." Surely Derbyshire does not consider scholarship on one's own community to be a form of narcissism. Would he have the same reaction to a woman who was the daughter of a tenant farmer in Yorkshire, and then went on to Oxford to write a thesis about the culture of farmers' children at elite English universities? I doubt Derbyshire would question the premise of such a work; why, then, begrudge Mrs. Obama's examination of her culture? I think I know the reason.

Maybe I'm jaded, but I really need persuading that when I look at Barack Obama, I'm not just seeing Al Sharpton minus the pompadour and the attitude.

And so Derbyshire sayeths the ultimate conservative libel onto a black politician: you are like Reverend Al. Because Obama exploits race to stay in the news despite his obvious political irrelevance? No, Obama can't be said to do that, nor does he need to. He's like Al Sharpton because he and his wife have a history of acknowledging and analyzing their race. Good work, Mr. Derbyshire.

Update

It should be noted that Derbyshire is a racist in the English Colonial tradition; i.e., he believes white skin makes one more intelligent than anyone with darker skin. Compared to Barack and Michelle Obama, Derbyshire becomes a living refutation of his own beliefs.

—Douglas Carlucci

Dowd, Fallows on Couplewordsgate

A few opinions on Couplewordsgate:

Maureen Dowd shows the Clintons' hypocrisy in her column today; both Clintons have made a habit of pilfering applause lines, and not only from their friends and supporters.

James Fallows rightly dismisses the charges against Obama in the Atlantic:

A plagiarism charge stings when it underscores the idea that the plagiarist is trying to mask some deficiency: The D student looks over the A student's shoulder to copy during a test. Does any sane person actually think that Barack Obama is deficient in expressing himself? His first book was a "real" book, of a quality most "real" writers would be proud to have matched. (The second one was more of a campaign book, and less in his own voice.) To the extent this flurry is designed to introduce subliminal concerns -- and, let's face it, concerns tied to racial stereotypes -- that Obama is not quite deserving intellectually, a flim-flam man, it really is contemptible.

I respect and admire Joe Biden, but his "similar" case in 1988 was completely different, and actually bad. On the stump he was telling someone else's personal story -- as it happened, Neil Kinnock's -- as if it were his own. That is not the kind of detail you just swap into and out of a stump speech to make it more powerful. Indeed, the mystery is how anyone could actually utter words -- "My daddy was a coal miner," "there I was, at Valley Forge" -- knowing them not to be true. And -- mentioning again that I respect and admire Biden -- the incident wounded him because in fact he had been a weak student in college and law school. Not, say, the president of the Harvard Law Review.

And it's different when people whose job is writing -- people who know very well that the exact phrasing of ideas is each writer's brand and property, and who have plenty of time, in private, to check and perfect the phrases on which they will be judged -- copy others' work. I'm a hawk on punishing them. But to think that this is anything like a candidate's constant search for ways to explain his message, in real time, is unrealistic and wrong. As someone has already said, in an interview or post somewhere whose insight I'm stealing, It's fine for the Hillary Clinton campaign to adopt "Fired up! Ready to go!" as its new motto, and it's fine for Barack Obama to use this way of explaining the importance of hope.

As I've written, if this incident exposes any deficiencies, they are in the media and the Clinton campaign.

Clinton is a politician facing the failure of her ultimate ambition, so it is understandable—but not appropriate—that she would start making some desperate gambits to try to wound her opponent in order to catch up to him.

The media, on the other hand, have no excuse. All they are proving is that they are totally incapable of skepticism and are willing to repeat any slander as long as they can reasonably claim they are just passing on what someone else said—essentially, they are engaged in the opposite of journalism. The journalistic process short-circuits after the first step, particularly among TV talking heads. When a reporter hears something, he checks it out, verifies it, sees if there's any truth to it, then writes about what he's found, tells us whether the scuttlebutt matches the reality. Today, TV is filled with blow-dried idiots who have happily adopted the Fox Question format: "Did Obama steal lines in his speeches?" they ask. You see, a question mark or an interrogatory tone makes it journalism! And asking a Democratic Party hack and Republican Party hack makes it professional journalism.

The Fox Question is a term I won't take credit for, but is an important concept in analyzing the modern television news media. It goes like this: a campaign or party surrogate makes a charge to reporters, and television news producers are stuck between the temptation of the higher ratings the charge might bring and whatever feeble ethics they learned at journalism school. The answer is the Fox Question. They get to air the charge on television, but they distance themselves from it with punctuation and tone. Example: "Barack Obama's foreign past. Did he study Islam in Indonesia?" The answer might be no, but that's ok, because the charge wasn't made; the host—John Gibson or Chris Matthews or one of those knuckleheads—is just discussing the questions of the day.

—Douglas Carlucci