From the Shanghai Stringer:

Obama the Racialist

Why is Obama foolishly evoking race time after time?

Obama's problems with race have nothing to do with his half-African ancestry or his own experience with racism and unfairness, but boil down to his deftly wanting it both ways: reminding the Germans he is a different sort of American from what they're used to (false, they knew Rice and Powell well enough), while preempting by suggesting others will evoke race, but in a negative context. But his polls, I wager, will begin to slip from all this, because all this sophisticated triangulation is about to blow up in the public mind.

1) The voter is starting to hear serially from Obama about race; they were promised a racially transcendent candidate, but so far Obama seems obsessed with identity, either accusing others of racism, or using heritage himself for political advantage. This is a tragic blunder.

2) He has the same want-it-both-ways with odious racists: Rev. Wright is a former spiritual advisor, and "brilliant" scholar who nevertheless serially slurs America, whites, Italians, Jews, etc. Ludacris is "a great talent" and "talented" to such an extent Obama wants him in his iPod menu, and has met with him — but also a racist to be shunned. Ditto Pfleger. A pattern is emerging: Obama associates with or tolerates racists when such quasi-intimacy cements street-cred as an authentic minority or someone cool in the anti-Bush mode; but then when they inevitably revert to form, he not merely casts them off, but is "shocked" at their usual expression, and so like speed bumps they litter the roadway as he barrels ahead.

3). The "typical white person", grandma-under-the-bus riff, Pennsylvania-"clingers" rant etc., 'no more disown Rev, Wright/but now leaving Trinity Church', etc. themselves are immaterial, but in toto provide a thin margin of tolerance when something like Ludacris or Obama's latest accusation of racism surfaces.

4) Right now Obama does not need to solidify his 90% African-American base or the Moveon.org white liberal adherents; but instead he must remember why he lost all those primaries to Hillary and to what degree his campaign since then has addressed those concerns that lost him those electorates. When a West Virginian hears that Obama is accusing others of racism, or hears him promise that racial reparations will now be a matter of government deeds not words, or a rapper brags he is a favorite of Obama and then slurs Clinton, McCain, Bush in thinly disguised racist terms, it starts to create an image of someone who is not bringing people together, but precisely the opposite.

Why all this? Inexperience and hubris — the same overconfidence that makes him say we need a Pentagon-sized new civilian aid department, to inflate our tires to avoid drilling, and must stop merely talking about reparations and starting doing something about them. His handlers need to return to the teleprompter, since all these incidents have in common the impromptu moment.

Postmodern Architecture

It's getting loony, but then who is to say that the Leaning Tower of Pisa might not really be the Victory Column?

What was stunning about the New York Times' Bob Herbert's charge that the McCain campaign, in its satire on Obama's messianic sense of self, had deliberately inserted clips of the phallic Leaning Tower of Pisa and Washington Monument to drive home a racist trope about black men and white women was not just his embarrassing ignorance of architecture, or his infantile pop-Freudianism, or even his preemptory efforts to tie all criticism of Obama to racism and thereby stifle dissent. It was the sheer arrogance in the manner in which he persisted in his false points: "An image right there... of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and ... the Washington Monument.... You tell me why those two phallic symbols are placed there...".

If one listens to the clip, he asks rhetorical questions, and then in condescending fashion chides his bewildered panelists about their inability to fathom his own pseudo-charges: "You remember that! Alright!...Look at the beginning of that ad again! You tell me!...Pow! ...I really wish someone would answer the question!...Run the ad again and take a look at it!"

There is never any sense of humility or self-doubt that he might just not know anything about the Victory Column or campaign ads. Instead, there is a very strong sense that all he has to do is evoke the charge of racism and, presto, all facts, details, and truth thereby simply are to disappear and skeptics are to cower.

So here we are this summer: a messianic candidate, rebuked in his efforts to use the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign backdrop, then settles for the garish Victory Column, the 19th-century monument to Prussian militarism and conquest over its neighbors, and thereby provides fodder for his supporters to allege that when others use clips of his silly stagecraft they are really inserting phallic symbols in racist fashion. Orwell couldn't have thought all this up.

Read the whole thing.