A few days ago, I remarked that I was surprised that Harold Ford Jr. was in fact a black man (in the wake of the kerfuffle over his partying with "white women.").

I said the following, intending a comment on skin color politics among African-Americans (apparently, some people think its bad to quote yourself--I'm not sure why...)

The irony is that Ford probably isn't black enough for a really bright political future--not with a "real" black man like Barack Obama already a senator and poised for a run at the White House. Obama is mixed race as well, but he was perhaps fortunate to retain more of his father's phenotype than his mother's.

So what do I read today? Obama isn't black enough either, or rather, he's the wrong kind of black.

Back in 2004, Alan Keyes made this point quite often. Keyes was the black Republican carpetbagger chosen by the elephants to run against Obama for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. The choice of Keyes was either a Republican version of affirmative action or an example of just how dumb the party believes black voters to be, since it was obvious that Keyes came from the Southeast, not the Midwest.

That race was never much of a contest, but one fascinating subplot was how Keyes was unable to draw a meaningful distinction between himself as a black American and Obama as an African-American. After all, Obama's mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan. Other than color, Obama did not - does not - share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves.

Not surprisingly, I find myself lost in the complexity of black identity politics. By Stanley Crouch's lights--Harold Ford is more authentically black than Barack Obama, who although he looks "blacker" than Congressman Ford, doesn't have slave ancestry nor has he suffered racial discrimination. That of course begs the question of whether Harold Ford Jr. knows the sting of discrimination. Probably not, and frankly that might become a short term problem for the rising generation of black politicians until the find other means for establishing their racial bona fides.

...and Mitt Romney thinks he has it tough.

I've always found it hard to fathom the Democrat dauphin phenomenon.

In 2004, John Edwards, commonly known as the Breck girl, thought it was a good idea to try to capture the presidential candidacy of his party after one undistinguished term as a Senator and on the strength of class warfare. He wasn't alone in his temerity, and in fact the press dubbed the field "the seven dwarves".

The best I could tell, Edward's attraction was that he was a "Kennedyesque candidate"; youthful-looking with a full head of hair.

Edwards, in spite of a second try, has had to give way to the new "It-boy", Barack Obama.

So surely Obama is a more substantial figure right? Not really.

He worked one year in the private sector in his entire life--shades of John Kerry. His career has been law school, civil rights work, election to the Illinois Senate, a big loss to former black-panther Bobby Rush for the Congressional first district in 2000, and then a "land-slide" victory in the 2004 election for the Senate.

As far as I can tell, his entire appeal lies with the fact that he's black and gave a stirring but meaningless "unity" speech for the 2004 Democrat national convention.

Now he's being serious cited as a presidential candidate for 2008.

Consider for a moment some of his Republican challengers and their credentials.

John McCain is one of the most influential and effective Senators on the Hill. He's an honest-to-goodness war hero.

Rudy Guiliani graduated Magna Cum Laude and rose in the U.S. Attorney's office to become deputy Attorney-General. He had a record of 4,152 convictions with only 25 reversals. He ran for mayor of New York City in 1989 and lost a squeaker, the ran again in 1993 and won. He briefly considered a run against Hillary Clinton for the Senate, but withdrew. Even before 9/11, Guiliani was hailed as an effective and popular mayor, but his leadership during and after the attack on the World Trade Center made him a national figure. Time magazine elevated him to man of the year in 2001.

Mitt Romney was valedictorian at BYU, received an MBA from Harvard (where he was named Baker scholar) and a Juris Doctorate cum laude from the same university. He become a vice-president at Bain capital and was responsible for a turnaround of that company that became the foundation of his great wealth. When the 2002 Olympic organizing committee was rocked by a bribery scandal and 400 million behind in their revenue projections, they tapped Mitt Romney to turn it around. He did so brilliantly, pulling off a universally lauded games and producing a substantial profit. Romney was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002, and performed another turnaround on that state, effectively turning a 3 billion dollar deficit into surpluses in 2004 and 2005.

Do you get the picture?

Obama has done nothing--nothing at all to merit ANY consideration for higher office, but the Crats love this guy. Not even a recent scandal where Obama bought a Chicago mansion for $300,000.00 below the asking price from a guy who is under investigation by federal prosecutors is going to have the slightest effect on his prospects.

One can only conclude that Democrats are not serious people, or they simply wouldn't put up with this serial comedy of Hollywood candidates.

Mickey Kaus explains his problem with Barack Obama

I'm a "character" voter, not an "issues" voter. But the way you reveal your character is by grappling with issues, not by grappling with yourself. Anguish is easy. Isn't it time for Obama to start being ostentatiously reflective about policies? That's what you want from a Harvard Law Review type.

The light went on when I read this--everything I've heard from Obama has been in this self-reflective vein. Kaus is on to something.

Barack Obama's reaction to accounts that he attended a Madrassa in Indonesia as a child have been intense and indignant.

To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago. Furthermore, the Indonesian school Obama attended in Jakarta is a public school that is not and never has been a Madrassa.

These malicious, irresponsible charges are precisely the kind of politics the American people have grown tired of, and that Senator Obama is trying to change by focusing on bringing people together to solve our common problems.

Below please find facts and citations rebutting the claims in the Insight Magazine story to help inform your editorial discussions about this issue. Attached also please find a letter from an ecumenical coalition of religious leaders denouncing this brand of negative politics.

One school of thought is that Obama senses a vunerability in his ethnic heritage--and wants to nip it in the bud. Yet in reacting so strongly to a minor story (Steve Doocy is a weatherman for crying out loud...), Obama is proving very thin-skinned indeed

Obama is very sensitive about his press. After his press conference, he headed toward New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and chided her -- in a kidding way -- for a comment in the 12th of 14 paragraphs in an Oct 21 column. She wrote that Obama's "ears stick out."

"I just want to put you on notice," he said.

"I was teased relentlessly when I was a kid about my big ears."

Obama's ovee-the-top response, which characterizes the story as a politically-motivated smear, stands in stark contrast to his well-crafted image of being a hail-fellow-well-met. He's looking more John F. Kerry than John F. Kennedy on this one.

The London Times details Barack Obama's complicated family history.

Obama’s African family is particularly complicated. By his own account, his father never really left Kezia, his first wife, in Kenya. She bore Obama Sr two children, Roy and Auma, who now works in social services in Berkshire.

They were separated, Obama’s mother claimed, but “it was a village wedding and there was no document that could suggest a divorce”.

His own father and mother’s wedding in Hawaii may not have been properly documented either. “How and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I have never quite had the courage to explore,” Obama writes in his memoir.

After his father left Ann and two-year-old Barack to study at Harvard, he went to Africa with another American woman, Ruth, who became his third wife. She bore him two sons in Kenya, one of whom died in a motorcycle accident, but Obama Sr continued to see Kezia.

“Traditionally, she was still his wife,” a relative explained. Kezia went on to bear two more sons, Abo and Bernard. Although their paternity is disputed by some relatives, Obama Sr regarded them as his own. Later in life, he fathered another son, George, by a young Kenyan woman.

Not exactly a traditional family, although by all appearances Obama's own family reflects a more common stability.

What piqued my interest was the comparison with Republican hopeful Mitt Romney, whose own family history includes a number of polygamous ancestors. How will the respective family histories be treated by the media? Has Obama, the media darling, inoculated Romney against prurient interest into his background, or will we have a double standard?

We saw an amazingly robust effort by CNN in particular to refute the allegations that Obama attended a Madrassa as a child (that would have been difficult since Madrassa's have only become a factor in the Indonesian school system since the early 1990s--before this, Indonesia operated on a system designed by Dutch colonizers. Obama likely attended a pesantren).

Will we see a similarly conscientious effort on behalf of other candidates not so favored by CNN?

That would be nice, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Whisper campaigns have been a part of political combat since the inception of the nation. Historically they've been extremely effective. Alexander Hamilton's political career was completely destroyed in this way.

Modern whisper campaigns benefit from a rabid media, anxious to report almost anything before anyone else, but information technology also makes it extremely hard for such campaigns to take hold. It took me exactly five minutes to find a link to a site that discussed the Indonesia school system and made it clear that it was at least highly unlikely that Obama attended an actual Wahabi madrassa.

What is really required for a successful whisper campaign these days is media collusion. Only by having the story endlessly repeated so that it makes an impact on even the most superficial consumers of news, can a campaign have impact.

Over the weekend, I went out to lunch with friends from California. The Surge came up, and I asked them what there impressions were. My friend didn't have an opinion, but it was nevertheless interesting that a guy who travels all week every week and rarely if ever watches the news, nevertheless had the impression that The Surge was in disfavor.

That's the way it works--a simple, succinct message repeated endlessly becomes the received wisdom.

I believe it certainly originated with the Hillary campaign, but Obama-love is quite fervent among the left these days, and it will be hard for Hillary to find fertile soil from salacious rumors even among conservatives.

Hell, we enjoy a good dust-up as much as anyone.

Its remarkable to me how frequently politicians accede to bad political advice about manufacturing symbolism.

Symbolism, for the record, is good--if its spontaneous, honest and believable. Manufactured symbolism rarely if ever works and usually ends up doing more harm than good. Probably the most famous example was Dan Qualyes effort to characterize himself as the second-coming of JFK.

It was somewhat plausible--Qualye was young, well-coiffed, good-looking and a Senator, but as Lloyd Bentson so effectively pointed out, incidental similarities only serve to high light gross deficiencies in the desired comparison.

John Kerry, who incidentally served in Vietnam, fairly begged his former comrades-in-arms to elicit the deficiencies of his military service, no doubt motivated by Kerry's anti-war slanders of his fellow soldiers.

Between Will Smith and Bill Clinton.

Failed presidential candidates contemplating the wreck their lives have become -->

One of the most egregious developments in political discourse has been the non-apology apology. It the one where its your fault for being offended by something someone else says.

On Monday, Barack Obama, the "uniter, not divider", informed his adoring audiences that 3,000 lives have been wasted in Iraq in what he has previously characterized as a dumb war.

Obama can't apologize for something he actually believes and that helps him politically with his anti-American, anti-freedom and anti-war constituencies, so he's just sorry you and I are offended that he trivializes the sacrifices of our troops.

Its rather ironic, considering Obama's lofty rhetoric about uniting the country to create a new kind of politics. Don't you just feel the love?

The more snippets I read from Barack Obama, the more I think this long campaign season will work to his disadvantage. Can one still be considered articulate without knowing anything? The media certainly considers the inverse true - inarticulateness equates to ignorance; witness their skewering of President Bush.

Two Obama campaign items come to mind:

First in a dispute with Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who said "If I were running al Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats." In response:

The Democratic presidential hopeful said if the Australian prime minister was "ginned up to fight the good fight in Iraq," he needs to send another 20,000 Australians to the war.

"Otherwise, it's just a bunch of empty rhetoric,"

It’s an extension of the old chickenhawk argument “if you haven’t been there you don’t have a right to speak out” except in this case Obama doesn’t think 1000 troops qualify as ‘being there’. Obama's magic threshold of 20,000 would consume most of the Australian armies' 26,000 regulars. Perhaps Obama would be surprised to know that this ally he has been disdaining has also been our most faithful ally having supported us in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and currently Afghanistan.

Bill Kristol on the Geffen blurt

Once unleashed, this series of thoughts is subversive. So much of the Hillary Clinton candidacy depends on an aura of inevitability, supported by oodles of money and a fear of retribution if you're not on board. But what if she's not inevitable? And what if the retribution isn't so all-powerful?

That's what is now being tested. Now that it has been raised, the thought that Hillary isn't the ideal nominee might spread. Hence Team Clinton's need to enforce omertà. Hillary's attack dog, Howard Wolfson, couldn't even take the time to do some basic fact-checking before rushing out an attack email demanding Obama denounce the remarks of Geffen, "his campaign's finance chair." But Geffen is not and has never been Obama's finance chair. He has no official role in the Obama campaign.

I think Kristol is a little confused. Geffen didn't open the gate, he simply pointed it out . Clinton's inevitability has always been more media myth than reality--easily disabused if you read the lefty blogs with any regularity. If fact the whole reason for Obama to be in the race is that the consensus has been that Hillary is anything BUT inevitable.

He is correct though in one regard--Geffen's stature lends authority to the nagging doubt a lot of people have been nursing about Hillary. I strongly suspect that this will be seen as the moment the wheels came off the Clinton campaign.

Dontcha just love politics? One moment you're a titan, the next your John Kerry.

I suppose its possible that Hillary can recover--for all her deficiencies, she's has enormous personal resources at her disposal. Which ever way it goes though, Obama is in a lot of trouble.

In the short term, Obama will reap the rewards, but as it becomes clear that he's advancing and Hillary is falling behind, two things are inevitable. First; he gets dubbed the frontrunner by the media. He's having a hard time coping with the media now, but after that happens, our hot house flower is going to wilt under the pressure. Secondly he will be the target of some of the nastiest political dirty tricks every conceived. The far-left complain naively and bitterly about Rovian tactics, but the Clintons are Shaolin masters of political knife-fighting. Maureen Dowd doesn't call him Obambi for nothing. The very thing that has made him so attractive as a candidate is a fatal weakness.

John Edwards may pull a Lincoln and slip right through the middle of all of this.

Barack Obama's gaffe here, stating 10,000 people died in Kansas tornando's this past week, is astounding because of his lack of comprehension of what that figure means. The number is higher than deaths from the 9/11 attacks, Hurrican Katrina, and U.S. Iraq war casulties combined. When my high school son heard me play the video his first reaction was "did he say 10,000?!" Such a number of deaths in a single American tragedy would bring this country to a standstill; and yet it didn't phase the Senator when he spoke it, as it did my son listening from across the room.

The gaffe reveals a lack of awareness or "feel" for the scope of disasters in America. The kind of stuff the average person becomes familiar with as they read the paper, watch the news, and discuss events with friends at the water cooler. The Senator is from Illinois, which happens to be in the North end of Tornado Alley (I lived pretty close to the Illinois state line, in Indiana, and recall the tornado watches and warnings) - certainly the Chicago papers provided damage reports from the interior of the state. Does he read them? If he does, is he able to analyze and compare/contrast information?

I've remarked before of the ignorance displayed by Senator Obama. This extended campaign season doesn't seem to working in his favor but it does appear to be working in America's.

I’ve already criticized Senator Obama this week for public displays of ignorance so I didn’t want to pile on when he flew to Detroit and got it wrong concerning fuel economy standards across the world. But somehow he’s managed to add hypocrisy to his Detroit agenda:

Sen. Barack Obama talks a good game. He also drives a good car, but the two are not entirely compatible.

The Democratic presidential contender was in Detroit on Monday, oozing charisma and environmental awareness as he chided local automakers for building too many big vehicles and not enough fuel-efficient hybrids.

So his choice to drive a V8 Hemi-powered Chrysler 300C emits a whiff of hypocrisy along with its exhaust fumes. Obama's choice proves once again that fuel economy is seldom the No. 1 factor when Americans buy cars. The 340-horsepower 300C has plenty of room for the lanky senator, his wife, Michelle, and their two daughters. It gets 25 miles per gallon on the highway, good for a big sedan, but far short of hybrids and compact cars.

Nice ride though.

H/T Instapundit

I distinctly recall the first time I took notice of Barack Obama.

Shortly after the Democrat nominating convention, a neighor of mine was effusive over Obama's "new tone" People dug Obama's "we are all Americans" rhetoric.

Setting aside my amazement that anyone could be taken in by such blatant pandering, Obama's "one America" sentiment has been replaced by the old politics of divide and conquer.

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Tuesday that the Bush administration has done nothing to defuse a "quiet riot" among blacks that threatens to erupt just as riots in Los Angeles did 15 years ago.

The first-term Illinois senator said that with black people from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast still displaced 20 months after Hurricane Katrina, frustration and resentments are building explosively as they did before the 1992 riots.

"This administration was colorblind in its incompetence," Obama said at a conference of black clergy, "but the poverty and the hopelessness was there long before the hurricane.

"All the hurricane did was to pull the curtain back for all the world to see," he said.

Obama's criticism of Bush prompted ovation after ovation from the nearly 8,000 people gathered in Hampton University's Convocation Center, particularly when he denounced the Iraq war and noted that he had opposed it from the outset.

Vote for Obama, or black people will burn their neighborhoods down. It would be amusing if it wasn't so pathetic. For white Democrats to infantilize blacks is one thing, for a black man to do it to his own people is just sick.

Don't worry black people--Barack Obama is here to save you. What do they call this? The soft racism of low expectations.

Republicans for Obama? Well, if you pay me enough...

Once more proving that he just isn't ready for prime time, Obama calls for Christian unity while blaming Evangelicals for "hijacking faith".

I'm sure they'll all vote for him now...

Obama raised 32 million dollars in the last quarter--10 million more than Hillary raised.

Its a money race at this point and Obama is clearly the front-runner. He killed everybody (Romney is expected to have rough parity with Hillary Clinton...). John Edwards needs Ann Coulter to talk about him more--9 million.

The money race simply reflects the political realities in the country--the far left is a political dynamo and Hillary is not their girl. The magnitude of John Edwards failure is enormous--he's been working for years to ingratiate himself with the far left but simply had no answer for Barry's star power-he's black, he's clean, he's a money-raising machine.

On the Republican side--not nearly the kind of polarized situation we see on the left--everybody supports the war on terror and there are still a lot of good choices. I think there is still a lot of money on the fence at this point, and there is certainly no grassroots candidate pulling in the internet bucks. Romney is just better at fund-raising, but it will take a narrowing of the field to see big dollars being committed to one candidate or another.

For the Democrats this quarter? More of the same. Barry will increase his lead and Bill will have to work harder than ever. Some of the dwarves may drop out of the race by October, but they'll stick it out as long as they can afford it.

For Republicans, things get much more interesting--McCain drops out, Fred comes in and a few of the alsorans take their coats and hats and go home. Romney maintains his lead because its structural at this point, but Fred Thompson will have something to prove--he will have to at least achieve parity with Romney to be in the catbird seat.

Barry addressed a sensitive issue in front of an inner city audience yesterday--violence.

"We have an entire generation of young men in our society who have become products of violence, and we are going to have to break the cycle," Obama said. "There are too many young men out there who have gone down the wrong path."

He later added, "There's a reason they go out and shoot each other, because they don't love themselves. And the reason they don't love themselves is because we are not loving them enough."

Such insights are uncommon for Democrats, but the policy recommendations to go with it were all too common.

He said the government needs to permanently reinstate an assault weapons ban and close regulatory loopholes that protect unscrupulous gun dealers.

He also said government should support and fund more after-school programs to keep kids off the streets. But some of the burden must also be shouldered by residents who need to do more to raise and protect at-risk children, he added.

This will undoubtedly be reported as a gutsy statement by Barry, but let's get serious--the real social problems that underly the violence are the result of decades of pandering by black leaders and white Democrat politicians. My son, recently returned from southern California, reported that he is convinced that blacks are now the most racist people on earth. Decades of blaming whitey for all the problems have produced a cancer on the black community that refuses to accept accountability. Blessed is the young black man with a father who raised his own sons and supported his family.

Those who weren't so lucky are running the streets with guns.

Of course this is true here in Utah as well...but they're hunting deer and elk.

Notorious South Dakota lefty blogger and Tom Daschle staffer, Chad Schuldt has been fired from Hildebrand-Tewes for embezzlement. His case is currently under criminal investigation. His site declares that it has no information about issues "being speculated about by rightwing bloggers".

Actually there is no speculation--rightwing or otherwise. Steve Hildebrand, founder of Hildebrand -Tewes, and senior advisor to Barry Obama, is the source of the information and adds the detail that Schuldt had diverted funds meant to pay taxes to his own use.

Embezzlers are not garden variety thieves--they generally have "serious issues" that motivate their activities--a highly developed sense of entitlement among them.

If that sound a little typical for a lefty, I'm sure its a complete coincidence.

Frankly its a little unusual to have a company actually admit to having been embezzled from. The stigma it places on management for demonstrating bad judgment and having inadequate financial controls usually results in a dismissal, a mutual agreement to keep quiet about it and no criminal charges. I am personally aware of a couple of cases like this. In one of them the accountant who actually discovered and reported the theft thinking he might be rewarded for his vigilance, was instead fired with the perpetrator--kill all the witnesses. The perpetrator, as is often the case, went on to bigger and better scams.

It may simply be that management's hand was forced by the fact that it was a large, not-easily-replaced sum of money, and it was owed to the IRS.

Is embezzlement an inherent risk with Democrats? In general, no, however among the strain that is actively ambitious to participate in the political process you have a collection of personality traits that may indeed make them a greater risk for this kind of lawlessness--self-righteousness, a sense of entitlement, a deep need for recognition and of course; an addiction to adrenaline. Standard accounting practices will at least remove temptation for the Chads until they can get they can get elected and steal legally.

"Let me make this clear," Obama said in a speech prepared for delivery at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

Barry is upping the ante again on foreign policy with Hillary Clinton. Its a tactic that forms part of his overall strategy of changing the terms of the debate to ground more to his liking:

"If the debate is about changing politics and moving the country in a different direction and bringing people together, we like our odds in that debate," said a senior official in the campaign, who insisted on not being identified in order to discuss strategy candidly. "If the debate is primarily about who is going to be a strong, tough leader, that debate, quite frankly, is probably going to benefit Hillary Clinton."

The lefty blogs have been quiet so far today, although predictably, conservative blogs are up-in-arms about a demonstrably wacko set of facts and objectives. This morning, the Clinton's media plant--George Stephanopolis, was quick to hammer home what the Clintons hope will be the media frame for Obama--he's naive.

Well of course he is, but his naivete reflects the state of the Democrat party, which is just a little more naive than usual. The entire Clinton presidency was irretrievably naive--all one has to do is watch video of Madeline Not-too-bright dancing with dictators. These are not grown-ups folks and fellatio in the Oval office is so very emblematic of that fact.

The central myth for Obama and the left is that Iraq is not central to the war on terror--yeah, right. Once again, Democrats simply refuse to take al Qaeda at its word. With the stated goal of establishing a global caliphate, the subsidiary strategy is to overthrown mideast regimes and replace them with Salafist/Iranian-style Islamic regimes and then use the oil wealth to set up the major confrontation with the west (and the east). The current roster of players in the fight over Iraq includes al Qaeda, the Iranians and the Saudis--why? Quite simply because even before the Invasion, Iraq was the first, best opportunity to overthrow a middle eastern regime. It has among the world's largest reserves of oil, and borders the Gulf emirates, Jordan, Turkey and Syria. If Iraq isn't central to the WOT, then our enemies are complete morons--which clearly they are not.

The other myth is that bin Laden IS central to the WOT. Let us examine the facts here--we've caught or killed the vast majority of al Qaeda's operational leadership and yet al Qaeda continues to persist and exist. Bin Laden has been notably absent from the propaganda and recruiting materials, and yet al Qaeda is still successfully recruiting. The irony here is that no lefty would concede the argument that if, god-forbid, something happened to Kos or Jerome Armstrong, the nutroots would suddenly collapse. Politicial movements are not cults, and neither is al Qaeda. Radical Islam is an idea that spontaneously generates its own infrastructure.

We caught Saddam. He was tried, convicted and hung. The insurgents didn't lay down their arms as a result and its foolish to expect that focusing all our resources on capturing bin Laden would be any different. The left has a tendancy to personalize their conflicts. Its all about Bush-Cheney, but the reality is that they simply hate you and I and Bush-Cheney are simply icons for their hatred. That works rhetorically, but its not a foundation for foreign policy.

Finally--this idea that we should invade Pakistan isn't Bush-Cheney lite, its Bush-Cheney on crack. I'm interested to see how that particular statement plays with the left. My guess is that Barry wants to look tough, "see, I can invade countries too..." The reality of course is that if you don't like Iraq, you're really going to hate Pakistan. I'd love to see how this squares with all the elaborate rhetoric the left has produced about international law, human rights, etc...

Democrats say a lot of silly things, and it only gets worse at election time, but always remember that success in left-wing politics consists of pandering and bribes.

Sis Toldja: So much for the diplomatic approach...

Riehl World View: Stick a fork in him..

Talk Left: Barry steps over the line...

Oliver Willis: Somebody switched out the kyrptonite with a fake...

Matthew Yglesias: Weakly defending Barry

Obama looks like he's going to retain his fund-raising crown even as he trails Hillary by 23 points in New Hampshire.

From what I've been able to gather over the past year, Obama's money and Hillary's polls are all about one thing--Bill Clinton. George W. Bush gets a lot of flack for allegedly dividing the country (yeah, like no one was a far-left loon before he took office...), but Bill Clinton as the distinction of dividing his own party.

The media like to point out that Bill is a "rock star", and that is true as far as it goes--there is a constituency in the Democrat party that just love Bill Clinton, just as there is a constituency that believe that the Clintons represent everything that is broken in the party. They hate the triangulation business, they hate the way the Clintons use them to get what they personally want. I distinctly recall Rosie O'Donnell's repudiation of Bill Clinton. She felt betrayed and she was not alone.

These people see Hillary as no better than a third term for George Bush and they are willing to spend big money to make sure she falls short. Obama has a lot of good will built up with these people, but he better start performing or his next quarter could look like John McCain's.

Barry Obama is dangerously naive, even for a Democrat, but you have to respect what he represents to a significant part of the American electorate--hope for change, and specifically the kind of change that ends the poisonous environment created by Congressional Democrats.

Obama's campaign on Sunday also announced that it had surpassed 350,000 donors for the year, a significant feat at this stage in any campaign. In a letter to supporters, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said the donors represented more than 500,000 donations. At midyear, the campaign had reported getting contributions from more than 250,000 individual donors, meaning that about 100,000 new donors contributed to him during the past three months.

This is the kind of grassroots support that George W. Bush had in 2000 and it cannot be taken lightly. The Obama campaign has raised an estimated 80 million dollars so far. This is more than simply an anti-war platform, which all the candidate share--its enthusiasm for a new political paradigm.

Its ironic that the "morning in America" candidate is a Democrat this time around.

Will it work? Quite possibly.

Lynne Cheney revealed that Dick and Barry are cousins--eighth cousins

[your grandchildren are all first cousins, however your great grandchildren through different children will be second cousins. Your great-great grandchildren may be third cousins if you are their only common ancestor, and so on... Removes are a matter of generation. My father's cousins are my cousins once removed because we aren't of the same generation. Similarly, my cousins children are also once removed because they are the same generation as my children...]

Barry Obama and Dick Cheney have a common ancestor eight generations ago. Cheney is also related to Harry S. Truman.

Its rather remarkable how many presidents are related to each other. George W. Bush is related to:

George Washington

Thomas Jefferson

James Madison

James Monroe

John Quincy Adams

William Henry Harrison

Zachary Taylor

Millard Fillmore

Franklin Pierce

Abraham Lincoln

Ulysses S. Grant

Rutherford B. Hayes

James A. Garfield

Grover Cleveland

Benjamin Harrison

Theodore Roosevelt

William H. Taft

Calvin Coolidge

Herbert Hoover

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Gerald Ford

Nixon and Ford had similarly lengthy lists of presidential relatives. Clinton, Reagan, Carter, JFK, Eisenhower, Truman, Harding and Wilson had none.

Carter is related to Elvis Presley.

Obama spokesperson Bill Burton opined that "every family has a black sheep..." I don't think he was referring to Barry...

I watched Obama on Leno last night.

What I saw was Barry's secret weapon--his easy grace and remarkable charm. It stands in sharp contrast to Hillary's clenched butt-cheek demeanor and startling cackle.

As he walks out onto the stage there is not a hint of self-consciousness. He's relaxed, smiling, happy to be there. Because he's so relaxed, he makes you relax. If he was smarter, he's remind you of a black Bill Clinton (contrary to popular opinion, Clinton is not black...)

If I was Barry's campaign advisor, I'd tell him to do a lot more talk shows and fewer policy debates. Obviously he has to do the debates, but they don't play to his strength.