The Obama Campaign

As slick and vacuous as an SUV commercial, or something like that. It's rare that a Progressive and I would be singing the same tune, but I can't find much wrong with this assessment of Obama. And I know just how he feels about sitting out the campaign.

He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him.

The Obama campaign has even put out a misleading bio of Michelle Obama, representing her as having grown up in poverty on the South Side, when, in fact, her parents were city workers, and her father was a Daley machine precinct captain.

. . . they present their candidate as a figure who transcends racial divisions and “brings us together”; on the other hand, they exhort us that we should support his candidacy because of the opportunity to “make history” (presumably by nominating and maybe electing a black candidate). Increasingly, Obama supporters have been disposed to cry foul and charge racism at nearly any criticism of him, in steadily more extravagant rhetoric.

Obama’s campaign, in stressing his appeal to rapturous children and liberal, glamorous yuppies, offers vicarious identification with these groups, as well as the chance to become sort of black in that ultra-safe and familiar theme park way.

And so on.