The Hatred of the Online Crowd

Popular culture has been transformed by new modes of online communications and social networking platforms. From Blogger to MySpace to YouTube, technology provides endless opportunities for people to make friends, share hopes and joys, and perhaps live dangerously.

One of the most disturbing manifestions of the today's online reality is the phenomenon of "trolling," which is discussed in today's New York Times:

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait....

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

What caught my attention about this story is not the notion of "trolling" but the larger issue of the "hatred of the online crowd," referred as to "malwebolence."

Much of online communication is pseudonymous, and thus in the absence of fear of consequences we see the proliferation of the most horrendously depraved behavior from what is, essentially, a tech-savvy, un-lumpen web-prowl-etariat.

We know the dangers: tragedies like Megan Meier's MySpace suicide, the mysogynistic death threats to tech-writer Kathy Sierra, or the demonization of conservatives bloggers like Jeff Goldstein.

The intensity of the hatred itself is not new. What's novel is the unprecedented volume and retrievability, which is accelerated by the liberation of unaccountability.

I haven't been the subject of a social networking demonization campaign, although last week I was introduced to the term "cobag" by those friendly nihilists at Sadly No! (and I get "fair and balanced" malwebolence from extreme right-wing hate bloggers as well, who allege I'm RINO for speaking out against racist blog rings (as seen, for example, here, here, here, and here).

My wife sometimes worries about my safety, as I don't blog pseudonymously.

Much of this hatred is defended in terms of the First Amendment, and the legal protections against online demonization aren't so robust, as the Times indicates:

Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech...?

Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It’s tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients ... like ... Megan Meier presumably wouldn’t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well....

Many trolling practices ... violate existing laws against harassment and threats. The difficulty is tracking down the perpetrators. In order to prosecute, investigators must subpoena sites and Internet service providers to learn the original author’s IP address, and from there, his legal identity. Local police departments generally don’t have the means to follow this digital trail, and federal investigators have their hands full with spam, terrorism, fraud and child pornography. But even if we had the resources to aggressively prosecute trolls, would we want to? Are we ready for an Internet where law enforcement keeps watch over every vituperative blog and backbiting comments section, ready to spring at the first hint of violence? Probably not. All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling without snuffing out the debate.

That's probably as good a description of the issues as we're going to get (although I'd be interested to read some legal and scholarly articles on this).

Read the entire New York Times article here: "The Trolls Among Us."

Barack Obama and Racial Preferences

One of the more important issues raised by Stanley Kurtz in his essay on Barack Obama's "lost years" in Chicago politics is the candidate's hypocrisy on racial preferences in affirmative action programs.

It turns out, in contrast to Obama's frequent claims to offer a transcendent post-racial sensibility, the Illinois Senator boasts an aggressive record of pushing racial preferences in minority and women's enterprise programs, in minority construction contracting, and in riverboat casino-gambling. As Kurtz notes:

Obama's intensely race-conscious approach may surprise Americans who know him primarily through his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention of 2004. When Obama so famously said, "There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America-there's the United States of America," most Americans took him to be advocating a color-blind consciousness of the kind expressed in Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream that his children would one day be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Anyone who understood Obama's words that way should know that this is not the whole story. In an essay published in 1988 entitled "Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City," Obama tried to make room for both "accommodation and militancy" in black political engagement. He wrote,

The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and board-room negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches.

However his views may have evolved in the ensuing 20 years, Obama surely knew that the King-like rhetoric of his keynote address would be taken by most Americans as a repudiation of the kind of race-based politics he and his closest allies have consistently practiced throughout his electoral career. It's difficult to gauge the extent to which Obama may have consciously permitted this misunderstanding to take hold, or the extent to which he still believes that the opposition between "integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy" is a false one. Neither alternative is particularly encouraging.

Kurtz's research represents the essential story on Obama's civil rights record, much of the which the mainstream press has blown off.

It's all the more noteworthy, therefore, that the New York Times offers a new, in-depth look at Obama's delicate path on class politics and racial preferences:

In 1990, as his fellow students rallied to protest the dearth of black professors at Harvard Law School, Barack Obama wrote a vigorous defense of affirmative action. The campus was in an uproar over questions of race, and Mr. Obama, then the first black president of The Harvard Law Review, decided to take a stand.

Mr. Obama said he had “undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action” in his own academic career, and he praised the intellectual heft and wide-ranging views of his diverse staff.

“The success of the program speaks for itself,” he said of the law review’s affirmative action policy in a letter published in the school’s student newspaper.

Mr. Obama, a Democrat, has continued to support race-based affirmative action, calling it “absolutely necessary” when he was a state senator in Illinois and criticizing the Supreme Court for curtailing it in his time in the United States Senate. But in his presidential campaign, he has unsettled some black supporters by focusing increasingly on class and suggesting that poor whites should at times be given preference over more privileged blacks.

His ruminations about shifting the balance between race and class in some affirmative action programs raise the possibility that, if elected in November, he might foster a deeper national conversation about an issue that has been fiercely debated for decades. He declined to comment for this article.

“We have to think about affirmative action and craft it in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren’t getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who has struggled more,” Mr. Obama said last week in a question-and-answer session at a convention of minority journalists in Chicago.

During a presidential debate in April, Mr. Obama said his two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, “who have had a pretty good deal” in life, should not benefit from affirmative action when they apply to college, particularly if they were competing for admission with poor white students.

While Mr. Obama’s biracial background in many ways makes him an ideal bridge between racial sensibilities, the issue remains politically treacherous, especially with race taking an increasingly prominent role in the campaign. Indeed, Mr. Obama’s comments have already begun resonating in the long-running dispute over affirmative action, emerging as three states consider ballot initiatives that would ban racial preferences altogether.

I seriously doubt that racial preferences constitute an issue that Obama wants to embrace as a main campaign plank.

There are few other programs in American public policy that fail as badly on the merits as contemporary affirmative actions programs. The U.S. is now committed to equality before the law - and equal protection for all people. To discriminate in favor of one group, or sets of groups, at the expense of a "privileged" white hegemonic class makes a mockery of notions of color-blind justice.

If Obama truly is America's post-racial candidate (and potential savior) he must abjure a politics of racial recrimination, reparations, and set-aside redistributionism. Should he not, he risks becoming just the latest black candidate of ethnic grievance and racial parochialism.

Obama will be seen as "all talk" if he can't help the nation rise above the peculiar divisions of our past: Personal responsibility? That's just for conservative traditionalists. Educational achievement? That's a "white thing." Yo, my man, the black community needs "progressive" programs and "social justice"!

Indeed, what may happen is that Obama ends up as serving as the set-aside savior for groups such as ACORN, La Raza, NAACP, NARAL, and Now.

This would be a tragedy.

The U.S. is ready for the post-racial transcendence that Obama's original campaign rhetoric promised. Family responsibility, educational opportunity, minority enterprise and capitial formation, universal programs in market-driven health care and taxes - and a considerable role for efficient government. These alternatives promise a much better avenue of color-blind uplift than does racial-preference divisiveness.

**********

UPDATE: See also, Just One Minute, "The Time To Lead Is Later," which points out the Times' description of how Obama might "foster" a deeper national conversation on race, while Obama refused at the same time to be interviewed for the article:

Obama is so eager for a national conversation on affirmative action that he won't talk to the Times about it...

You can't make this stuff up!

The Tragedy of Doha

In a 2005 essay, former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills noted:

It is no exaggeration to say that the Doha Round could do more to stimulate the global economy and to alleviate world poverty over the next quarter century than any other policy initiative the 148 WTO member governments could undertake together.

This is why last week's collapse of the Doha world trade negotiations is such a disaster for the global economy and the international developmental agenda.

The experience of America and the world since the end of World War II has been of expanding prosperity in both the developed and underdeveloped worlds. The growth of international trade has made the United States vastly more affluent and has lifted an estimated 375 million people out of extreme poverty since 1985.

Today, while the U.S. unemployment rate is edging up, trade exports have bouyed manufacturers and kept American workers in the employment sector.

I noticed some serious misunderstanding as to the causes and consequences of the collapse of trade among prominent commentators in the blogosphere (here and here). For example, the U.S. is generally not to blame for the failure of the Doha round. The developing nations, especially China and India, flexed their muscles and missed an opportunity to consolidate the current free trade regime, notwithstanding its longstanding flaws in American and European agricultural protection.

That said, as the New York Times reports, the collapse of Doha may signal a shift in world power:

Over the last two decades, China has managed to turn the forces of globalization into the most successful antipoverty project the world has ever seen. So how does one explain the fact that when the latest round of global trade negotiations blew up for good last week, ending seven years of talks to lower tariffs and free up trade around the world, it was China with a hand on the detonator?

The answer has a lot to do with how the world — and China in particular — has changed, and a lot to do with how the Chinese see the world that’s coming. In that world, countries like China and India will have much more clout at the bargaining table because they have much greater economic power than in the past.

It is not that the Chinese think the great era of globalization is over. Far from it. The glistening Beijing of today was built on dollars, yen and Euros earned around the world, and now being lent back to the United States.

But the era in which free trade is organized around rules set in the West — with developing nations following along — definitely appears over, and few are mourning its demise. Even in America, where for years free trade advocates assumed their own country would be the biggest winner, advocates of the system are on the defensive.

This is still incomplete, I would add.

Another way to think about it is that the developing nations, especially India, may not have realized that the U.S. is still in the driver's seat in terms of market power. American negotiators resisted India's demands for agricultural protection. The intransigence in New Delhi may have cost the Indian economy years of growing prosperity, for the price of satisfying domestic farming interests.

But here's how the Financial Times puts it:

The collapse of Doha ... speaks to the failure of both sides to own up to the world as it is. On the side of the rich countries, particularly the US but no less many European nations, there is a refusal to acknowledge that globalisation no longer belongs to the west. In previous trade rounds, the rich nations set the rules and the rest could take it or leave it. No longer.

Equally, the new powers now give the impression – and you see this as much in India as China – that they want to be free riders. They are happy to profit from the rules, but unwilling to support the architecture of the system. Doha, in this respect, saw both sides in blindfolds.

International trade is based on the notion of mutual gains. If parties to negotiations are captive to powerful interests and protectionist policies, further trade expansion cannot take place.

This is the trajedy of Doha.

Obama's Chicago Years: Race Conscious Big Government

Stanley Kurtz has been doing some of the best writing on Barack Obama's fundamental leftism.

  

As the 2008 presidential election quickens, Obama's ties to the oppositional elements of America's subterranean outposts of the American left are becoming increasingly clear, from William Ayers to ACORN. 

Kurtz is on the assignment with his latest piece, "Barack Obama's Lost Years," which takes a look at Obama's history as an Illinois state senator:

Barack Obama's neighborhood newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald, has a longstanding tradition of opening its pages to elected officials-from Chicago aldermen to state legislators to U.S. senators. Obama himself, as a state senator, wrote more than 40 columns for theHerald, under the title "Springfield Report," between 1996 and 2004. Read in isolation, Obama's columns from the state capital tell us little. Placed in the context of political and policy battles then raging in Illinois, however, the young legislator's dispatches powerfully illuminate his political beliefs. Even more revealing are hundreds of articles chronicling Obama's early political and legislative activities in the pages not only of the Hyde Park Herald, but also of another South Side fixture, the Chicago Defender.

Obama moved to Chicago in order to place himself in what he understood to be the de facto "capital" of black America. For well over 100 years, the Chicago Defender has been the voice of that capital, and therefore a paper of national significance for African Americans. Early on in his political career, Obama complained of being slighted by major media, like the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Yet extensive and continuous coverage in both the Chicago Defender and the Hyde Park Herald presents a remarkable resource for understanding who Obama is. Reportage in these two papers is particularly significant because Obama's early political career-the time between his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate in 1995 and his race for U.S. Senate in 2004-can fairly be called the "lost years," the period Obama seems least eager to talk about, in contrast to his formative years in Hawaii, California, and New York or his days as a community organizer, both of which are recounted in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. The pages of the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender thus offer entrée into Obama's heretofore hidden world.

What they portray is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the Obama campaign. As details of Obama's early political career emerge into the light, his associations with such radical figures as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Reverend James Meeks, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn look less like peculiar instances of personal misjudgment and more like intentional political partnerships. At his core, in other words, the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan. Elected president, this man would presumably shift the country sharply to the left on all the key issues of the day-culture-war issues included. It's no wonder Obama has passed over his Springfield years in relative silence.

Kurtz then goes on to break down each area of Obama's state governmental experience, from his racial legislative record, to his relationship to liberals and radicals, and to his big government redistributionism.

The picture that Kurtz provides is one not just of a Chicago machine politician - in the classic style of Illinios power and patronism - but also one of a personalist postmodern update of earlier eras of Democratic Party racial recrimination and state-centrism.

This vision is a good preview of the future of American politics under a Barack Obama administration in Washington, D.C. 

Obama's Stealth Socialism

Peter Wehner, at the National Review, notes:

John McCain, while still the underdog, has a chance to pull out this election. He's gotten more aggressive in the last week or so and it is, I think, beginning to pay dividends.

McCain's most recent dividends come from Obama's missteps on the race controversy. But his deeper vulnerability is found in his stealthy socialist agenda. Investor's Business Daily makes the argument:

During his NAACP speech earlier this month, Sen. Obama repeated the term at least four times. "I've been working my entire adult life to help build an America where economic justice is being served," he said at the group's 99th annual convention in Cincinnati.

And as president, "we'll ensure that economic justice is served," he asserted. "That's what this election is about." Obama never spelled out the meaning of the term, but he didn't have to. His audience knew what he meant, judging from its thumping approval.

It's the rest of the public that remains in the dark, which is why we're launching this special educational series.

"Economic justice" simply means punishing the successful and redistributing their wealth by government fiat. It's a euphemism for socialism.

In the past, such rhetoric was just that — rhetoric. But Obama's positioning himself with alarming stealth to put that rhetoric into action on a scale not seen since the birth of the welfare state.

In his latest memoir he shares that he'd like to "recast" the welfare net that FDR and LBJ cast while rolling back what he derisively calls the "winner-take-all" market economy that Ronald Reagan reignited (with record gains in living standards for all).

Obama also talks about "restoring fairness to the economy," code for soaking the "rich" — a segment of society he fails to understand that includes mom-and-pop businesses filing individual tax returns.

It's clear from a close reading of his two books that he's a firm believer in class envy. He assumes the economy is a fixed pie, whereby the successful only get rich at the expense of the poor.

Following this discredited Marxist model, he believes government must step in and redistribute pieces of the pie. That requires massive transfers of wealth through government taxing and spending, a return to the entitlement days of old.

There's more at the link.

See also, Kyle-Anne Shiver, "Why I'm Thanking God for Obama."

Cartoon Credit: Michael Ramirez

Blogger and Sitemeter

Yesterday I received an e-mail from Dave Marron at The Thunder Run with a heads up on a possible denial-of-service lock-out attack on his blog. (Perhaps this was a replay of the Pro-Bama lock-out controversy in June.)

This apparently happened to a number of bloggers as well, and the outrage prompted The Yankee Confederate to post this provocative entry: "Obama's Netroots Supporters Continue 'Blog Burning'."

The whole controversy, both political and technological, generated responses from both left and right.

Then, late afternoon yesterday, I had trouble logging onto my own blog. I tried a couple of different computers, and keep getting an error message. A Google search sent me to a Blogger help group, where I found that websites with SiteMeter code were gettting blocked in Internet Explorer.

I removed the code and that fixed the problem.

Wired has a nice summary, "Web Sites Using SiteMeter Are Crashing with Internet Explorer":

A number of web sites that use SiteMeter tracking code to monitor the number of visitors to their site are reporting that the code is causing Internet Explorer browsers to crash when users visit their sites.

I haven't spent time testing a lot of sites, but the Gawker Media sites all seem to be affected. These include Gawker, Valleywag, Gizmodo and Lifehacker, among others.

The problem appears to be affecting IE 5.5, 6.0 and 7.0. Internet surfers using IE to access a site that has SiteMeter tracking it receive a message saying the site cannot be loaded and "operation aborted." The issue seems to have begun late afternoon Friday.

SiteMeter has not responded to a request for comment and so far has posted no announcement to its web site addressing the issue. But SiteMeter's blog has a few posts published earlier this week referencing its move to a new platform and changes to its tracking code.

A number of sites are reporting that once they remove the SiteMeter code, the problem disappears and their page loads fine in IE.

Captain Ed notes that the Hot Air blogs were affected, and he suggests having a backup browser available for Internet Explorer users facing trouble with website accessability.

For techies, see The Reference Frame, "Fix: IE7 with Sitemeter: Operation Aborted."

Obama Missteps in Race Allegations

This morning's New York Times suggests Barack Obama has hit the wrong tone in his allegations of racism against presumptive GOP nominee John McCain:

Senator Barack Obama is a man of few rhetorical stumbles, but this week a few of his words opened a racial door his campaign would prefer not to step through. When Senator John McCain’s camp replied by accusing him of playing the race card from the bottom of the deck, the Obama campaign seemed at least momentarily off balance.

The instinctive urge to punch back was tempered by the fact that race is a fire that could singe both candidates. So on Friday the Obama campaign, a carefully controlled lot on the best of days, reacted most cautiously as it sought to tamp down any sense that it was at war with Mr. McCain over who was the first to inject race into the contest. Mr. Obama made no mention of the issue, except for a brief reference in an interview with a local newspaper in Florida.

“I was in Union, Mo., which is 98 percent white, a rural conservative, and what I said was what I think everyone knows, which is that I don’t look like I came out of central casting when it comes to presidential candidates,” he told The St. Petersburg Times. “There was nobody there who thought at all that I was trying to inject race in this.”

The furor started on Thursday when Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, said, “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck.” Mr. Davis was alluding to Mr. Obama’s remarks on Wednesday that Republicans would try to scare voters by pointing out that he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

As Mr. Obama carefully addressed the issue on Friday, his campaign’s formidable network of grass-roots activists, and the Web sites crafted to give them “talking points” to carry into battle against Republicans, remained uncharacteristically quiet on the matter, even though the issue dominated political blogs for a second straight day.

David Plouffe, the campaign manager, talked briefly, and not too eagerly, about it. And the campaign’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, blamed the Republicans for misconstruing Mr. Obama’s words as an attack, and quickly moved on.

The mainstream press is finally getting it.

It's the Democrats who have been obsessed with race this campaign, and now Obama's own allegations of racism have forced a system-wide backlash against the attacks.

The big question now is how long will the racial pull-back last?

Obama wants to use race to has advantage, just like the activist racial-recrimination base of the party. It's assumed that the guilt-mongering victim's mentality is gold for Democrats, as they can mine the presumed racial shame of white Americans for electoral and policy gain.

But the backlash is too risky, and whatever gains might be had in crass racial appeals aren't enough to justify turning this campaign into a referendum on racial tolerance.

The radical activists would love it, of course. See, "Obama Heckled on African American Policies."

Photo Credit: "Barack Obama addressed hecklers after he finished a speech in St. Petersburg, Fla., on Friday," New York Times.

Do Voters Tell Pollsters the Truth in Racial Surveys?

The question of the "Bradley effect" came up last January in controversies in public opinion surrounding Hillary Clinton's whopping comeback victory in the New Hampshire primary.

The workings of the Bradley effect were first suggested in the 1982 gubernatorial race in California, when black Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley lost a close challenge to George Deukmejian, after holding a strong lead in match-up surveys heading into election day. Since then, survey specialists have suggested that pollsters might be overestimating black candidate support in pre-election surveys in general.

John Judis offered an overview for this year at the New Republic:

Pollsters - along with nearly everyone else on earth - failed to predict the result of the New Hampshire Democratic primary. According to Real Clear Politics, they estimated that Barack Obama would defeat Hillary Clinton by an average of eight percent. She won by three, and eleven percent is an awful lot for pollsters to be wrong by - well beyond the margin of error. In the scramble to explain how this could have happened, several writers, including Andrew Sullivan and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, have suggested that the discrepancy might be the result of what is called the "Bradley effect."

Judis took particular issue with Andrew Kohut, who had looked at the New Hampshire controversy in, "Getting It Wrong."

All of this is a nice background review to the Wall Street Journal's weekend analysis, "When Voters Lie":

One of the toughest questions on any poll is whether people are telling the truth. It is a conundrum that looms front and center as voters look ahead to the first U.S. presidential contest that an African-American candidate has a chance to win. With polls showing overwhelming voter support for the idea of a black president, researchers and pollsters are trying to determine who really means it.

Peter Hart, a Democrat on a bipartisan team conducting the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, estimates that 10% of current Democrats and independents who say they support presumed Democratic Party nominee Barack Obama may not be giving a fully honest answer, at least based on their responses to broader questions about race. "This election is exceptionally tricky," he says.

While most political pollsters say they don't find large numbers of people lying on polls, they are taking extra precautions....

Pollsters look for the "Bradley Effect," the idea that some white voters are reluctant to say they support a white candidate over a black candidate. The phrase refers to California's 1982 gubernatorial election, when the late Tom Bradley, a black Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, led in exit polls against white Republican George Deukmejian. Mr. Bradley lost the election. The conclusion: some voters hid their true choice from pollsters. Skeptics say the issue was neither race nor honesty. One theory is that Mr. Deukmejian's supporters simply didn't want to participate in polls.

Sen. Obama leads Republican rival John McCain 47% to 41%, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey last month. Aides to Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain declined to discuss the details of the candidates' polling strategies. But the two camps no doubt take surveys with a grain of salt. "There certainly is a presumption that people self-censor to some degree," says Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center in Washington.

In a recently released study, Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., found nearly 11% of people who have reported being polled said they have lied to pollsters about their views on politics and public affairs. "Why they're lying is probably as varied as individuals are varied," says Jerry Lindsley, director of the school's polling institute. "Halfway through a survey, they might all of a sudden get nervous about the kinds of questions they're being asked and start to lie or not be totally straightforward."

Questions about polling and race were raised during this year's presidential primaries. In New Hampshire, polls gave Sen. Obama as much as a 10-percentage-point advantage over Hillary Clinton the day before the primary. Sen. Clinton went on to win the state. Pollster Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, doesn't blame lying. Instead, he says, some voters who were poorer, less-educated and white may have had less favorable views of African-Americans and were less likely to take surveys. "When polls get it wrong, it's not because people lied, it's because the people who turned down the polls have different attitudes than the people who took the polls," he says.

Read the whole thing, as well as the sidebar analysis by June Kronholz, "How the Unconscious Affects the Truth."

Note, though, that recent political science research finds that white voters show little disinclination to vote for black candidates in congressional, and state and local elections.

That's not to say, however, that racial bias in voting is insignificant after all. The Washington Post reported in June that "3 in 10 Americans Admit to Race Bias." However, that same survey found that voters were more concerned about John McCain's advanced age than they were about Barack Obama's racial background.

I wrote a beefy analysis on racial prejudice during the Democratic primaries, "Barack Obama and the Political Psychology of Race."

I don't think racially "sensitive" voting will ever totally be eliminated, but a hegemonic Jim Crow structure of racist sentiment is a thing of the past. Indeed, while Barack Obama's election seems to have stimulated latent racist ideological and psychological elements (even though much of this is justified in terms of free speech exceptions), the strong possiblity of the Illinois Senator's election to the presidency in November seems to make a lot of these debates moot.

Related: "Obama Aide Concedes 'Dollar Bill' Remark Referred to His Race."

Obama's Economic Illiteracy

This video analysis of Barack Obama's economic planning, from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation, is essential viewing. It's about ten minutes long, but well worth your time:

Additional analysis on Obama's political economy is provided by Michael Boskin: "Obamanomics Is a Recipe for Recession."

Hat Tip: Vulcan's Hammer

Terror's Continuing Evil

The continuing evil of terrorism was on display last weekend with the bombings in Istanbul, Turkey, and Jaipur, Bangalore and Ahmedabad, India. The Jerusalem Post explains the implications, in "Why Terror Thrives":

Someone set out to kill a lot of people on Sunday night in Istanbul, Turkey - and did. Two bombs were exploded, 10 minutes apart, along a pedestrian mall in a residential neighborhood. The first explosion attracted a crowd; the second, which could be heard a mile away, was intended to kill those drawn to the site of the first attack. Some 17 people lost their lives and over 150 were wounded. Turkish president Abdullah Gul said the attack showed "the ruthlessness of terrorism." Indeed it did.

Terrorism, meaning the systematic use of force against civilians to demoralize, intimidate or subjugate countries or peoples, has been a scourge of humanity from time immemorial. The assault against an El Al plane at Munich Airport on February 10, 1970 was not the first instance of a civilian airliner being targeted. That appalling distinction goes to a Puerto Rican communist who hijacked a US airliner to Havana in 1961. Cuba gave him asylum.

It was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, however, that trailblazed attacks on airliners with its September 7, 1970 hijacking of three planes "to call special attention to the Palestinian problem." Sure enough, the Palestinian cause has since became synonymous with anti-civilian warfare, from the Munich Olympics' massacre in September 1972 to the Arab fratricide inside Gaza this weekend. And the slaughter of innocents is now part of the Islamists' struggle against "infidels." What the Palestinians began in the early 1970s is now paying "dividends."

This past weekend, for instance, Muslim attackers killed 49 Hindu civilians in western India, in 17 separate attacks. The modus operandi, as in Turkey, was a small explosion followed by more bombs set off to kill rescue service personnel and bystanders.

Yesterday, at least 25 Shi'ite pilgrims were killed and 52 wounded when female suicide bombers (presumably Sunni Arabs) attacked a religious procession in Baghdad.

Terrorism is now so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable. And always, obscenely, the onslaughts are carried out "in the name of Allah."

TRAGICALLY, the international community has only itself to blame for making terrorism permissible as a tool of war - depending on who is blown up, and who is doing the blowing up.

This distinction was first articulated by the world's most coddled terrorist, Yasser Arafat, on November 13, 1974, when the PLO chief made his debut appearance at the UN General Assembly: "The difference between the revolutionary and the terrorist lies in the reason for which each fights," he asserted. "Whoever stands by a just cause and fights for liberation from invaders and colonialists cannot be called terrorist... The Palestinian people had to resort to armed struggle when they lost faith in the international community...." The family of nations responded with a standing ovation.

Although Arafat would make a number of tactical flip-flops on the use of violence against innocent civilians, he ultimately rejected gains he could have made at the negotiating table - at Camp David in 2000, for instance - in favor of unleashing the second intifada.

One can only fantasize about how much safer the world would be today had the UN, instead of legitimizing Arafat's terrorism, charged him with war crimes. Would disgruntled Muslims have established al-Qaida's global network - or Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Al Shabaab in Somalia, or the Army of Muhammad in India - had the international community sent a different signal all those years ago? But not only did Arafat get a green light from the international community, the world has since helped nourish self-defeating Palestinian tendencies toward violence, intransigence and radicalism.

Seldom have the Palestinians been told to choose between violence and political accommodation. When the Quartet gave Hamas precisely that choice, the Palestinians stood their ground. Far from penalizing them, the world went wobbly - the most recent example of this being a UK parliamentary committee, headed by Labor MP Ann Clwyd, which wants to "dialogue" with Hamas and lift sanctions against Gaza's Islamo-fascist regime.

VIOLENCE may be endemic to mankind, yet the community of nations nevertheless managed to outlaw poison gas and criminalize genocide. Is it beyond people's capacity to, belatedly, define deliberate attacks against civilians as a crime against humanity? Wouldn't the world be a better place if terrorists found no sanctuary, no financial backing and no diplomatic cover - because, simply, no "reason" justified their actions?

See also, "Unending Terrorism."

Obama Playing the Race Card

John McCain, in an interview with CNN's John King, says Barack Obama is playing the "race card":

John McCain told CNN Thursday it is fair for his campaign manager to claim Barack Obama is playing 'the race card.'

"I'm sorry to say that it is. It's legitimate," McCain told CNN's John King. "And there's no place in this campaign for that. There's no place for it and we shouldn't be doing it."

Earlier Thursday, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis lashed out at the Democratic presidential candidate over his comments that Republicans are making an issue of his race.

"Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong," Davis said in a statement sent to reporters.

The Obama campaign has issued a denunciation.

Yet, McCain's on solid ground here. Peter Kirsanow explains why:

Obama's statement yesterday about Republican scare tactics is merely the latest in a string of statements in which he suggests that certain Americans are intrinsically racist, and those Americans aren't just confined to political opponents. His declaration that his grandmother was a "typical white person," was, at the time, derided primarily because it was seen as Obama "throwing her under the bus" for political expediency. But the statement's premise — that the "typical" white person is a reflexive racist — is at least as offensive.

Similarly, the commentary surrounding Obama's statement to San Francisco elites about bitter, working class voters focused largely on the condescension in his claim that such folks "cling to guns or religion." Somewhat ignored was the clause "...or antipathy to people who aren't like them..." Again, Obama is branding a huge swath of the American populace in unsavory terms.

During the primaries his campaign lept upon any statement that was even remotely related to color as evidence of racist intent. This is, to say the least, peculiar for someone whose campaign was based in part on racial transcendence. Even more so for someone who doesn't seem to have encountered any pernicious racism or racial barriers in his personal life. His profligate insinuations of racism now are far beyond unseemly. As the possible next President of the United States, he needs to be called on it.

Kirsanow's comments are in keeping with the points I've made on Democratic racial hypocrisy, here and here.

John McCain will be mercilously attacked by Obama's supporters, but he's absolutely right to take a stand on this issue. Indeed, McCain might further consolidate his campaign's comeback by making his own national address on race. Although Democrats continue to hold 90 percent of the black vote, the GOP's stress on bolstering family institutions, and meritocracy in economic opportunity, continues to offer a powerful moral-mobility agenda for America in the post-civil rights era.

See also, Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith, "Race Issue Moves to Center of Campaign."

John McCain's Final Solution!

I noted previously - with reference to the McCain campaign's "Celeb" ad buy - that there's a racist double-standard on race this election season. We saw yesterday, for example, that just suggesting Barack Obama's "presumptuousness" triggers cries of "racism" from left-wing partisans.

As one blogger argued, perhaps the Democrats are "so horny for someone to call Obama a shiftless darkie they're this close to saying it themselves."

The allegations of John McCain's race-baiting have continued today. This comment, from The New Disease, is mindboggling:

What's really going on here? This ain't McCain taking a cheap shot at Obama's "celebrity" status....

This vicious, nasty, disgusting ad is about the black mens and the white womens. And how the former ain't supposed to touch the latter. It's about a threat to the white womens! Rape! Why else juxtapose two comely young white ladies in striking profile shots against the vaguely threatening, kinda shadowy image of a black man, with sorta scary chanting in the background. That chanting has a purpose, too - it says the black man has somehow bewitched the white folk and fooled them with his mystical savage black powers somehow.

This is an incredibly interesting passage, particularly for someone like myself, who has studied Jim Crow race relations as a professional, and as one who's father grew up in pre-civil rights era Missouri, especially since the hypothesized "strapping black predator" theme in McCain's ad buy absolutely never occcured to me.

Indeed, I'm convinced more than ever that the lefties are jonesing so bad - including Barack Obama himself - that every single criticism of his campaign or personal statements is "racist."

The Republicans have responded, in "McCain Camp: 'Obama Has Played the Race Card'."

But that's not all!

It's not enough to allege racism: Obama backers are now making the case that the "Celeb" ad recalls the Nazi propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl, especially, "Triumph of the Will."

So, we have McCain not just as a white-feminine sex object race-baiter, he's further alleged as mounting a campaign of 1930s imperialist, industrial-style, war-state final solution-esque propaganda!

Now, while its certainly okay to check the veracity of McCain's campaign blitz against Obama (Garance Franke-Ruta notes that bloggers are on the assignment), to go as far as to suggest that images of young celebrity sex-kittens juxtaposed to a Democratic-sponsored campaign speech by a black American presidential candidate in modern-day Berlin is a reprise of the 1000-Year Reich, is patently absurd.

The Building Backlash to Obama's Marxism?

I noted this morning that the "foundations of Obama's community organization of power are found in his radical ideological, political, and religious history."

As we get closer to the campaign, perhaps Barack Obama's radicalism is becoming more apparent, which may explain why the Illinois Senator's unable to pull out a lead in public opinion over GOP nominee John McCain.

Also, as Carrie Dudoff Brown reports today, at the Politico, the new attention to Obama as smug and elitist seems to be taking hold (recall Obama's dismisall of the working-classes as "bitter").

In turn, the Democrats' far left-wing base has become increasingly crazed in trying to come up with something to offset Obama's own self-immolation. Obama's weaknesses have left Democratic partisans scrambing to paint the GOP as racist, which is perhaps the only thing more scary than a neo-Marxist administration come January, as Investor's Business Daily warned earlier:

When one looks at Obama, it's shocking how radical and anti-American his closest associates are. Taken separately, the black liberation theology of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, or fundraiser William Ayers' unrepentant past as a 1960s terrorist or Obama's openly pro-Che Guevara volunteers in Houston might be dismissed.

But taken together, and given Obama's closeness to his friends, it's fair to ask whether Obama doesn't share their extreme-left views. Yet whenever he's asked, he gets mad and avoids the issue.

Maybe that's not surprising, given that Obama himself began his career as a Chicago community organizer and worked on projects there influenced by Saul Alinsky. The Marxist Machiavellian of the Chicago scene advised budding revolutionaries in his 1971 book "Rules For Radicals" to conceal their radical affiliations to attain greater power. That works well for Marxists.

But Obama's friends seem to be giving him away. If this sounds extreme, take a look at some of the activities of Obama's associates:

Wright is an adherent of black liberation theology, an explicitly Marxist interpretation of the Bible whose aim is to stir up class and race hatred to advance communism. Created by a rifle-toting Peruvian priest in the 1960s, it's now discredited in religious circles.

"Liberation theology isolates a few verses, takes them out of context, and then exaggerates their meaning," said the Rev. Bob Schenk of the National Clergy Council, on "Hannity's America" last weekend.

But Wright clings to it. And recently, he loudly praised the Marxist Sandinista dictatorship of Nicaragua.

Not by coincidence, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua's president, endorses Obama. "This is not to say that there is already a revolution under way in the U.S. . . . But yes, (Obama and friends) are laying the foundations for a revolutionary change," said Ortega.

If that's not enough, Wright's also made pilgrimage to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in Havana in 1984, alongside the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Cuban-American writer Humberto Fontova noted Jackson and his entourage cheered "Viva Fidel" and "Viva Che Guevara" on the $300,000 trip paid for by the Cuban Council of Churches.

Then there's Obama's friend ex-Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, another Marxist. Not only did Ayers set off terrorist bombs against "the establishment" with no regrets during the 1960s, he told the New York Times "we didn't do enough."

Further, as the American Spectator notes, "Obama’s Left-Wing Extremism":

So the true picture of who Obama is should now be clear. His consistently extreme left policy positions are well grounded deep into his past, dating back even to the prep school Marxism of his youth. How could America allow this man to become President of the United States? Do we not take that position seriously anymore?

See also, Kyle-Anne Shriver, "Obama, the Closer: An Eloquent Clean Cut Black Man is the Perfect Front Man for the Radical Left.

Image Credit: "Obama's Marxist Underpinnings."

Obama's Community Organization of Power

One of the most imporant and fundamentally radical elements of Barack Obama's political journey is his experience as a Chicago community organizer.

The nature of community organization is inherently leftist and anti-establisment. Rooted in progressive social activism, community action is an Americanized version of the proletarian class struggle of the Marxist-Leninist ideological program. As such its essential project is the overthrow of institutions of hierarchical dominance and the decimation of the oppressive classes. It is totalizing in its project to defeat the reigning patterns of alleged hegemony of class and race. It seeks to give power to "the people."

The contemporary progressive left is well aware of Obama's practice of radical community organization. Progressives see in Obama one of their own. He'll take his politics of agitation, practiced on the Chicago South Side, to the national level.

The political appeal and current application of this leftist Trojan Horse is explained by John Maki, in his essay, "Obama's "Community Organizer" Phase Was About Political Power, Not Soup Kitchens":

"Community organizer."

If you've heard the term, you likely learned about it through Barack Obama's memoir or one of his speeches where he talks about his time working in poor neighborhoods on Chicago's South Side in the 1980s. He refers to this time in his life a lot. Obama leans on it, hard, while stumping. But what does it mean?

"One of my fundamental beliefs from my days as a community organizer is that real change comes from the bottom up ... And there's no more powerful tool for grassroots organizing than the Internet."

-Barack Obama

What do community organizers actually do? How do they do it? And how has Obama's experience as a community organizer shaped his run for the presidency?

Well, as Maki indicates, community organizers practice a brutalizing politics of fear and power. Community progressives achieve their aims through a politics of implacable belligerency. It is the politics of abject thuggery. It is based in confrontation and scare-tactics. Those subjected to the community activist model will be offered a deal they can't refuse - there'll be hell to pay in going against the will of the people:

If you think these tactics resemble standard forms of political intimidation, you are right ... community organizing is old-fashioned, bare-knuckle politics for the little guy.

This is also what most coverage of Obama's days as a community organizer fails to appreciate. For whether you are an Alinksy-schooled community organizer or a Chicago politician, you are a student of power. If you have survived long enough to succeed in either position, like Obama has, you have learned not to worry so much about the power you have. What keeps you up at night is the power you do not have. In community organizing and politics, you know the only thing that can hurt you is what you cannot control.

Since Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, he has been accused of moving to the center and flip-flopping on positions he adopted during the primary. This criticism misses the point. In his recent moves, Obama, the community organizer, is simply trying to build new alliances as he neutralizes threats to his power. It is what any Chicago-trained community organizer worth his salt would do.

The fruits of Obama's community organization model can be seen in the latest revelations surrounding the presumptive nominee's ties to ACORN, the Chicago-based radical community action group. As Stanley Kurtz notes:

Obama has had an intimate and long-term association with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn), the largest radical group in America. If I told you Obama had close ties with MoveOn.org or Code Pink, you’d know what I was talking about. Acorn is at least as radical as these better-known groups, arguably more so. Yet because Acorn works locally, in carefully selected urban areas, its national profile is lower. Acorn likes it that way. And so, I’d wager, does Barack Obama.

Obama has been tremendously successful in keeping his oppositional community ties out of the national spotlight. There's been some attention to Obama's South Side radicalism, but for the most part the soft, respectable images of Barack Obama as a Harvard-trained lawyer and family man, with some sprinklings of benign multiculturalism, have prevailed as the dominant narrative.

The truth is otherwise.

Obama's steeped in the oppositional model of critical race studies. His theology's one of black liberation, social revolution, and hatred. He has known ties to ex-revolutionary fugitives William Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn, activists today who still denounce the United States and stomp on the American flag; and Obama's family ties have deep and troubling foundations in doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist activism and ideology.

The foundations of Obama's community organization of power are found in his radical ideological, political, and religious history.

This is the political program Obama will take to Washington if he's elected this November.

See also, Rick Moran, "Obama's Ties to ACORN More Substantial Than First Believed."

Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi: From Guantanamo to Martyrdom

Debra Burlingame, at the Wall Street Journal, illustrates how the civil liberties activists of the American left have enabled terrorists and sacrificed lives to the nihilist mayhem of Islamist evil.

The story begins with Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi, a one-time detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who was released from American custody in 2005. Al-Ajmi returned to the Middle East to commit a suicide bombing in Mosul, Iraq, in March 2008 (as seen below, in the blast photo from the Combat Outpost Inman).

It turns out that Al-Ajmi had written poetry while at Gitmo, with one poem mocking the American detention system, and glorifying holy martyrdom under Islam:

Al-Ajmi, a 29-year-old Kuwaiti, blew himself up in one of several coordinated suicide attacks on Iraqi security forces in Mosul this year. Originally reported to have participated in an April attack that killed six Iraqi policemen, a recent martyrdom video published on a password-protected al Qaeda Web site indicates that Al-Ajmi carried out the March 23 attack on an Iraqi army compound in Mosul. In that attack, an armored truck loaded with an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of explosives rammed through a fortified gate, overturned vehicles in its path and exploded in the center of the compound. The huge blast ripped the façade off three apartment buildings being used as barracks, killing 13 soldiers from the 2nd Iraqi Army division and seriously wounding 42 others.

Using the name "Abu Juheiman al-Kuwaiti," Al-Ajmi is seen on the video brandishing an automatic rifle, singing militant songs and exhorting his fellow Muslims to pledge their allegiance to the "Commander of the Faithful" in Iraq. Later, Al-Ajmi's face is superimposed over the army compound, followed by footage of the massive explosion and still shots of several dead bodies lying next to the 25-foot crater left by the blast.

In 2006, Al-Ajmi's "Miranda" poem was included in a recitation of detainee poetry at a "Guantanamo teach-in" sponsored by Seton Hall Law School. The all-day event was Webcast live to 400 colleges and law schools across the country and abroad. Some of the lead attorneys pushing for detainee rights participated in the event, which began with organizers boasting about the diversity of the event's participating schools as exemplified by the American University of Paris, the American University in Cairo, the U.N. University for Peace in Costa Rica, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Parsons School of Design in New York City. One of Al-Ajmi's lawyers gave a presentation about detainee treatment entitled, "Insults to Religion."

Marc Falkoff, a former Covington & Burling attorney-turned-law-professor who represents several detainees, read the poems and later published a selection of them in a book ("Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak," Iowa University Press, 2007.) In his introductory remarks to the students, Mr. Falkoff described Al-Ajmi and the other detainee poets as "gentle, thoughtful young men" who, though frustrated and disillusioned, expressed an abiding hope in the future. "One thing you won't hear is hatred," he said, "and the reason you won't hear it is not because I edited it out, it's because it's not there in the poetry." Then how to explain the fact that -- on the advice of Al-Ajmi's attorneys - "To My Captive Lawyer, Miranda" [the poem glorify Islam jihad] was excluded from the published collection last year? Mr. Falkoff, who also has a Ph.D. in literature, refused to explain further, though he insists on describing Al-Ajmi's verse as a "love poem to his lawyer."

The remainder of Burlingame's essay details how recent Supreme Court rulings will likely result in additional terrorists heading back to the bloody landing grounds of the war on terror, who will then kill American GIs and Iraqi nationals now serving to consolidate freedom for the people of Iraq.

Meanwhile, students back home in American college classrooms, like those at City University of New York in Queens (who were assigned "Poems from Guantanamo"), will be enraptured with the poetic lines of the likes of Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi.

Photo Credit: Long War Journal, "Suicide Car Bomb Attack Killed 13 Iraqi Soldiers in Mosul."

Racist Double Standards

The left's deafening silence on Ludacris' controversial rap that Barack Obama's going to "paint the White House black" is matched today with the latest hypocritical campaign by Obama backers to smear the GOP as racist.

In response to John McCain's new ad buy questioning Barack Obama's experience to lead, the nihilists have charged the McCain campaign with exploiting white fears of black predation on young white women. Here's Crooks and Liars:

The McCain campaign is looking increasingly desperate with each attack ad has chosen to take a tried and true approach to their latest ad — veiled racism. Referring to Barack Obama as the “biggest celebrity in the world,” McCain’s ad conveniently and quite overtly slides footage of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton into the mix.

Here's Melissa McEwan's attack:

Once again, McCain reveals himself to be eminently, shockingly willing to embrace the heinous tactics of the Bush team that he once deplored. That anyone still considers this guy an honorable rogue, a maverick, or a hero is beyond laughable. He doesn't possess any lingering shred of integrity, and his alleged independent streak came to a screeching halt as it collided with the stumbling zombie corpse of his credibility the moment he stood in New Hampshire with his arm around the shoulders of the man whose operatives called his wife a junky and his adopted daughter illegitimate. He may have been honorable and brave once upon a time, but he’s not anymore.

Is there any reason left in the political world?

Various observers, including journalists at the major national dailies, have noted the presumptuousness of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. But making that argument, too, it turns out, is racist:

But what I'm most interested in today is the new meme the McCain campaign has been pushing for the last few weeks that Obama is presumptuous, arrogant and well ... just a bit uppity.

Both sides, left and right, make the same allegations - that the other has nothing going for itself but allegations of corruption or racism.

Yet throughout the entire 2008 campaign, the genuine racism that Americans have seen has been in the Democratic Party ranks, from Bill Clinton to Jesse Jackson to Luducris' incitement for John McCain to be shot and paralyzed.

Obama's Presumptuous Arrogance Risks Stunning Loss

Here's Dana Milbank on Barack Obama's "victory tour":

Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee....

As he marches toward Inauguration Day (Election Day is but a milestone on that path), Obama's biggest challenger may not be Republican John McCain but rather his own hubris.

Bonnie Erbe at U.S. News agrees:

Democratic Party leaders would have you believe they are barreling toward victory in November with a youthful, enigmatic, messiahlike candidate capable of resolving every ill and satisfying competing constituencies. The GOP candidate, on the other hand, switches message from the war to the economy to offshore oil drilling and back again. Sen. John McCain goes through staff, advisers, and surrogates more quickly than McDonald's changes burger flippers. What is wrong with this picture? Why are Democrats so united and on-message this year and Republicans so fractiously incompetent?

Stay tuned, friends, because this, too, could change. The cracks are growing in the Democratic unity dam. and McCain may be on the verge of getting his act together. Sen. Barack Obama needs to step off his "holier than thou" platform and get his designer shoes dirty. He needs to let voters catch a glimpse of the regular guy who may actually lurk under his veneer of superiority. From using a logo resembling a presidential seal at one speech earlier this year (an obvious error and never seen again) to addressing a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin and meeting with heads of state before he has reason to, Obama's puerile self-absorption may backfire on him and turn off the very voters he needs to turn on: the white working class. His campaign's use of Cecil B. De Mille speaking backdrops rivals Karl Rove's brilliant manipulation of wedge issues. But as Steve Kornacki of the New York Observer notes, this, too, has its downsides:

Mr. Obama's campaign has featured Reagan-like stagecraft that has made his opponents look like midgets, producing an effect that prompted Chris Matthews, in a moment that will haunt him to his grave, to talk of a certain "thrill going up [his] leg." But it never seems to move his polls numbers.

Indeed, according to Gallup and Rasmussen Reports daily tracking polls, Obama's European trip poll bounce dwindled almost immediately to pretrip levels.

See also, "Pro-Bama Media Bias May Mobilize Republican Enthusiasm."

Going Negative: McCain's New Attack Campaign

Unlike some in the GOP, I'm not worried about John McCain's new aggressiveness in attacking Barack Obama's cultural and political liabilities.

The latest indication of McCain's increasing focus is the new "Celeb" ad buy:

Here's the text:

He's the biggest celebrity in the world.
But, is he ready to lead?
With gas prices soaring, Barack Obama says no to offshore drilling.
And, says he'll raise taxes on electricity.
Higher taxes, more foreign oil, that's the real Obama.
JOHN MCCAIN: I'm John McCain and I approved this message.

Here's some analysis on McCain's new tack:

As Obama seems to be preparing to become president following his whirlwind trip to the Middle East and Europe, the McCain campaign is stepping up its criticisms with an aggressive new communications strategy.

McCain, himself, has suggested that Obama would prefer to lose the Iraq war in order to win the election. He has run a television ad blaming Obama for high gas prices, and has criticized him for skipping a meeting with injured U.S. troops in Germany because he couldn't bring television cameras along. All are charges that the Obama campaign vehemently disputes and are disputable.

But McCain advisers say that Obama's hyper-charged celebrity is one thing not open for debate, noting that no one else could just show up in Berlin to find 200,000 Germans screaming his name.

"There are some things about this race that cannot be changed. The fact that Barack Obama is the biggest celebrity in the world is a fundamental truth in the eyes of most Americans and people around the world," said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds. "We cannot argue against what is true. What we can make a case for is that despite his enormous celebrity status, his policies and his positions are not what the American people want in a president because he's inexperienced and his policies underscore a lack of judgment that Americans will not vote for in November."

In the meantime, the Obama camp is squirming under the microscope.

Perhaps Obama's non-bounce from the European tour is proving just how politically disastrous the trip was.

Ludacris Raps Assassination Chic for Obama

Ludacris, the popular rap music star, is known for glamorizing "a life of guns, violence, drugs and disrespect of women."

So perhaps it's unexceptional that Ludacris would attack presumptive GOP nominee John McCain as not belonging in "any chair," in the Oval Office or otherwise, "unless he's paralyzed." Via Gateway Pundit, Hot Air, and The Swamp:

Here are the key lyrics:

... so get off your ass, black people, it's time to get out and vote!
paint the White House black and I'm sure that's got 'em terrified
McCain don't belong in ANY chair unless he's paralyzed ...

So, is this racist?

Not for Spencer Ackerman:

Dave Weigel tipped me off to Hot Air posting this as an example of what they're too pussy-assed to call Luda's unforgivable blackness. But look: you're playing into our hands. Play every race card you want. Expose yourselves completely and irrevocably. Get out there on the record. Just remember what they say about payback.

Assassination chic, defended with some extreme left-wing demonology of vengeance.

Well then, who's exposing whom?

Turns out that Obama's hip to it, in any case: "Outrageously Offensive."