Colin McEnroe | To Wit

Stayin' Up Late

Bill Clinton has struck again -- against his own wife.

He brought up the nearly dormant "landing under sniper fire" issue yesterday in Indiana. He said his wife misspoke because it was late and she was tired. Criticizing the reporters who seized on it, he added:

"And some of them when they're 60 they'll forget something when they're tired at 11 at night, too."

Isn't Hillary Clinton's big claim that she is razor sharp at 3 a.m.?

Now, according to him, she's so old and fuzzy that she starts hallucinating before the "Tonight Show" comes on.

My Kingdom for a White Person

And then there's this!

Maybe McCain and Obama can work out some kind of audience exchange program.

Old White Guy + Old White Guy With Glasses = Diversity

I had to look carefuly at this photo to reassure myself it was not a John McCain clone introducing his host organism. Had he replicated through mitosis? No, it was just Chris Shays. The other day one of  McCain's many ill-considered introducers caused a few raised eyebrows when he compared Tiger Woods, unflatteringly, to McCain. I have no idea what that meant or whether anyone should care about it; but I think it was a pretty random comment that drew undue attention because the face of the McCain campaign has been, over and over, the face of old white men. With a few young white men sprinkled in sometimes.  Condi Rice rumors notwithstanding, they don't even seem to be trying to make this look inclusive. It's the Last Hurrah of the Oldigarchy. David Letterman said McCain looks like the guy who makes the keys at the hardware store. It's as if this campaign consists of nothing but those guys, marching down mainstreet in their True Value aprons.

I'm not making a value judgment here. Just questioning the stagecraft. Why don't they at least pretend this isn't happening?

So Hillary compares herself to Rocky?

Yes, she does.

I'm stealing this idea from a caller to my show, but ... does Hillary know the plot of "Rocky?" She said in Pennsylvania she has "a lot in common" with Rocky.

She's losing a close decision to a black man?

The Bogey Woman

Somebody shared with me an email hit piece on Michelle Obama who -- I believe -- will be the next fake issue in the anti-Obama movement.  The candidates are heaving chainsaws at each other -- to use Joe Klein's metaphor -- and you can expect to see Ms. O spinning and whirring and roaring through the air in the coming weeks.

Already the infamous (and, I concede, ill-advised) quote about when she finally became proud of America seems -- in my experience -- to have a kind of force multiplier effect when joined to the Pastor Wright jeremiads. It proves something to certain people, although I'm not sure what.

The email hit piece was clearly the work of an intelligent mind. It was carefully worded and slickly packaged, with a series of uncharitably chosen photos intended to make Obama look like some kind of Extra Scary Negress. The one that appears at the bottom is especially effective, with Obama's pupils sitting high in their sockets, evoking the unmistakeable movie iconography of a person possessed by Satan.  It made me remember the way, in the Fifties, white people almost seemed to get a kind of shivery fun from being scared of black people.  Whooooo! They're dark and different. Whooooo! They smoke reefer and talk to snakes and practice voodoo and dance the watusi and eat pig's feet. Whoooo! What if one of them is right outside your window right now? The Bogey Man!!!

The hit piece deals -- are you ready? -- with Obama's senior thesis at Princeton. This term paper has already been an issue in the campaign, and I predict that it will become more of one, particularly if it's done as a whispering campaign, the way the Obama-is-a-Muslim canard was spread.

The hit piece misrepresents Obama's senior thesis, which is available in full at Politico.com and which is analyzed by an actual sane person here.  Yes, it has a somewhat aggrieved tone. (Hey, she was a senior in college. Are there any college seniors who aren't crazy and pissed off about something? If so, they're the ones you should worry about. College is where you're supposed to get some of this stuff out of your system. )

But by and large, the thesis asks a remarkably subtle question. What are the pluses and minuses of building up a strong, separate, highly networked racial or ethnic community before attempting to join a specific minority group to the majority? It's explicitly the question posed by -- on the one hand -- Colin Powell and Condi Rice (just join and don't look back ...much) and -- on the other -- the Obama/Patrick/Booker movement within the Democratic Party, where there seems to have been an effort by blacks to cultivate and develop leaders who have distinct ties to the black community but not ties that limit them. They've shrugged off the rhetoric -- and indeed the inflections -- of Jackson and Sharpton; but they bring their own version of black identity with them.

In an odd way, American is now writing its own senior thesis, the yin complement to Michelle's yang. We're asking ourselves how completely sterilized and de-natured a black candidate has to be in order to serve as president.  Some people would prefer no black president at all. Some would prefer a person much more like Powell whose footprints in the white snow don't really lead back to a scary place in the black woods. (It would be interesting to know what Powell really thinks about the racial flyspecking of the Obamas.  I bet, in places of his heart, it makes him a little angry, even while it kind of comfirms a lot of his own life choices.)

If recent poll numbers are any inclinations, maybe we're a little more grown up than I would have guessed. There seem to be a lot of people who understand that Barack Obama could have sat in church listening to the breadth of arguments made by Wright and discarded the ones that struck him as outdated and crazy.

I bet there are lot of people who, also, cannot look at themselves in the bathroom mirror and say the words, "I cannot vote for this man, because of his wife's college term paper," without feeling a little silly. 

Meanwhile, the people who are circulating this kind of material are, it must be said, despicable. It is cheap hate-mongering. I don't really want to go there, but if we get into some kind of trash-the-spouse pissing contest, neither Cindy McCain nor Bill Clinton is going to look very appetiizing. Obama seems to have lived her life in a more unformly high-minded -- if occasionally fiery -- manner then either of them.

Best New Excuse

I was late to work because of "sniper fire."

Psssst! It's Shiite Extremists!! Doing everything we can! Also, I wuv you.

John McCain doesn't have to achieve full understanding of the situation in Iraq as long as Joe Lieberman is there to whisper in his ear. It's so Ron 'n'  Nancy!

A last best offer

I don't know what more you could ask him to do or say.

He explained his relationship to the pastor and -- as a somewhat separate matter -- the church. He repudiated the distasteful content.

But he wasn't a weasel. He didn't sell Wright out. He didn't get on his knees to anybody, and he didn't throw anybody under a bus.

He re-stated, again eloquently, who he is. The white parts and the black parts.

He invited us to consider the roots of black anger. And then the roots of white anger. (As my friend Rand Cooper said, this is what they ask you to do in most kinds of counseling. State the other person's position as if it were your own, just to make sure you understand it.)

And then, as he always does, he told us what we have in common.

I'm not sure I'd go quite as far as Andrew Sullivan:

... this searing, nuanced, gut-wrenching, loyal, and deeply, deeply Christian speech is the most honest speech on race in America in my adult lifetime. It is a speech we have all been waiting for for a generation. Its ability to embrace both the legitimate fears and resentments of whites and the understandable anger and dashed hopes of many blacks was, in my view, unique in recent American history.

And it was a reflection of faith - deep, hopeful, transcending faith in the promises of the Gospels. And it was about America - its unique promise, its historic purpose, and our duty to take up the burden to perfect this union - today, in our time, in our way.

I have never felt more convinced that this man's candidacy - not this man, his candidacy - and what he can bring us to achieve - is an historic opportunity. This was a testing; and he did not merely pass it by uttering safe bromides. He addressed the intimate, painful love he has for an imperfect and sometimes embittered man. And how that love enables him to see that man's faults and pain as well as his promise. This is what my faith is about. It is what the Gospels are about. This is a candidate who does not merely speak as a Christian. He acts like a Christian.

Andrew gets a little operatic about this stuff.

In some ways, it was a moment in which a weakness, paradoxically, played to the candidate's strength. Obama is at his best when talking positively about race, identity and unity.  He has been talking and writing about it for years now. Wright, in all probability, has been a sort of gale force wind that helped Obama define himself and locate his own set of core principles. Part of figuring out who you want to be, in your 20s and 30s, usually involves a bit of figuring out who you don't want to be.

In a weird way, Obama is sort of lucky he gets to talk about this stuff instead of explaining how he'd dig us out of a recession. I'm sure he's nowhere near as reassuring or inspiring on that score. But then who is?

Watching and reading this speeech, my mind locked on the words of another esteemed American politician.

"And you know, if that's not enough for people, then heck, don't vote for him. "

That was Hillary Clinton, talking about her husband on "60 Minutes" in 1992. She took a lot of crap for saying it at the time, but I thought it made a certain amount of sense. There's only so much explaining you can do. And when you hit that wall, you just have to say, "OK. This is me. This is as good as I get.  Buy the car or walk away, because I'm all done negotiating." It's how I feel about Obama after this speech, and I bet it's how he feels too.

Jeremiads

The big joke about Barack Obama's candidacy is that America is ready for a black president, but he has to be utterly free -- scrubbed and purged -- of any form of black rage, any deep emotions about the underlying unfairnesses, the things that never got fixed, the permanently stalled and frequently imprisoned black underclass. Our black president cannot be angry about any of that.

It's sort of an insane idea. It's like saying we want a crazy person as president. If I were a black man, I'd be angry every damned day.

The thing is, we did the impossible. We found a smart, charismatic, sane black politician who is determined to run forward, gathering us together as one, cutting the cords to the grievances of the past. He's not perfect, but he's been pretty steadfast about the idea of serving everybody and not getting worked up about "black things." People say he's not black enough or he's too black or he's got no business being where he is. He doesn't take the bait. That is just not how this cat rolls. He's amazing that way. If I were in his shoes, well, you don't even wanna know what I would have said back to Geraldine Ferraro.

So we did the impossible, like I said. We found the one viable black politician in America who isn't angry about things that have been done to black people, or who at least hasn't let that poison any corner of his rhetoric or conduct.

And you know what?

It's not enough. It turns out we want even more than that. We want a black candidate who has somehow lived to middle age in America without ever rubbing elbows with anybody who's mad in that way. Somehow, you have to have made it into your forties without ever having a significant association with an angry black American. Baby, that is going to be very hard to do.

As far as I can tell though, that's what Obama's critics are asking him to explain. How could you know somebody like that? How come you didn't storm out of the room anytime anybody went off on white folks? And you know what?  As usual, Obama has produced a very good answer.

In some ways, what folks are objecting to us is just the very nature of old time black religion. You go to church, and the service is long and loud and heavy on theatrics. And that man in the pulpit, his job is to fill you with fire. And he uses drama and hyperbole and emotion to do it. And you sit there and -- yeah -- maybe that isn't exactly how you feel these days but once in a while it's meaningful to hear someone else say how, in some ways, your people are still in chains. Worth pondering, later, at the coffee hour, to what to degree you're down with that sentiment.

I'm sure the Powells go to some real nice Episcopalian joint in D.C. where don't nobody talk no mess. But if Obama went some place like that, he'd have even more people saying he's not black enough.

I don't see any indication in the man that he would have ever done much more than shake his head and chuckle and say, "There goes Jeremiah again!" Do you?

You know, church doesn't have to be boring.

A Giant Sucking Sound

One of the sad lessons of this season of hope is that we seem still bitterly divided against one another. Women don't trust men. Blacks don't trust whites. Jews don't trust blacks. And I don't like anybody very much. I worry. I hear the small minded rhetoric of Geraldine Ferraro, and I wince. I read the inflammatory nonsense of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and I flinch. The campaigns keep dumping personnel and cutting ties, because nobody seems to know how to play nice.

In the case of Wright, Obama is in a horrible position, but I don't think he can afford to waste many tears on his old pastor. Wright's behavior has become so bizarre as to raise real questions about whether he wants his parishoner to be president.

And somehow, the ugliness has to stop. This is starting to feel like a squandered opportunity, for both Democratic candidates.