The current concern about Romney recalls anxieties about Mormons and Catholics from the nineteenth century, when both churches evoked suspicion. Critics thought of them as “fanatics,” a stereotype applied to Catholics, Mormons, Masons, and Muslims. They feared that leaders of these groups would employ their spiritual authority over blindly loyal followers to magnify their own power. Any prophet claiming to speak for God, they reasoned, must necessarily try to impose his beliefs on everyone else. But this argument, while based on logic, was impervious to fact. The real-world actions of Mormons and Catholics, and their protestations of innocence, meant nothing. ~Prof. Richard Lyman Bushman

It may be worth noting that Prof. Bushman frequently returns to this old charge of fanaticism when discussing this issue.  It is something like the lens through which he is viewing the entire controversy over Mormonism in our presidential politics today.  It was part of one of the replies (sorry, the TNR overlords have locked up the previously free debate) that he gave to Linker during their online debate.  Linker complained that he had never used the word fanatic–while doing everything he could to hint that Mormons were all basically fanatics-in-waiting–but Prof. Bushman had him pretty well cornered.  As I noted at the time, Linker was proceeding with a pretty impeccably logical polemic that brought his negative assumptions about the political dangers of Mormonism to their logical conclusions.  The only trouble with this was that the actual history, the reality of Mormons in American politics, did not support his nicely designed polemic.  Linker was convinced that he had proven his polemical point, and the targets of the polemic were equally convinced that he could not possibly be referring to them because he could not cite a single real episode where his fears of Mormon church interference in politics had been realised.

As I wrote at the time of the debate just a little under two weeks ago:

It seems to me that it is quite one thing to note that Mormons are not Christians and for Christian voters to take that into account when judging a Mormon candidate.  It is quite another thing to conjure up rather far-reaching, implausible scenarios of Mormon domination when the historical record suggests that nothing could be further from the minds of the Mormons themselves. 

To that I would add that Prof. Bushman’s latest article is very good but ultimately ends up targeting a kind of anti-Mormon criticism that barely exists anymore.  The concern of secularists who are anxious about a Mormon President is much more basic: they don’t trust anyone who believes as divinely revealed things they regard as patently absurd.  There is virtually no reasoning with such a view, since every attempt to show reasonableness or coherence within a religious framework will simply leave such critics cold.  Yet the Weisbergs of the world do not fear rule from Salt Lake City–they fear giving power to someone who thinks that the Lamanites actually existed.  Other opposition to Mormonism is of a fairly different nature as well.  The concern of most Christian voters who are put off by Romney’s Mormonism is not that Mormons are “fanatics” as such or that they are liable to follow the orders of their church authorities with blind zeal, but that they areMormons in the first place.  It is a concern about what kind of symbolism and identity they are willing to endorse, and whether Mormons fit within their Christian identity.  Pretty plainly, a sizeable number of Christians hold that they do not fit. 

This should not distress true-believing Mormons, as I have said in the past, since they claim to be the true successor to the Church of the Apostles and view all others as frauds.  Given such a view, it is inevitable that Christians would consider Mormon and Christian identity to be mutually exclusive, just as Mormons, if they are serious about their founding claims, must see their true “Christian” identity and our “apostate” identity to be mutually exclusive.

Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?

This is the question Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s camp is asking about Sen. Barack Obama.

An investigation of Mr. Obama by political opponents within the Democratic Party has discovered that Mr. Obama was raised as a Muslim by his stepfather in Indonesia. Sources close to the background check, which has not yet been released, said Mr. Obama, 45, spent at least four years in a so-called Madrassa, or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia.

“He was a Muslim, but he concealed it,” the source said. “His opponents within the Democrats hope this will become a major issue in the campaign.” ~Insight

You had to wonder when something like this was going to come up.  People thought the middle name he received from his Muslim grandfather would be a problem–I’m sure that his supporters now wish that was his only connection to Islam.  On the other hand, when they referred to his upbringing in Indonesia, reporters thought they were doing Obama a favour (it made him wonderfully worldly and multicultural, you see), but until now people hadn’t brought up the logical Muslim connection.  Why were they in Indonesia, after all, and what did he do while he was there?  The point of the Democratic attacks dogs is that he concealed something about himself, but what a thing to conceal in the present environment! 

The concealment will probably hurt him more than the substance of what he concealed, but all of it is probably very bad for him.  This would be bad enough for the average pol, but for the Boy Wonder who will supposedly bring us a new politics filled with integrity and goodness it could be catastrophic.  Obviously, the fact he apparently used to be a Muslim will be a serious blow to any of his efforts to reach across those “traditional political lines” he is supposed to be so good at crossing (at least rhetorically).  He might be able to use it to his advantage because he has since left Islam behind and turned to Christianity, and if he struck the right tone he might be able to convince people that he is a more credible authority on the nature of the Islamic terrorist threat because of his background.  Nonetheless, it will raise serious doubts in the minds of many people that Obama needs as supporters.  More than that, if these claims are confirmed, they will do to Obama what the Mormon issue is doing to Romney by creating a serious problem for voters’ ability to identify with Obama and his biography.  Fair or not, when people hear that he attended a madrassa in Indonesia for several years, even though Indonesia is admittedly a country that would have been at that time still relatively untouched by Wahhabist infiltration, the words “security threat” are more likely to come to mind than “future President.”  

The biggest problem for Obama is that this revelation, if confirmed, will burst his bubble of content-free, feel-good media coverage.  Another problem is that it serves as a huge distraction and a potential source of confusion for anyone paying attention at this early stage.  Obama was supposed to be gearing up for his announcement next month, and now he will have to either deny, dismissively bat down or confront this story.  The news coverage will still be about him, but it will not be the flattering, “He has come to save us!” reporting to which we have been subjected so far.  If the Clinton team was the one that engineered this leak, it shows that they have lost none of their old capacity for dirty tricks and a willingness to take down anyone who gets in their way.

And yet, literally billions of our neighbors deem the contents of the Bible and the Qur’an to be so profound as to rule out the possibility of terrestrial authorship. ~Sam Harris

If I made it my business to be a professional religion-basher, and if I thought getting my criticism of religion was right as an important way to shine the light of reason on the darkened corners of religious minds, I would at the very least get my facts straight about certain key elements of the religions I was bashing.  Christians and Muslims agree that their scriptures are authored by God in the sense that they accept that the revelation comes from God.  They do not agree that revelation came in unmediated form and that the text as set down in its complete form (which, of course, was a redacted and edited form also in the case of the Qur’an) is the uncreated Word of God.  Muslims believe this, Christians do not. 

Therein lies one of the most significant differences between the two religions, and the one that has possibly has done the most damage of the intellectual culture of the Islamic world than any other.  As I understand it, the Qur’an is not open to hermeneutics of any kind, and there is no other way to understand it except literally, where by literally I mean there is no possibility of interpreting the same text in several different senses.  That creates certain obvious problems for the possibility of reconciling revelation and other sources of truth, since multivalence in a religious text is effectively impossible without some room for interpretation.  On the other hand, Christians acknowledge, as they have acknowledged since the beginning, that Scripture is a divine revelation mediated through inspired authors and the composition of the texts is attributed to various patriarchs and apostles.  (We can set aside for the moment the high criticism’s doubts about the traditional attributions of books of the Bible.)  Terrestrial authorship, in the sense that it was understood that the Scriptures themselves were set down by men according to the revelation, is not only a possibility for Christians, but it is taken for granted and assumed to be the case. 

Muslims do not have a tradition of remembering the Composers of the Qur’an as they remember the Companions of the Prophet, because they believe that Jibril spoke the Qur’an to Muhammad and that was it.  Christians commemorate and many venerate the Evangelists and others in recognition of what can only be called terrestrial authorship of Scripture.  That they also take Scripture to be true and inerrant is not surprising, but they plainly do not rule out “the possibility of terrestrial authorship.”    

There was an awareness from the beginning that the accounts of the Gospels differed and there was also an awareness of the potential problems and contradictions in Scripture.  Because of the possibility of having multiple senses in which one could read Scripture, it became possible to interpret revelation on the assumption that God guided the Fathers and the authorities of the Church in this work of interpretation and teaching.  Undoubtedly Mr. Harris will spew forth venom at all of this as well, but for him to do that he would first have to know about it, which he evidently does not from the comments that he made.

Andrew Sullivan, the vicar of doubt, is debating Sam Harris, ueber-atheist, in a blogalogue.  For me, this is like watching the Raiders play the Cowboys: the only thing to do is simply root for injuries and mistakes.

Joseph Pearce has started more regular blogging at Small Is Still Beautiful.  He has two new posts this week: one on globalisation and one on the related problems of global free trade.  In the latest Mr. Pearce challenges what he calls “economic correctness,” in which support for free trade becomes the moral position against which it is not permitted to argue:

Global free trade has become an unquestionable moral dogma enshrined at the heart of modern economic theory. Aware of this “economic correctness”, politicians and economists are reluctant to question its presumptions and are failing to confront or even comprehend the effects of free trade on a world economy that is changing radically. Yet with rapid technological innovation it is possible, even likely, that the globalization of trade will destabilize the (post)industrialized world while at the same time exacerbating the problems facing the developing world.
 

The dogma of free trade has its roots in the nineteenth century and is based on the interrelated concepts of specialization and comparative advantage. Free trade theory stipulates that countries should specialize in those economic activities in which they excel in order to achieve a competitive edge, or a comparative advantage. They should abandon less efficient activities, relying on imports. These imports are paid for by exporting the surplus produced in the specialized industries. The result is greater efficiency and productivity and, therefore, higher levels of prosperity.
The rapid changes in the world over the past few decades throw the whole theory into question. New technology has made the global marketplace a practical, as opposed to a theoretical, reality. This has far-reaching consequences. During the past few years, four billion more people have entered the world economy. China, India, the countries of the Pacific rim and those of the former Soviet empire have all joined, or are trying to join, the Promised Land of global consumerism.
Sooner or later this is likely to cause major disruption. Labour costs in the developing world are as little as one-fiftieth of those in the developed, or over-developed, world. Since the free movement of technology and capital has `levelled the playing field’ the underpaid workers of the third world are now in direct competition with their comparatively rich counterparts in Europe and America. The workers of India, China and Bangladesh are part of the same global labour market as the workers of Britain and the United States. The implications are clear. Two identical enterprises, one in Britain and one in Vietnam, produce an identical product, using identical technology, destined for identical markets. They both have access to the same pool of international capital. Indeed they are both part of the same multinational corporation. There is only one significant difference: labour costs in Vietnam are one-fiftieth of those in Britain. It is not necessary to be an economist to realize which enterprise has the comparative advantage.

I know many of you have already jumped in and have been commenting at SISB for many days, but I encourage everyone to go see what Mr. Pearce is saying and, from what I have read so far I would recommend the book to you all.

Unlike Jesse Jackson with his epochal primary and caucus victories in the 1980s, Obama is not a protest candidate dissed and dismissed by party insiders, but a mainstream contender with a plausible route to the nomination and the White House. ~Walter Shapiro

You mean Carol Mosley-Braun wasn’t a contender?  Her seventeen voters will be devastated to hear that.

What is Obama’s “plausible route” to the nomination?  Forget about winning it all for a minute.  How does he win any of the primaries, much less enough of them to wrap up the whole thing?  People say these things about Obama being a serious contender, as if wishes were election outcomes, but they never provide the explanation for how Obama might plausibly become the next Democratic nominee.  Where is he going to win?  Maybe he wins in New Hampshire, or maybe he gets a Howard Dean-respectable (but disappointing) second place and it goes downhill from there.  Years from now, people will tell of how they were there in the winter of ’06 when Obama first came to New Hampshire and how nothing he did later could stir up the kind of sheer spontaneous interest that first visit generated.  This might be because he is not actually that interesting.  He is a politician of conventional liberal views perfectly suited to his party and his original constituents in northeastern Illinois, and he has impressive rhetorical skills and a telegenic personality.  That’s all.  He has not come to lead you, the Democrats, to the Promised Land.   

I see no realistic scenario in which he wins in Iowa, which is a virtual lock for Vilsack, or Nevada, which some see as Edwards’ likely stomping grounds, and I assume that South Carolina will probably also be Edwards’ for the taking.  (These assessments start to run contrary to my assumption that losing VP candidates never win their party’s presidential nomination, but right now Edwards has many advantages, including a message, that Obama does not have.)  After that, the primary calendar in February looks fairly grim for Obama: Delaware (Biden’s home state), Missouri, D.C., Tennessee, Virginia, Wisconsin, Arizona, Hawaii and Idaho.  Maybe Hawaiians will go for their “native son,” but most the rest of these, save Wisconsin and D.C., form a roll call of states where left-liberals fear to tread.  He probably wins D.C. and gets few delegates for his trouble.  Wisconsin would have gone to Feingold, had he decided to run, and could fall to Obama, but it is hardly certain.  (And yes, I know that it is somewhat ridiculous to be talking about these things a year in advance.)  Therefore, he stands a good chance of being fifth or sixth in the delegate count (behind, say, Clinton, Edwards, Biden, Clark, and Vilsack) at the end of February, which is not where he would need to be if he were going to win it all.  If Obama is going to win the whole shooting match, he has to pull off victories in three of the first four votes.  That is what he needs to convince people that he is a serious candidate, even if it would take fewer victories to secure frontrunner status for someone else, because he is so inexperienced and unprepared for what he is about to undertake.   

States with major metropolitan areas that would probably be most favourable to Obama don’t begin coming up until at least Super Tuesday when Massachusetts and New York roll around, and as it stands now he has to wait until March 18 for Illinois’ primary.  There are attempts in the works to move Illinois to early February, but failing that Obama’s presumed natural base of support in this state may end up doing him little good if he cannot survive until that vote.  California deceptively waits at the end on June 10 like a mirage for the man dying in the desert, offering the illusory hope that it might rescue a failing campaign at the very end of the primaries.  The nomination will have been wrapped up by then, as it always, always is.  The new calendar has ensured that the nominee will be known even sooner than in previous contests.  The other big hitters will keep going through Super Tuesday for the sake of form, but it is fair to assume that whoever gets the early lead wins.  Someone like Vilsack winning it all is looking less implausible by the day, while Obama’s implausible candidacy just gets harder and harder to take.

These aren’t Vulcans.  There are Klingons in the White House.  But unlike the real [sic] Klingons, these guys have never fought a battle of their war.  Don’t let faux Klingons send real Americans to war. ~Rep. David Wu (D-OR), dragging down a good speech against pro-war ideologues with a fairly lame and strained joke about Bush’s foreign policy “Vulcans” led by Condi Rice.

Yes, Gov. Romney is a Mormon. We are not. According to the liberal media, this is an unbridgeable gap, and evangelicals will never turn out to support a faithful Mormon like Governor Romney. As usual, the media have it wrong. And they root their error (as usual) in a fundamental misunderstanding about American evangelicals—seeing us as ignorant and intolerant simpletons who are incapable of making sophisticated political value judgments. ~Evangelicals for Mitt

A reader has alerted me to this pro-Romney site.  It is worth a look to see the arguments of evangelicals who are willing to look past Romney’s Mormonism and support him based on shared policy views.  For what it’s worth, I don’t think evangelicals who refuse to vote for Romney because of his Mormonism are “intolerant simpletons” incapable of making “sophisticated political value judgements.”  I think these evangelicals actually believe someone’s religion really matters for the formation of his worldview and they actually prefer having a Christian, probably preferably a Christian who shares their entire faith and experience as evangelicals, as the person to represent them.  This is completely understandable and even laudable.  There are evangelicals for whom Mormonism is a bridge too far, and there are those for whom it is not, but the first group outnumbers the latter and, I suspect, feels much more strongly about it.  In the primaries, the antis will overwhelm the pros. 

Back to the quote.  Perhaps it is because of their disdain for evangelicals that the liberal media have played up Romney’s Mormonism as being in conflict with evangelical voters, or perhaps it is because they enjoy pushing the “religious politics has come back to haunt the GOP” narrative, or perhaps it is just because they like to report on conflict that will generate interest in presidential election reporting in early 2007 when most people are more concerned with the NFL playoffs or paying off their Christmas bills.  I don’t know the real reason why they’re talking about it. 

But it probably has something to do with anecdotal evidence of anti-Mormon opposition among evangelicals and the slightly more scientific evidence that half of all evangelicals would never consider voting for a Mormon.  It certainly has to do with evidence that four out of ten voters from the general population would likewise not even consider it.  Maybe the other approximately half of evangelicals will enthusiastically vote for him and “evangelicals for Mitt” will not have the odd, out-of-place sound to it that “hawks for Kucinich” or “pacifists for Gingrich” have.  Even so, losing half of the evangelical vote before he was even officially in the race on the Mormon issue alone is a political death blow to an avowedly social conservative candidate. 

Let’s go back to those Rasmussen numbers and look at how they break down.  Who are these anti-Mormon voters?  It turns out that they are from pretty much every possible group.  Some are more likely to refuse consideration of such a vote, but there are high levels (30%+)of resistance across the board.  Remember that this is a straight-up yes or no question: would you ever consider voting for a Mormon for President?  Those opposed are not leaving Romney any room with which he can work: they will never consider it.

43% of Catholics say they would never consider voting for a Mormon, and 36% of Protestants (classified separately from evangelicals) and 53% of evangelicals say the same.  That’s a lot of people with religious affiliations who say, “No, thank you” when presented with a Mormon presidential candidate.  That’s without asking any other questions of him.  What about his policy views, his “values”?  These are apparently irrelevant. 

Opposition intensifies in direct proportion to a voter’s frequency of religious attendance: only 37% of those who rarely or never attend services are unwilling, 44% of weekly attendees are unwilling to consider such a vote and 59% of people who attend services more than once a week are unwilling.  This makes sense.  The more practically religious you are, the more a candidate’s religious identity will probably matter to you.  But that doesn’t get away from the startling fact that over a third of people who almost never go into a church will never vote for a Mormon presidential candidate.  Against such huge numbers and strong opposition no candidate can hope to prevail.  There is not enough time, even if he had the luxury of trying, to “educate” the voters on what it means to be Mormon.  This education is almost certainly needed, if only to root out egregious and obvious errors of fact that have lodged in the public consciousness, but the middle of a presidential campaign is neither the time nor the place for it.  In popular culture (see Big Love or Entourage), mainstream Mormonism is still associated, incorrectly, with polygamy, which has not been helped by Romney hamming it up with jokes about marriage being between “a man and a woman…and a woman and a woman.”  Yes, that’s very droll, Mitt, but it only works if everyone knows that Mormons no longer practice polygamy.  It would not be a surprise to me if a great many people still don’t know that or if they easily confuse Mormon splinter groups with the main LDS church.  In any case, Romney is banking on the public being relatively well-informed about the internal affairs of a relatively obscure religious group with which most people have no dealings, and this is a losing bet.   

The chances of a Mormon candidate are worse among women than among just about any other group: 47% would not consider voting for one for President, while only 38% of men would not.  Party affiliation does seem to make some significant difference.  Pat yourselves on the backs, Republicans–you are marginally more accepting of Mormon presidential candidates than much of the rest of America!  Among Republicans, 42% would consider voting for a Mormon, 40% wouldn’t.  Among Democrats, opposition is greater (32% willing vs. 51% unwilling).  Of the three options, those not affiliated with either are least likely to be opposed to considering a vote for a Mormon (42/33).

Ideology does not seem to matter in determining a refusal to support a Mormon candidate.  Each group (conservative, moderate, liberal) has equally high levels of refusal to consider such a vote (43, 44, 41% respectively).  Liberals are slightly more likely (44%) to consider voting for a Mormon, and conservatives the next most likely (39%).  Curiously enough, “moderates” are the least willing (34%).  People of indeterminate ideology (“not sure”) are just as opposed (43%) and even less willing to consider voting for a Mormon (25%).  The conservative numbers seem to mirror the overall national results of 38% willing to consider a vote and 43% unwilling.  Obviously, if Romney loses almost half of conservatives from the beginning before he even opens his mouth, he has no realistic chance in the primaries.  To have a fighting chance, he would have to get every single vote of those who are open to voting for a Mormon, and he simply isn’t going to get all those votes.

How important a candidate’s faith is to voters heavily determines opposition.  Among those who say it is “very important,” opposition is intense (59%), and among those who say it is “somewhat important” opposition is still considerable (38%).  Almost inexplicably, though, among those for whom a candidate’s faith is “not very” or “not at all important” there are still large numbers who would never consider such a vote (31 and 30% respectively).  There is clearly not just an intense religious opposition to a Mormon presidential candidate, but what seems to be a generalised, nationwide, cross-cutting cultural hostility that can be found in virtually every group of people in America. 

If Mitt Romney could somehow get himself elected President in the midst of this, he would have to be considered one of the great political and campaigning geniuses of the last century.  No offense to Gov. Romney, but however good he is he isn’t that good of a campaigner.  I don’t think someone with the political skills of Clinton and Reagan combined could pull this off.  What he is trying to do is, for all intents and purposes, impossible.  At best he might hope for a few decent second-place finishes in a few places and shoot for the VP slot, but even in that case his Mormonism seems likely to be a weight that will drag any GOP ticket down (after all, if all these people won’t vote for a Mormon for President, why would they vote for a Mormon to be first in line for the Presidency?).

With all of this in mind, there is something that needs to be said clearly and as often as necessary to make the point: Romney’s religion is a problem not just for the Jacob Weisbergs and evangelicals out there, but it is more or less a problem to some large degree for every kind of non-Mormon American out there.  It roughly splits the country down the middle between those who would never even consider the possibility of a Mormon President and those who are open to that possibility.  It would be worth inquiring how it is that Mormons can be distrusted this much by such a wide variety of people.  Christians are obviously more likely to view Mormonism poorly for religious reasons, and secularists are apt to view it at least as poorly as they view other religions, but how exactly does anti-Mormonism become such a general phenomenon such that at least one-third of every group into which they broke down this polling information was firmly opposed to a Mormon President?  Is it mainly a product of Christian opposition to Mormon theological errors?  Is it leftover disdain for past polygamous practices being transferred to the modern church?

2007 will be the Year of Insufferable Media Coverage Of A No-Hope Candidate, for Obama is running for President.  Websites like this one will be everywhere, and the Hawaiian tourism authority will soon consecrate his birthplace as a locus sanctus Democraticus where weary white yuppie pilgrims can come to pay homage to the genius of Obama and receive remission for their guilty feelings about being white and privileged, for Obama is running for President.  Members of Oprah’s Book Club will receive complimentary photographs of Obama swimming at the beach, and hundreds of people with IQs over 120 will be poring over the saccharine, “let’s unite America” drivel of The Audacity of Hope in dire earnest as they attempt to scry Obama’s views on…well, on anything at all, for Obama is running for President.  The way things are going there might even be, God help us, a line of action figures before the year is out.

I am here to tell you, friends, that this particular episode of national lunacy will be mercifully brief, though it has already gone on for far, far too long.  By this time next year, Obama will have had to say something distinctive about substantive policy.  He will have to cast votes on the war and numerous other issues that he will have to be able to defend, and this time he won’t have a cartoon opponent like Alan Keyes to overcome. 

What he says is almost beside the point.  Some people will agree, probably more will disagree, but at that point the dream of an Obama who will reconcile all oppositions within himself will be over.  That is inevitable in political contestation, which is why the promise to “bring people together” is always such an illusory, deceitful one.  Once he finally does say something, he will no longer be Barack, Font of National Good Feelings, but will become a rather conventional and boring pol who will either reveal himself to be a dreary technocrat spouting, Gore-like, minute details of legislation or the creamless cream puff I take him to be.  Because of his inexperience and the superficial nature of his appeal to date, he will probably take the technocratic route to show that he “understands the issues” and he will overcompensate here.  He will cease to charm, and he will try to persuade by rattling off facts and figures.   

I do not say all this because I assume all of the superficial charm and media hype will not influence voters.  They will influence many voters.  But the influence will not last, the charm will get old and at some point the hype will die down.  That is when the real Obama, the first-term U.S. Senator who hasn’t had real high-stakes electoral competition and hasn’t had to prove himself in a tough statewide contest, much less on the national stage, will emerge.  He will try to split the difference as a progressive who doesn’t speak in prophetic utterances about our impending doom.  In so doing, his fluffy style will attract all of the DLC types who will be revolted by his policy views, while he will be alienating the true lefty believers with his “we need to cooperate and bring America together” rhetoric.  The black activist establishment in the Democratic Party doesn’t really trust him and doesn’t seem to like him very much.  As they see it, he is reaping the rewards of their labour, which is true to the extent that they have helped inculcate profound feelings of guilt among middle-class white people who are fueling the Obama boom, which in turn benefits from the fact that Obama does not inspire these same feelings.  By supporting him, they can expunge their guilt without the danger of acquiring more.  

Any assumption that black votes in early Democratic primaries are locked up for him is a very foolish one.  He cannot, or at least does not, lecture people about slavery and segregation, and he is not really a product of the culture that is preoccupied with these things.  He now comes from the South Side, but he is not of the South Side.  Of course, people here generally like him very much, but does he pass the “authenticity” test elsewhere around the country?  One of the reasons why he apparently causes so many white people to gush and enthuse over his candidacy is that he is not personally tied into American black history.  That is what makes him theoretically viable and electable on the national stage, and it is also what weakens him among black voters in the Democratic primaries.

Obama and Tancredo have both effectively announced for ’08.  At the rate that such unelectable, long-shot candidates are jumping into the race, can it be long before Kinky Friedman throws in his hat?  I say, the more the merrier.  Our postmodern friend, James Poulos, thinks Obama is not just electable but will, in fact, be the nominee.

For some merriment, here is Dennis Kucinich–also running for President–doing some a cappella singing.  If you want some real laughs, just listen to the rest of his speech.  I admire his long-standing opposition to the war, but it’s hard not to laugh when you hear someone say, “Separation is the cause of insularity,” or when he starts rattling off a list of great proponents of nonviolence that starts with “Dr.” King and ends with Jesse Jackson.