This is simply brilliant.

It also underscores the whole point of protecting privacy, particularly given the actions of the DHS, DOJ, and EOP:  it doesn’t matter whether people have “nothing to hide,” the point is that our lives are our own, and people of authority have repeatedly abused their power to see terrorists where there are none, make connections that aren’t significant or in some cases even real, and utilize this information to either (A) directly trample on the rights of individuals or (B) plant within the culture at large the mentality of the panopticon, whereby if we believe someone’s watching at all times, we will discipline ourselves to fall into line.  This goes beyond merely being “not a terrorist,” to avoiding any activities that would even begin to raise suspicion, which in this environment (which is to say, currently a right-leaning quasi-fascist environment in which at the moment we have no right to habeas corpus, and the President has the authority to detain any American citizen at his discretion) doing anything which does not adhere to a very particular ideological notion of what is “patriotic” or what might be “suspicious,” including most kinds of dissent.  

This is not to protect us from terrorists, this is to protect the government (and/or the corporate oligarchy) from the people.  

Apparently we now have a Democratic nominee, although the contest is technically not over, and probably won’t be properly over for another fortnight.  How do I know this now?  Because Tim Russert and the rest of the corporate media blowhards have said so.

I do not say this with snark.  This has been my private assessment to various folks with whom I’m in regular email political discussions.  The fact is that the math for Clinton has been all but impossible for more than a month now, but this has only been officially acknowledged in the MSM after Tuesday’s primary, in which she was trounced in North Carolina and won Indiana just barely.  (That the media pundits should overwhelmingly switch from a “horse race” narrative to “it’s over” despite that those results didn’t really change much is worth a whole other post.)  At any rate, now that the media is thoroughly convinced Clinton is done, she in all probability is done:  superdelegates can side with Obama without fear of hefty scrutiny, voters may feel a vote for Clinton is a throwaway vote (then again maybe not, more of which below), and perhaps most importantly, the real story about the unlikelihood of a Clinton nomination given the math and what she’ll have to do to make Obama “unelectable,” a story that has been the subject of print and blogger analysis for weeks, will hit the idiot box in full.  In short:  now that the corporate media has decided to throw their lot in with Obama, Clinton’s path to the nomination no longer even has the bare semblance of legitimacy that this same media has been giving it.  Which comes to my next point.  Let’s let the estimable Digby lay it out for us:

…there’s nothing wrong with political junkies sitting around the virtual pot-bellied stove and saying the race is “over” or exhorting her to drop out. We’re citizens and, in some cases, political players. There is, however, something unbelievably distasteful about a handful of powerful, millionaire, celebrity pundits “declaring” such a thing and having the paper of record breathlessly report it as if it was decisive and meaningful.

Who the fuck anointed Tim Russert as the final arbiter of anything? His job is to analyze the political landscape not declare the decision as if he were some kind of Roman Emperor giving a thumbs up or thumbs down. It’s bad enough that these gasbags put those thumbs on the scale as hard as they do, but actually taking the initiative to say when the race is over is even worse. To coin a favorite Village phrase, “it’s not their place.”

Amen.  None of these media gasbags are any more informed than the rest of us, at least not in the era of blogging, instant online results, and the private lives of obsessives, to really do some thorough analysis.  Why should a bunch of socially isolated millionaires, most of whom are doing the bidding of corporate interests (whether consciously or unconsciously — paging Antonio Gramsci), state so flatly the “will of the electorate,” as if delivered from on high?  And as Digby states later in the post, we should not forget that, even if you’re a fan of Obama and welcome this pronouncement, it should chill you to the bone that they feel they have the power and influence to do this, because you can bet your ass they will feel no qualms about doing this to Obama, should the occasion present itself. 

That said, I’d like to point out a couple of things.  First, Digby bitches about this now, but there weren’t a lot of posts I recall seeing that illustrated how the MSM was keeping Hillary afloat in much the same way.  First, there’s the fact that (briefly alluded to above) all but a very few pundits and analysts deigned to point out that Clinton’s chances of getting the nomination have been questionable verging on the impossible for some time now.  I’m not suggesting they should have harped on her then as they are now.  But rarely was it ever mentioned that:  

1. The delegate math, barring a truly momentous change in the electorate, was going against her.

2. Despite her campaign’s claim to the contrary, she was unlikely to even pull even in the popular vote (which is not the agreed-upon metric for deciding the nominee anyway).

3. Although in pre-general election matchups both she and Obama beat McCain, and she does do better in the “big states” than he does, she is an albatross for down-ticket races in solidly red states, particularly out West; Obama, meanwhile, actually picks up a few Western states, and is much more competitive overall in every state, meaning that down-ticket races are more competitive and the GOP has more turf to defend.  This sort of analysis was utterly missing.

Secondly, the MSM devoted an inordinate amount of its coverage to the Jeremiah Wright scandal, which, while I suppose “newsworthy,” completely supplanted any substantive coverage on actual issues while simultaneously furthering the distasteful narrative of Obama’s “problem” with “real hard-working blue collar whites.”  (Aside:  it must be Obama’s elitism, and not the racist tendencies of Rust Belt whites, that is the problem; it’s a curious thing that “hard-working” whites west of the Mississippi overwhelmingly favore(d) Obama to Clinton.)

So, Digby’s question of “who the fuck do they think they are” still holds, but really we can trace this back much further (which she does in a different way), which includes the ways in which they kept Clinton afloat.

However…

I question the MSM’s influence.  First of all, not everyone watches cable news or even the network news any more, particularly if you’re under, say, 85.  Secondly, even those ratings, while in the millions, utterly pale in comparison to the number of voters out there, who have hugely varying degrees of interest in and information about the race/candidates.  Also, let’s talk about media effects for a moment.  First of all, it’s well established that media effects are not direct:  nobody sees or hears anything in the media and simply replicates this in practice (this view, often known as the “magic bullet theory” or “the hypodermic needle model” was disproved more than fifty years ago).  There are also chains of influence in one’s social network, whereby media influence may be quite indirect:  while the seed of influence may be planted by the media, consensus is worked out through social networks.  And keep in mind these models and perspectives are still not the whole story about how media effects operate, and there’s considerable controversy about the findings and methods in the entire field of media effects.  Not that, of course, actual experts who study the media are ever consulted (ahem), but we really should be much less cavalier about how powerful the media is, from where their “conventional wisdom” arrives (and how), and the extent to which this influences individuals, and what their subsequent action will be.  To this end: the Wright scandal appears not to have damaged Obama that much; voters in remaining states may decide to angrily flout the media’s conventional wisdom, or alternately, reinforce it; despite poll after poll showing that issues are important to voters this year, so far we’ve gotten the usual sensational sideshows (again, worthy of a whole other post or even a series).

In sum:  the influence of the media on such matters is not currently well known or well established, and it’s also abundantly clear that the MSM is not very well in touch with what voters are doing/thinking.  Your guess is really just about as good as theirs (probably better, since you might have time to actually think about what you say before you have to say it on live television).  

So I guess what I’m saying here is this:  the MSM’s anointment of Obama is the final nail in the coffin for Clinton’s media narrative, and therefore her campaign, by virtue of the fact that they will no longer carry her water as to the rationale that she has to carry on.  This is not the same thing as influencing the decisions of individual voters, nor does it suggest that voters are listening to Tim Russert’s opinion as their guide, rather than that the MSM is now focusing on the sheer math of the contest of which many voters may have been ignorant to this point because it wasn’t well covered before.  While the MSM still exerts considerable influence (particularly with respect to framing and salience), this influence is not direct and not as powerful as many people seem to suggest.  

Slate has been running a short series on “The Paranoid Style in American Science” by Daniel Engber, which chronicles the recent trend of skepticism run amok, meaning it is skepticism that takes up such a contrary position that it crosses over into the paranoia of the conspiracy-minded.  We are well familiar with this, of course:  global warming skeptics, intelligent design proponents, people who swear off vaccines because of alleged links to autism, etc. etc.  Engber deftly points out the myriad ways in which so many people have taken on the mantle of skepticism, starting with legitimate problems or weaknesses with their object of inquiry, but going much further, such that:

the conspiratorial thinker sees “a projection of the self”—he’s just like them but more discerning and more rational. Indeed, for the paranoid skeptics, it’s not that science is wrong but that the scientists aren’t scientific enough. (original emphasis)

The circuitous discourse that is then taken up is seen by the skeptic as hyper-rational, when it is in fact anti-rational.  The effect of this tack of so-called skepticism, then, is not to find “truth,” but to destabilize it.  Although they themselves think they are exposing a conspiracy to hide truth, what they are in fact doing us undermining our ability to consider anything “true” that does not exist with 100% exactitude — in other words, that scientific fact/theory (which is understood as being “true” yet contingent) becomes suspect as an entire regime of knowledge.  What the skeptic actually engenders then, is not truth but Truthiness.

“Truthiness”, coined of course by Stephen Colbert, refers to the notion that “truth” does not necessarily stem from, or adhere to, “facts”.  Although the term is mostly reserved for “intuitive” thinking that one thinks or wishes to be true when it’s not, I think the term is actually somewhat more complex with regard to the way in which people approach “truth.”  The purveyor of truthiness recognizes that facts are only meaningfully rendered when they enter into discourse (and are at base derived from science, which operates according to its own discourse), but nonetheless holds that the discourse of truthiness, while not literally “true” in the traditional sense, speaks to a kind of truth, a higher order truth.  Thus we have a discourse that adopts a sophisticated postmodern disdain for truth on the one hand, but paradoxically believes that somewhere out there is truth in an absolute form.  In this way, proponents of intelligent design call into question the way scientific knowledge is legitimated in order to propagate a notion that speaks to the “truth” of God’s creation without making any claims on truth that can be empirically defined or arrived at.  This kind of postmodern position is (perhaps ironically teleologically) best explained via poststructuralist notions of discursive practice and skepticism toward metanarratives—how else can we explain this marriage between irrationality and rationality?  What aspect of capitalist ideology can systemically produce subjects who are both very good capitalists and very good fundamentalists?  And so we have the ultimate irony:  people who believe in truth in its absolute form are in fact the ones pushing us further and further into postmodern relativism, whereby “truth” and “facts” are entirely subjective and discursive.  To this end, “truth” is linked to situational politics, and is taken up strategically, as a weapon to “prove” whatever it is one already believes in (needless to say, without good reason).

So, welcome to the (post)modern era, where the logical conclusion of truthiness will lead us into a new age of, potentially, hyper-rational capitalism paradoxically (or so it would at first seem) coexisting with an anti-rational culture.  So, awesome, we get all the exploitation and commodity fetishism, but none of the reason.  This oughtta be fun.

As you can see from previous entries, I tend to find television advertising annoying.  Occasionally, however, it transcends this and becomes perplexing, then alarming, then hilariously horrifying.  Such was the case recently when I happened to catch a new Wendy’s ad.  I couldn’t tell you what they were advertising, because the prologue, if you will, featured something truly astonishing:  Wendy giving me the “come hither.”  The next time the ad came on, I asked my wife if she saw it, if I wasn’t going crazy:  nope, “That is totally the come hither,” she said.

Wendy, mind you, is that twee freckled redhead in pigtails, allegedly modeled after founder Dave Thomas’ own daughter.  By no stretch of the imagination is she even barely legal (g’head, click on it, only the government and your internet provider will know).  And apparently an animated, forever youthful American icon giving me the come hither is going to make me want to come in and buy burgers.  Um…wtf?

Between being exceptionally busy and all the politics stuff, I sorta forgot all about The Bracket.  So for you fan(s) out there, here’s how it ended:

If you recall, the semifinals featured the intriguing matchups of:

(7) Alka-Seltzer Cheesedick vs. (3) Verizon Dipwad

(1) Jared Fogel vs. (4) Geico Caveman

My take:  Caveman beats up Jared, Verizon  beats the Cheesedick, and in the battle royal a challenger comes out of the stands with a chair:  Freecreditreport.com Assface.  Amidst the fracas he overpowers both with the magnitude of his bad lip-syncing kissy-lips.  Seriously, it’s like a kind of douchebag Blue Steel.  The end.

BTW, Freecreditreport.com:  for fuck’s sake, if we have to have catchy ditties sung by the most boring-voiced drip noggin possible, at least do us all a favor and edit the music so that his lip-synching actually matches it.  God damn, that’s annoying.

Update!  Big Dog Beta is out, and although it looks just as formidable and uncanny, it’s clearly also more fun-loving.  Now that’s the sort of scary DARPA-funded cyborg overlord run amok that I could really learn to love!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last month, you’ve seen Stuff White People Like, a blog that needs no further explanation. And of course with the inevitable success and meme-making that is that site, it’s seen its fair share of criticism and praise in many incarnations. This morning I read yet another critique, at The Root, which argues that SWPL is really nothing more than a smarmy, lame extension of smug whiteness, far inferior to the cuttingly smart Black People Love Us! and so forth. But unfortunately, this author, like I think nearly everyone who goes to that site, still doesn’t get it, not really. What makes Stuff White People Like so funny to me is not just that it’s a (sometimes clever, sometimes obvious) list of white accoutrements and behaviors. Its true charm lies in something more subtle: a critique not only of “whiteness” but of late capitalism (whether or not author Chris Landers is really fully aware of this himself).

First off, the site doesn’t trade on “whiteness” as skin color per se: it trades on a specific kind of white privilege. Notice there is nothing on there about NASCAR, for instance. If you were starting a list of things “white people” like, wouldn’t you go straight to (or at least include) stuff that rednecks like? Certainly this joke has been done to death (there is a reason Jeff Foxworthy is now primarily a game show host), but wouldn’t such things count as “white”? So this is not just any whiteness, this is a specific kind of whiteness. This is stuff that upper middle class, milquetoast Democrats in their 20’s and 30’s like. And this is the crucial part of that satire: the stuff they like sets the trend for establishing power and consumer trends in our society, of what “everyone” aspires to (and paradoxically, marketers help inculcate this market to convince white people of what they like). The new American Dream is not about having a ranch home with a picket fence and 2.5 children, it is, essentially, Stuff White People Like. “Whiteness” is therefore coded as being much more, and much less, than skin color, and is instead about a particular taste culture that for the moment is the hegemonic form of “success” in this country. This is borne out in the blog’s mode of address: advice to someone who isn’t white on how they can move in white circles and take advantage of white people. The base assumption is that everyone wants to be white, or hang out with white people. Why? In order to get ahead in life.

This requires an extremely brief discussion of the core of what is meant by “white privilege“: although intimately connected to race, it is not limited to race. After all, you can be white and not really be able to capitalize on white privilege (and vice versa). It is not merely skin color, it is a set of attitudes, behaviors, cultural norms, and a host of other socially advantageous attributes. It is rooted in being “white” not merely because white people have historically been the most advantaged group, but also because its boundaries and elements are largely established and maintained by white people, as a whole way of being, as praxis. Most importantly, these qualities are what become the standard for “proper” behavior and attainment in our society, from relatively banal things like the stuff listed on SWPL, to extremely important things like how to conduct yourself at a job interview. And the most important thing about it is this: it is entirely normative, meaning that it establishes norms, and it is regarded as being “normal” when it is in fact a culturally, socially, and historically specific set of elements. How do you know whether you have white privilege? Well, when Katrina hit, and you saw the footage of the refugees in New Orleans, did you say or think, “Why don’t those people just get the hell out of there?”? If so, you “suffer” from white privilege in the sense of not being fully aware of how privileged you are or how privilege works in our society.

So, SWPL is not just a means of making fun of whiteness—it’s about exposing the normativity of this kind of taste culture, and how it’s not actually “normal” at all, and is based instead on incredible socio-economic power (which may or may not be “earned” so much as granted to those with the right connections and/or skin color—although certainly anyone can attain it). To this end there is no contradiction between being a “person of color” and doing/buying/enjoying all the things on SWPL. SWPL also therefore exposes the politics of such so-called liberalism for what it is: being mostly vain and unthinkingly consumerist. The site further exposes the real truth of this kind of liberal: whether or not they truly realize it, they “celebrate diversity” as an end in itself, not as a means of actual social empowerment; their means of “protecting the environment” is not to advocate fundamental consumption and lifestyle changes, but to merely recycle and buy “green” products. And so on. In short: their politics is not a real politics, it is a commodity fetish. It is an ultimately arbitrary set of signifiers of social power, which in its normativity and banality, not only hides the source of that power, but ironically puts it on display. Meanwhile, it is also ultimately somewhat bereft of meaningfulness (though not meaning), in that it is almost entirely based on conspicuous consumption. In short, this demonstration of social power, while in its way less of a barrier to social mobility than in years past, is still a means of maintaining a class system, only in this case it is also the privileged in society who become dependent on and beholden to capitalist ideology. The problem with confusing social relations with commodities is that it masks the true nature of these social relations, and with it any truly liberatory politics. It is also a problem in that every aspect of our lives becomes commodified, and we are rendered incapable of being social without buying something (or buying into something) first.

Or, as a non-academic translation: remember Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club? He lived the life of a white person, as articulated on SWPL. The point of the film was about how empty he felt living that comfortable life. And of course while a lot of audiences and critics alike were fixated on the problems of defining “authentic” and meaningful masculinity according to fighting, they missed the point of the whole last third of the movie: about how that morphed into an anarchist organization, where at the very end they blow up the buildings of credit card companies. At base Fight Club’s argument is therefore that our malaise stems not from the fact that men don’t get into fights anymore, but rather that this malaise is a function of living with/in capitalistic postmodernity.

Although it’s clear that practically nobody “gets” either SWPL or Fight Club at that level of detail, there are signs that people understand the humor of SWPL well enough that it’s not just a list of things that white people do—lots of people, it would seem, are prone to at least a little bit of critical reflection about what they or acquaintances of theirs do, and therefore recognizing that it’s no more or less “normal” than any other culturally specific thing. But it seems pretty clear that the underlying critique of white privilege is still not really getting through, which, ironically, demonstrates its power.

Hillary supporters, please spare me invectives denigrating Obama, unless you have truly substantive criticisms (which there is more than enough fodder for).  There’s been plenty of ugliness back and forth, and plenty of media whoopsies back and forth (Obama got the golden boy treatment, but nobody ever pressed Clinton on her “experience” until now), but your candidate was never cheated out of this.  This is a primary process, not a coronation.  Don’t become fucking Pats fans, whinging about how “destiny” was averred by some “unworthy” opponent.

That metaphor, in fact, is quite apt:  Clinton, the candidate of destiny, the wielder of a great machine, has been upended by someone who’s worked harder, run a better ground game, played solid defense, and put together a much better game plan.

At least when this is finally over, you won’t hear me shouting some sort of political equivalent of  “Eighteen and one!  Eighteen and one!”:  I started out as an Edwards supporter, and Barack’s had to work up from about fourth place to convince me that he’s the better candidate.

Many wags compared Clinton’s wins in OH and RI (and sorta win in TX) to a zombie or similar monster, rising from the grave just when Obama was filling in the last bits of dirt.  The comparison seems inapt now because zombies you can kill by destroying the brain or removing the head.  But it seems to me that the Clinton campaign is not operating with a lot of brains.  I don’t want to start turning into one of those anti-Hillarycranks in the blogosphere, but I have to rant for a moment:

Both campaigns have traded some extremely nasty barbs.  I can’t say who’s on the moral high ground there, so we’ll just say they’re even.  However in the process, the Clinton campaign managed to denegrate states Obama won as being “insignificant,” which would mean they are write-offs for her in the general.  That’s a problem, because Dems will probably need states like VA, CO, MO, WI, and IA in the general in order to win.  So, not only was it a failed strategy for taking down Obama, it was a disastrously stupid thing to say for in the future.

But that’s in the past.  Here’s what’s brainless in the present:  Hillary is fighting damned hard despite that it’s now pretty much impossible for her to win.   As noted below, and posted in excruciating detail elsewhere, the only way Hillary can get the nomination is by a superdelegate landslide in her favor.  By some estimates, assuming public commitments maintain their commitments, she’ll need 64-75% of the remaining superdelegates to win the nomination.  Even with lingering questions about Rev. Wright, are that many superdelegates going to go for Hillary?  That’s also leaving aside the fact that even with Obama doing more poorly than expected, he’ll still be ahead in both popular vote and pledged delegates (probably the former, definitely the latter), potentially even including do-overs in MI and FL.

Let’s break this down:  at this point Hillary remains in the race hoping that something so catastrophic happens to Obama that all his ardent support evaporates, and two thirds of the superdelegates will side with her.  I mean, what must they be cooking up to take him down with?  Surely they’re not going to wait for something to crop up?  She is not a gambler in that respect.  In short, the sort of thing that they’d need to pull off in order to take Obama down will not endear her to the independents, who she’ll need in order to beat McCain.  I’m truly afraid of what they’ll try, because frankly it won’t just hobble Obama, who I think you can tell I slightly prefer as a candidate—it will undoubtedly hobble her in the process.  I mean, just when we thought all that crap from the ’90’s was the “old” politics, and we could forget the little things that the Clintons did that irked a lot of people, we are suddenly reminded all too clearly, and the fuzzy butterflies of peace and prosperity give flight to the ugliness of those pitched battles, still being fought by the Boomers.

God, fuck that.  Bring on the old timer and the upstart.  Boomer politics can suck it.

One last rejoinder.  While I understand precisely why Obama’s team is dragging their feet on Michigan and Florida, I don’t think they should.  I think they should play ball on this, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because Clinton’s extremely unlikely to maintain the 55% margin she had there before (a recent Rasmussen poll has them tied there).  Obama, the math favors you even with re-votes.  You’re statistically tied with Clinton in Michigan.  If you win or tie her in that state you’ve blunted her so-called “momentum.”  And maybe at long last you can put her down.  You know, I had the wrong metaphor.  She’s not a zombie, she’s a bit more like Jason or Michael Meyers: no matter how much damage you inflict, no matter how far ahead you run, she just keeps coming.

I’d love to post on all the crazy and amazing political stories in the next few days, but even in my usual state of procrastination and distractions, I can’t give any of that the time it deserves. Anyway it will be good to wait awhile to see how some of this shakes out. To whit:

All three candidates have hit fairly significant obstacles this week, all of which go to the core of their respective purported strengths. Obama, the man of judgment, has been taken to task on his judgment for his long time relationship with Rev. Wright. Clinton, the woman of experience, has this week released documents of her itinerary and activities as First Lady, which calls into question her experience: she didn’t have a security clearance or take part in high level meetings, her tasks while abroad were mainly social, and there is no evidence linking her to the health care programs that she claims she helped work on. McCain, the man of foreign policy and military credentials, managed in a speech while in Iraq to repeatedly mixed up Sunni and Shia and to state that Iran was helping to train Al Qaeda, which is not remotely true.

None of these are minor glitches. While Obama’s speech was brilliant, moving, intelligent, thought-provoking, honest, forthright, etc. etc., I don’t think he successfully answered the base question that the righties are pushing, which weighs on people’s minds: okay, so did you ever pull Rev. Wright aside and ask him to knock it off? Of course from my point of view, this is a storm in a teacup. Some religious nut ranting in a sermon, raising some legit critiques about America as well as some batshit crazy inflammatory idiocy, doesn’t really influence my opinion of Obama one way or the other, really. But I’m not your average (white, working class, moderately to poorly informed) voter. Barack has met this scandal head on, but it will not leave him in the general.

Hillary’s big selling point is her experience. If her claims of experience (which I always thought were slightly overblown) don’t hold any water, then what’s her main draw? She and Obama have nearly identical policies on all the major issues, and he’s clearly gotten her beat on charisma (not that it should matter, but alas it does in our vapid political landscape). But to be honest I’m not going to dwell too much on Hillary, because barring a major superdelegate defection, she will not get the nomination: she won’t be able to catch Barack on pledged delegates, she almost certainly can’t catch him on the popular vote, and that’s even including the slim possibility that MI and FL will have do-overs. The Wright controversy is in a way manna from heaven for her, but even then….

McCain looked and sounded like a doddering old fool in confusing the situation in Iraq. He has by far the easiest task in overcoming his major gaffe for two reasons: 1. Let’s face it, the built-in animosity toward Hillary, and the hydrophobic reactions to Wright have kind of buried the McCain story for now; 2. He can pass off his gaffe as a mis-statement which, while maybe or maybe not true (and potentially no less troubling—this is how Reagan looked toward the end of his term, and we know what happened with him), is easier to believe than either of the excuses/explanations likely to come from the Democrats.

IF Barack survives this, which is to say, if he doesn’t lose as badly as estimated in Pennsylvania, and he still takes North Carolina, and particularly if he takes Indiana, he will still be the nominee. This scandal will still be with him, obviously, and the unfortunate reality is that he’ll lose a few million votes over it. But can he take the fight to McCain? Will he be able to press McCain, and will he be able to hang with McCain in the polls long enough in order to be within striking distance (or even ahead) by the time the debates come along in the autumn? From the Denver convention to that time, there will be a lot of time where he’s hit repeatedly by the right in every possible way, and they will try to push the Wright issue as much as possible, in every possible way. Barack’s main chances now hinge on whether he’s able to shift the conversation, and hit back at McCain (and for now Hillary, obviously). IF he can do this, and he’ll probably need some help from the MSM, he’ll be in pretty good shape. If not, if he’s constantly having to play defense, and constantly having to talk about his weaknesses, then….well, he might not be quite the “magic negro” we may have hoped he would be.