The Politico points his finger accusingly and breathlessly refers to “the same publisher that distributed the 2004 best-seller that took aim at John Kerry’s Vietnam service.” But it’s only just good old Regnery Publishing (which, as Henry Regnery Publishers, starting in 1947, used to be the only publisher that ever published a conservative political perspective title) that will be releasing circa August 4th David Freddoso’s The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate.

Obama suit worn by typical Obama voter

Donatella Versace is dedicating her Spring/Summer Collection to the person she calls “the man of the moment,” none other than that popular fashionista B. Hussein Obama himself. The collection is intended to express the style of “a relaxed man who doesn’t need to flex muscles to show he has power.” In other words, a fellow not like Bush, the kind of guy who won’t go around invading hostile countries to show off (just because they’re trying to develop WMD and acting as state sponsors of terrorism), but who will happily go to Iran to negotiate with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “without conditions.” The kind of man who cooks, supports Gay Rights, and isn’t afraid to cry at chick flicks.

In order to assure Obama’s electoral success, Versace was offering some advice, according to the news agency which-is-not-to-be-named: he should get rid of his tie, and “jazz up” his shirt.

Twitters of joy can be heard in San Francisco, but HillBuzz shakes her head, and scoldingly declares that this development is really a very ominous sign of electoral doom to come. They don’t vote for pastels in the Heartland.

Because Democrats don’t win elections when they are too adored by Hollywood or high profile Euro characters like Versace…regular Americans pick up on it, working class blue collar Americans, and they reject the kind of Democrat who inspires things like Versace’s new Spring/Summer line.

Especially when it’s heavy on the pastels.

Why?

Because, it emasculates a candidate and puts him in the realm of the frivolous, which is dangerous ground for someone like Obama, who doesn’t deal in substance to begin with. The image that’s being reinforced by him, and by things like the Versace line, is an elite, too-cute-by-half, far left liberal.

The voters he needs to win in the fall don’t give a damn about Versace or arugula, but about jobs and security.

Meanwhile, they’re laughing their asses off over at McCain campaign headquarters.

James Webb campaigning vigorously

Barack Obama has pop star appeal in the urban community of fashion, but his exotic background, his far-left liberalism, and his glib and polished Ivy League diction win few admirers in rural and working class America. Running as a peacenik against a war hero like John McCain also leaves Obama with deep vulnerabilities on national defense.

First-term Virginia Senator James Webb is bound to seem like a godsend to democrat strategists. A redneck, Marine war hero, and former Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, Webb has everything Obama lacks from Southern appeal to obvious masculinity.

The Wall Street Journal seems to be the venue selected for a serious “Webb for VP” trial balloon.

There’s not much doubt that Webb would do a lot to strengthen an Obama ticket, but the Webb ploy also raises serious questions: Would the democrat party activist nutroots base actually put up with it, or would they openly revolt? Even as a turncoat democrat and antiwar Senator, Webb’s personality, lifestyle, and very being represent everything calculated to offend your typical urbanista liberal.

And, even if Obama and the party backroom mechanics can successfully get the MoveOn.org wing to shut up and sit still for Webb, they have to ask themselves: Can they really control a person as willful and belligerent as Webb? Is Webb liable to challenge President Obama one fine day on foreign or domestic policy?

Even more frightening a question for democrats ought to be, will they have perhaps created their own Nemesis if they make James H. Webb into a national figure, and logical presidential candidate?

The post-1968 democrat party has had very limited national success, being a captive of its leftwing radical activist base, whose politics are simply unsalable at a national level. What would be the consequences of the rise of very different kind of democrat leader, one with a lot more resemblance to Andrew Jackson than to Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton? If I were a leftwing democrat, I’d find it all pretty scary.

Brooks wittily identifies the cunning opportunist lurking underneath the pious liberal. He even rates the Obamanation as slicker than Bill Clinton.

God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.

But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.

I suspect myself that there is also a wimp and a coward (much like JFK) underneath it all in there, who can be relied upon to back down and cover his own ass in the face of any challenge or tough decision. That’s how I read his 130 “Present” votes.

Read the whole thing.

Rightwing blogs are generally ignoring it. Leftwing, pro-Obama blogs are dismissive. The best snarky response I’ve read is by Seth Colter Walls on HuffPo.

The event began less than auspiciously for Mr. Sinclair — who has gained Internet notoriety by spreading wild accusations regarding gay sex, drugs and possible murder committed by Barack Obama — as National Press Club staff took pains to remove the association’s logo from behind the podium where Sinclair was set to speak.

Hostile-to-Obama Larry Johnson isn’t climbing aboard the Sinclair circus train, but Larry did clearly feel that he had a duty to mankind to publish Mr. Sinclair’s statement and provide a 9:24 video excerpt.

An unsavory individual named Larry Sinclair posted a video on YouTube last January (which has been since removed), accusing Senator Barack Obama of illegal and indecent acts in the back of a limousine in November 1999 while a serving Illinois State Senator. Sinclair alleges that Obama did cocaine with him and also accepted oral sex from Sinclair.

——————————————-

January 18, 2008 YouTube 1:42 video

——————————————-

Sinclair is reported to have volunteered to take a polygraph test last year to confirm his veracity, and to have failed the test.

——————————————-

Today, Larry Sinclair appeared at the National Press Club to repeat his story, presenting a journalistic quandary about whether to report another quite unsubstantiated rumor about Barack Obama.

Larry Sinclair web-site

Ben Smith (who won’t even mention the substance of the Sinclair allegations) exposes Larry Sinclair as a criminal and all-around low life.

———————————-

I had decided to give this one a miss, but coverage broke out widely today, after police arrived at the Press Club to arrest Larry Sinclair at the conclusion of his National Press Club news conference. Apparently, the arrest warrant was from Delaware.

Here’s an anti-Obama attack video, featuring a nice assortment of Obama’s gaffes and misstatements, made by disgruntled Hillary supporters.

9:46 video

who describe themselves as “a coalition of millions” (possibly a slight overstatement), and have a web-site and logo:

Right on. You go, girls.

Hat tip to SusanUnPC.

The Chicago Tribune is attempting to innoculate readers against the possibility that the rumor published by Larry Johnson of a tape of Michelle Obama ranting about “Whitey” may turn out to be true.

It’s hard to come up with an ethnic slur that has less of a sting than “whitey.”

A prevalent yet unsubstantiated Internet rumor has it that Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, used this term at some point in a speech, and the Obama campaign is concerned enough to have posted an online rebuttal.

I’ve got to ask, though. Are there really white people out there so ignorant of history, so unaware of the nuances of language and so threatened by minority grievances that they take genuine umbrage at the term “whitey”?

More a taunt than a threat, the word has no ugly history and hints at no particular stereotypes. It may have been hurled in a menacing fashion in ugly personal confrontations from time to time, but it’s never been used to keep a people down, to put them in their place, to rank them as subhuman.

To be truly offensive, a derogatory term needs to have an ominous context that “whitey” lacks.

Those who take offense are confusing prejudice—which is making negative assumptions about people based solely on external characteristics, of which all races and ethnicities are guilty—with racism, which is prejudice in action.

It requires them to imagine that “whitey” marginalizes, diminishes and therefore harms white people.

And if they’re really that dumb, then I guess they deserve to be insulted.

So there!

They really lit Jeff Goldstein‘s fuse with this one. Jeff retorts:

So yeah. It looks like an Obama presidency will give us a frank discussion on the issue of race. If by “frank” we mean, “shut up and quit you’re bitching, whitey. We’ll tell you what racism is.”

Read his whole Don’t call me nigger, Whitey.

Kevin Drum is experiencing a bit of schadenfreude at Hillary Clinton’s expense this morning.

….It turns out that Barack Obama’s hiring of Patti Solis Doyle is even more interesting than I thought at first. Perhaps because I deliberately pulled back from campaign coverage during the final couple of months after Texas and Ohio, I didn’t realize that Solis Doyle had become so estranged from Hillary Clinton after she was fired as Hillary’s campaign manager. Far from her hiring being a conciliatory gesture, the developing conventional wisdom is that Team Obama is sending the same kind of message to Team Clinton that the Tattaglia family sent to the Corleones in The Godfather:

“It’s a slap in the face,” Susie Tompkins Buell, a prominent Clinton backer, said in an interview. “Why would they put somebody that was so clearly ineffective in such a position? It’s a message. We get it.” She said it was a “calculated decision” by the Obama team to “send a message that she [Clinton] is not being considered for the ticket.”

Other Clinton insiders also seethed. “Who can blame Obama for rewarding Patti? He would never be the nominee without her,” one person who has worked for both Clintons and remains close to them said. The sentiment reflected what another person in the immediate Clinton orbit described as “shock” that Obama would send such a strong signal that he is not considering Clinton as his running mate so soon.

Another Hillary supporter puts it even more bluntly: Hiring Solis is the “biggest f*** you I have ever seen in politics.”

And he’s not alone. The whole left side of the blogosphere is buzzing like a beehive over this one.

Larry Johnson today has a new spin on the Obama Birth Certificate rumor: Obama is disqualified by an uncited, unlinked alleged 1952-1986 era Hawaiian state statute requiring both parents to be US citizens for their child to be a US citizen.

An internet friend (Katherine) has pursued this relentlessly. She sent me the following:

According to the state laws in Hawaii that were in effect at the time of Obama’s birth, a child must be born to “TWO” U.S. Citizen parents (this law was in effect from “December 24, 1952 to November 13, 1986,“ which means it applies to Barack’s birth.

But only Barack’s mom was a U.S. Citizen. Papa Obama was a citizen of Kenya. Well, the Hawaiian law stiplulates that:

…If only one parent was a U.S. Citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least ten years, at least FIVE of which had to be after the age of 16.”

It appears that Obama’s mother was only 18 when Obama was born, which means she was shy of the 21 years of age required by the law. In other words, she was not old enough to qualify her son for automatic U.S. Citizenship.

———————————-

Don’t blame Rush Limbaugh, and don’t blame rightwing bloggers like me, Obama Fight-the-Smears site and Bob Beckel. Larry Johnson is the source. I’m just reporting interesting or amusing campaign events, and Larry’s new rumor qualifies.

Robert Samuelson does a nice job of identifying the reality behind the campaign facade.

His campaign is itself a contradiction.

On the one hand, he projects himself as the great conciliator. He uses the metaphor of his race to argue that he is uniquely suited to bridge differences between liberals and conservatives, young and old, rich and poor — to craft a new centrist politics. On the other hand, his actual agenda is highly partisan and undermines many of his stated goals. He wants to stimulate economic growth, but his hostility toward trade agreements threatens export-led growth (which is now beginning). He advocates greater energy independence but pretends this can occur without more domestic drilling for oil and natural gas.

All this reflects Obama’s legislative record. From 2005 to 2007, he voted with his party 97 percent of the time, reports the Politico. But Obama’s clever campaign strategy would put him in a bind as president. Championing centrism would disappoint many ardent Democrats. Pleasing them would betray his conciliating image. The fact that he has so far straddled the contradiction may confirm his political skills and the quiet aid received from the media, which helped him by virtually ignoring the blatant contradictions.

And what does the straddle tell us of him? Aside from ambition — hardly unique among presidential candidates — I cannot detect powerful convictions in Obama. He seems merely expedient in peddling his convenient conflicts. He strikes me as a super-successful graduate student: the brightest, quickest, most articulate guy in the seminar. In his career, he has advanced mainly by talking and writing — not doing — and may harbor a delusion common to the well-educated: that he can argue and explain his way around any problem.

The Clinton-Obama nomination battle viewed from a Star Wars perspective.

4:59 video