Jack Beatty: Run, Barack, Run! - Beatty convincingly plays up his creds as anti-war and as the un-Hillary, but he's overboard in his awe of Obama, claiming that his sound judgment matched with his charisma make up for his lack of experience. What judgment, Jack? Yes, his judgment.
Yuval Levin: Off and Running - Levin is unimpressed with the The Audacity if Hope:
But then, Obama does his best throughout this book not to sound like a liberal Democrat. In this, he does a disservice to his own record.
Steve Sailer: White Guilt, Obamania, And The Reality Of Race - Sailer specializes in "going there" - i.e. saying the extremely politically incorrect. He's at it again, but with mixed results. For instance, here he hits the mark:
That sounds quite self-sacrificial... but, oddly enough, it sure hasn't hurt his popularity with whites
But when he starts psycho-analyzing "the white voter" he strays a bit. Sure white guilt plays into it, but it has little to do with a conscious or unconscious scheme to shut blacks up by electing one of them president (this theory really doesn't even make sense - whites want blacks to go away so badly they'll vote one into the executive branch?).
Obama's appeal is easier explained thusly: HE'S NOT SHARPTON. So many black leaders of the past two decades have been race hucksters like Sharpton and Jackson or plain maniacs like Farrakhan. Along comes Obama with a warm smile and allegedly nice things to say about people who disagree with him, and Hey! it feels like a breath of fresh air. This appeal is really very natural and Obama and his handlers would be subpar politicians not to capitalize on it.
What turns this natural appeal into mania is the media coverage - whose influence is surprisingly missing from Sailer's analysis. The media have bought into Obama whole hog because more than anything Obama embodies the hopes and dreams of America's liberal cultural elite. That more than anything explains "Obamania." It remains to be seen whether they can continue to pull the wool over our collective eyes, or if Obama's popularity will fade as people to the right of the crazed left discover that they don't have to like this guy just beause Dvid Brooks tells them to.
