Via Ace of Spades -- Here's a more interesting nugget: Rolling Stone published an article about the radical roots of Barack Obama called, cleverly enough, "The Radical Roots of Barack Obama." ... But now that the radical roots of Barack Obama turn out to be not just something that gets impotent aging RS editors sexually aroused, but something that might just end Obama's candidacy, the article isn't called that anymore.
Now it exists officially in the Rolling Stone archives under the decidedly less damning headline Destiny's Child.
From the Rolling Stone, Issue 1020 — February 22, 2007Obama's ascent from rookie senator to presidential contender is one of the more startling and sudden acts in recent political history. Those around him aren't quite sure what has happened, and neither, for that matter, is the senator himself. Obama says he experienced the change as a call from the crowds that always stalk him, a summoning to a new role.
[...]
"People don't come to Obama for what he's done in the Senate," says Bruce Reed, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. "They come because of what they hope he could be." What Obama stands for, if anything, is not yet clear. Everywhere he goes he is greeted by thrilled crowds, trailed constantly by a reporter from The Chicago Tribune who is writing a book about the senator with a preliminary title so immodest that it embarrassed even Obama's staff: The Savior. [Silly me. I only thought he wanted to be the second JFK, little did I know he wants to be the Second Coming.]
[...]
Obama chose Trinity United. He picked Jeremiah Wright. Obama writes in his autobiography that on the day he chose this church, he felt the spirit of black memory and history moving through Wright, and "felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams." [This is very odd. He now claims he didn't know about the Rev's wild statements and now the Rev is off his staff.]
[...]
After graduating from Columbia University, Obama spent four years as a street-level organizer in Chicago, where he met and worked with Wright, before attending Harvard Law School, where he was made the first black president of the law review. [Hmm, I question the timing]
[...]
It is in his ambitious, halting attempts to put together a coherent foreign policy that you can most clearly see Obama trying to figure out the algorithm of American power. [We're still recovering from master policy wonk Clinton. What we don't need is a policy wonk-in-training as the head of state.]
[...]
They worry about the problems created by globalization and believe that the most important issues America will confront in the future (terrorism, avian flu, global warming, bioweapons, the disease and nihilism that grow from concentrated poverty) will emanate from neglected and failed states (Afghanistan, the Congo, Sierra Leone). [Yes. I believe they really are this delusional.]
Chicago papers ran a series of stories detailing his relationship with a crooked developer, Tony Rezko. In a complicated but legal deal with Rezko, who bought a vacant lot next door to Obama's in Chicago, the senator was able to secure his own house at $300,000 below the asking price. The Chicago Sun-Times gleefully headlined its account from media darling to media-hounded. The report uncovered no evidence of wrongdoing, but its emergence serves as a reminder that Obama cannot remain above the fray forever. [Watta a deal! -- and completely legal., well actually not really that legal and there are complications and it's in the courts now and we can't actually talk about it and ... here's an update.
[...]
In other politicians, charisma often seems like compensation for some deeper, irreducible need: Bill Clinton comes so close, and listens so closely, because he wants to be hugged; George Bush slaps backs and gives his best friends nicknames because he, the draft-dodging son of a fighter pilot, needs to be the manliest creature in the room. [Ya gotta admire 'em. They can work in a Bush bash no matter the topic.]
With Obama, the charisma seems to stem from a remarkable ease with himself. When Frank Luntz, the conservative political consultant, walked into the young senator's office for the first time, Obama sat on the couch and gestured for Luntz to take the big, formal chair behind the desk. "I've been in many, many senators' offices, and never once have I been offered the senator's chair," Luntz says. "I asked him what he was doing, and he said, 'If I knew you any better, I'd be lying down.' [If he knew him even better, he might have invited him into the privy chamber where the even more perfectly at ease with himself, LBJ, frequently conducted the affairs of state.]
[...]
In late August, for the third time in his life, he traveled to Kogelo, the tiny, grassless village in western Kenya where his father had grown up the son of a Muslim goat herder and where the senator's grandmother still lives. [Actually it's his grandfather's third wife, not his grandmother, but she's iconic and very photogenic, so it doesn't matter.]
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