When I was a young newspaper reporter (a nerdy one, at that) at The Record in Hackensack, N.J., one of the journalists I looked up to was Michael Powell. Mr. Powell was then at New York Newsday but he had passed through The Record in what was becoming an itinerant career, with stops at Newsday, the Washington Post and now The New York Times.

When some of us would get discouraged about something in journalism, we would reach for some of Mr. Powell’s old stories, particularly his profile of Frank E. Rogers, the long-serving mayor of Harrison, N.J. His stories in The Record and Newsday gave us hope. He was the writer we aspired to be when we grew up as reporters.

I recount this to say that Michael Powell is a phenomenal reporter and a great writer.

I don’t know whether Mr. Powell aspired to a career at The Times (as most of us did) but we heard that he turned down The Times to go to the Washington Post when New York Newsday imploded. Some writers have been known to spurn the stultifying culture of The Times, some of them preferring the Post (Washington) and the Los Angeles Times.

In any case, Mr. Powell is at The Times now and The Times that he comes to, though still a colossus, is somewhat tarnished, prone to getting in its own way. And the Mr. Powell that I now read in that newspaper seems different. His work here, especially covering the candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic Party nomination and for the presidency of the United States, has bothered me at times.

Which is a long way to come around to what I want to say, which is that I enjoyed immensely Mr. Powell’s “American Wanderer . . . “ piece in Sunday’s “This Week In Review” section. The piece is well researched and well written. In fact, it may be over-written, especially the opening section:

That an air of the enigmatic attends Barack Obama is a commonplace; he is a man of fractured geography and family and wanderings.

He came of age in far corners, Indonesia and Hawaii, went to schools on both coasts and landed in Chicago, where he had no blood tie. With talent and ambition, he has leapt for the presidency at a tender age and will go to Denver to claim his Democratic nomination for the office.

There is to Mr. Obama’s story a Steinbeck quality, like so many migratory American tales: the mother who flickers in and out; the absent and iconic father; the grandfather, raised in the roughneck Kansas oil town of El Dorado, who moves the family restlessly, ceaselessly westward.

The American DNA encodes wanderlust ambition, and a romance clings to Mr. Obama’s story. The roamer who would make himself and his land anew is a familiar archetype.

And yet to describe such a man as rootless, as some people do, can stir up more questions, and an ambivalence reflected in the answers. What is rootlessness anyway? The word connotes something both celebrated and feared. Early on in Mr. Obama’s time in Chicago, the Democratic machine types would ask of this preternaturally calm young pol: Who sent him?

That question, probing and suspicious, has tendrils extending deep into our history. Again and again in American culture, the rootless outsider becomes an insider, and begins to guard his prize.

First he has to find that prize. For four centuries hope and despair pushed immigrants to these shores. Royalist Cavaliers found in the Virginias a new hierarchy. Puritans spread insistently across not always fruitful lands of New England. The Highlands English and Scots no sooner landed in Philadelphia in the 18th century than they lit out for the hills of Pennsylvania and down the mountain ridges of the Appalachians. In their sackcloth and baggy trousers, they were unceremonious and warlike wanderers.

“When I get ready to move, I just shut the door, call the dogs and get started,” is a Highlands saying transposed to a new world. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued in 1893 in his influential “Frontier Thesis” that the key to American vitality could be found in this relentless, drifting movement.

My only quibble with this section is that what Mr. Powell claims as a uniquelly American trait is actually a universal one. It transcends every culture. It is the linchpin of every fairy tale, adventure, or fantasy, from “Beowulf” to “Harry Potter” and everything in between.

Every society fears-lionizes the stranger who by dint of talent, vision, unique strength, or magically power overcomes to lead.

After this immensely enjoyable, yet strained, opening, the piece settles down and reaches some surprising conclusions:

Of the two nominees, Sen. John McCain has been the more peripatetic figure, with Obama the more rooted one. Obama is the one who sought out community and has stayed in one place, Chicago, for two decades. He is the one who is not divorced and has raised a family with his wife while Mr. McCain abandoned one family to marry a much younger and wealthier woman.

I hope Mr. Powell stays and that his career flourishes at The Times. I want him to take everything that is good about the place without being infected by its many maladies.

I have never hesitated to beat up the mainstream media and my former colleagues in the press for their failings. What I don’t do is praise good work. Let me point to a couple of samples of good work:

The Washington Post thoroughly debunked the major thrust of Sen. John McCain’s recent outbursts and smears of Sen. Barack Obama’s recent visit to Germany.

And, on the same day, The New York Times weighs in with an editorial on McCain’s spurious and desperate lies about Obama. McCain and his campaign staff are now scurrying away from some of their serial lies.

The McCain campaign has taken an ugly turn. The mainstream media will have to be vigilant to call what McCain is doing what it is. Today, the Times and the Post, to their credit, were willing to do that.

FROM MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA
During a speech to the Israeli parliament yesterday morning, President Bush attacked Barack Obama, comparing him to Nazi appeasers for the Illinois senator’s willingness to hold discussions with Iran.
One problem: Bush’s speech came just hours after The Washington Post reported that Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, said that the United States needs to “sit down and talk with” Iran. Not only that, Gates added, “We can’t go to a discussion and be completely the demander.”
Oops.

McCain Was For Talking To Hamas: Before He Was Against It…

Naturally, then, a media firestorm erupted, with the Bush administration and its political allies questioned all day about whether Bush has any idea what he is talking about, whether he has lost control over the Pentagon, whether Gates will be fired, what Gates thinks about Bush’s comparison of those (like Gates) who advocate dialogue between the United States and Iran to appeasers of Adolf Hitler, and whether the fiasco will remind voters that the Bush administration’s foreign policy has been marked by incompetence and dishonesty, thus doing irreparable electoral damage to John McCain and other Republican candidates.
Sorry — what was I thinking? That didn’t happen.
Click to continue reading…

Roger Cohen of The New York Times (or should I say the International Herald Tribune?) is fast becoming my favorite columnist. He is a great writer with a searching conscience and vision.

Cohen was writing about the decision by Congress in 2003 to spend $500 million to build the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is set to open in 2015.

The question Cohen asked, after taking a measure of the Holocaust Museum, was why there is no institution before now to wrestle with the America’s tortured racial history, especially as it pertains to slavery, Jim Crow laws, and violence perpetrated against African Americans, including lynchings.

A timely question.

For nations to confront their failings is arduous. It involves what Germans, experts in this field, call Geschichtspolitik, or “the politics of history.” It demands the passage from the personal to the universal, from individual memory to memorial. Yet there is as yet in the United States no adequate memorial to the ravages of race.

The King Center is a fine institution. But it’s a modest museum, like others scattered through the country that deal with aspects of the nation’s most divisive subject. Why, I wondered as I viewed the exhibit, does the Holocaust, a German crime, hold pride of place over U.S. lynchings in American memorialization?

Let’s be clear: I am not comparing Jim Crow with industrialized mass murder, or suggesting an exact Klan-Nazi moral equivalency. But I do think some psychological displacement is at work when a magnificent Holocaust Memorial Museum, in which the criminals are not Americans, precedes a Washington institution of equivalent stature dedicated to the saga of national violence that is slavery and segregation.

I lived in Berlin for three years, a period spanning the Bundestag’s decision in 1999 to build a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The debate, 54 years after the collapse of Hitler’s Reich, was fraught. It takes time to traverse the politics of history, confront guilt and arrive at an adequate memorialization of national crimes that also offers a possible path to reconciliation.

Germans have confronted the monstrous in them. In the end, they concluded the taint was so pervasive that Degussa, which was linked to the company that produced Zyklon-B gas, was permitted to provide the anti-graffiti coating for the memorial. The truth can be brutal, but flight from it even more devastating.

America’s heroic narrative of itself is still in flight from race.

Check out this story from The New York Times, circa 1916, about legendary Suffragette icon and former Rep. Jeannette Rankin, R-Mont., the first woman ever elected to Congress.

On the other hand, the language is not nearly as shocking as you find in the paper’s coverage of race.

Yesterday, the leading Democratic candidate for President, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, came to New York City to deliver a major speech on the economy right at the time when the economy appears to be teetering on the edge of a deep recession.

He was introduced by Mayor Michael Bloomberg who himself had flirted with making his own presidential bid as an independent. The two had breakfast. Then the Bloomberg gave Obama a rather warm introduction before his speech at Cooper Union. Obama came to the podium and said, essentially, luv you back, Mr. Mayor.

So, what did The New York Times put on its front page?

You guessed it, its own story on an interview it had with Sen. Hillary Clinton, (D-NY), about her healthcare plan.

Hello? Earth to The New York Times!

I have been saying all along that media types are suckers for Sen. John McCain, (R-AZ), especially over at Newsweek. I don’t know why he wastes money having a media relations staff when most people in the industry are more than happy to be his toady.

Now, Neal Gabler explores the issue on the op-ed page of the Times.

Obama addressing a crowd the day after his race speech (Davis Turner/European Pressphoto Agency)

A not-too-bad round-up on the history that led to the Speech Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL), gave in Philadelphia last week. The article shows, in some ways, how far we still have to go in our society to get to that bridge called fairness. I mean the place where we could actually be honest and fair and true with each other.

I have read Roger Cohen in The New York Times over the years but began reading him in earnest during the 2006 World Cup in Germany, some op-eds and most often his brilliant blog posts on the matches and the game of soccer. The pieces were elegant and learned, almost too much for the assignment.

The trouble, of course, is that he is published by The International Herald Tribune, not regularly by the Times.

It is a treasure to see him, if not in the pages of the Times, then at least on its website. Today’s piece by him is one of the most graceful I’ve read by him. I would quote him, except I would not know where to begin and Fair Use laws prevents me from plopping the whole piece here.

Let me offer one paragraph. You’ll have to go read the rest:

It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black “anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

I come late to the William F. Buckley eulogy party, a full week as a matter of fact. I was going to skip it entirely but I finally read my Newsweek magazine, which devoted precious newshole to the passing of the conservative icon.There was the long retrospective on his career by Evan Thomas, accompanied by a couple of respectful appreciations by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, the country’s premier liberal magazine, and Michael Gerson, George W. Bush’s exceptional speechwriter who sups now at the trough of several publications, Newsweek and the Washington Post included.Before I go any further, I should get this out of the way: among his many admirable qualities, Mr. Buckley was a very charming man and he gave great parties.Douglas Martin began his obituary in The New York Times this way:

William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died on Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 82.

No purpose will be served rehashing all the encomiums Buckley’s passing garnered. He was a great guy. A great writer. A great wit. Founded a magazine. He was the father of the conservative movement.Some of his eulogizers lamented what has become of the conservative movement he founded. Current crop of conservatives just don’t have the style, the civilized manner of Buckley. David Brooks, a protégé of Buckley who now occupies valuable real estate on The New York Times op-ed page, lamented the return of the haters and rabble rousers long after Buckley thought he had banished them from his movement.Brooks and others, as quoted by Newsweek, on Buckley:

For more than a half century, William F. Buckley Jr., who died last week at 82, largely inspired and held together the conservative movement that is collapsing today. The Wall Street Journal editorialized: “Several generations of conservatives grew up (in more than one sense) with Bill Buckley. Now they have—well, there is no one like him.” “He changed the personality of conservatism,” Brooks says. “It had been sort of negative, and he made it smart and sophisticated and pushed out all these oddballs and created a movement.” More recently, says Brooks, conservatism has “lost something.” In the conservatism spawned by talk radio and TV, the haters and know-nothings are back, ranting about immigrants and liberals. “It was a lot more philosophical under him,” he says. At those nightly salons, Buckley liked to talk and argue about ideas and literature and the nature of man; politics was rarely mentioned. “The new conservatives are not as intellectually creative as those dealing with communism and socialism,” says Brooks. Buckley tolerated some disreputable ideas, including segregation; but he had the capacity to change.

And vanden Heuvel had this to say early in her appreciation of Buckley:

And while he ceased to argue that Africans will be ready to run their own affairs “when they stop eating each other,” neither he nor his magazine ever fully repudiated the poisonous role it played in stoking white supremacists’ anger against the civil-rights movement.

The same Mr. Buckley called author Gore Vidal a “queer” and threatened to punch him out on his television show, The Firing Line. Charming indeed.

I’m sorry, Mr. Buckley might have had nicer manners but how is this any better than any of Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter’s serial assault on common-sense and decency?

William F. Buckley was an unreconstructed racist who comforted segregationists everywhere, including the purveyors of the long discredited policy of apartheid in South Africa. Buckley and the pages of the National Review provided ballast to the Reagan administration as it resisted all entreaties to help topple that evil regime.

That this man was welcomed in respectable society when he was alive was bad enough. That he was, on his death, further celebrated in the pages of respectable mainstream publications is both tragic and shameful.

How fortunate is John McCain, (R-AZ), to have Newsweek magazine in its corner?The magazine’s reporters and writers don’t even pretend to be objective anymore. They see their job as explaining the ‘Maverick’ to an unappreciative nation.

Case in point is their package of stories and columns under the headline Straight Talk Roadblock, which sought to dismiss the recent article by The New York Times about ethical lapses by McCain, including apparent cozy relationship between him and a lobbyist. Despite the fact that their own reporting (by powerhouse Evan Thomas and pit bull Michael Isikoff, among others) confirms the essential facts of the story by the Times, they still called it a non-story.In his ‘Editor’s Desk’ column, Jon Meacham said:

Let us be honest: without the allegations about sex, there was no Times story. (McCain’s FCC efforts and links to the communications company had been previously reported.) No suggestion of sex, no front page; no suggestion of sex, no right-wing rally to McCain’s side against the Times. It is, as Margaret Thatcher used to say, a funny old world.

It’s of a piece with recent Newsweek reporting about McCain, which has been adulatory, even more so than the usual media treatment of McCain. Howard Fineman put in his usual yeoman’s work sucking up to the good senator.As Newsweek says, there’s no scandal here. Everybody run along.

This story is scary. On election night, Sen. Hillary Clinton, (D-NY), was reported to have swept through New York. To put it mildly, the Empire state was said to be immune from the juggernaut Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL), was becoming in the rest of the country.

Then comes this little story in the metro section of The New York Times today:

Black voters are heavily represented in the 94th Election District in Harlem’s 70th Assembly District. Yet according to the unofficial results from the New York Democratic primary last week, not a single vote in the district was cast for Senator Barack Obama.

That anomaly was not unique. In fact, a review by The New York Times of the unofficial results reported on primary night found about 80 election districts among the city’s 6,106 where Mr. Obama supposedly did not receive even one vote, including cases where he ran a respectable race in a nearby district.

City election officials this week said that their formal review of the results, which will not be completed for weeks, had confirmed some major discrepancies between the vote totals reported publicly — and unofficially — on primary night and the actual tally on hundreds of voting machines across the city.

In the Harlem district, for instance, where the primary night returns suggested a 141 to 0 sweep by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the vote now stands at 261 to 136. In an even more heavily black district in Brooklyn — where the vote on primary night was recorded as 118 to 0 for Mrs. Clinton — she now barely leads, 118 to 116.

The history of New York elections has been punctuated by episodes of confusion, incompetence and even occasional corruption. And election officials and lawyers for both Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton agree that it is not uncommon for mistakes to be made by weary inspectors rushing on election night to transcribe columns of numbers that are delivered first to the police and then to the news media.

Timesman Sam Roberts assures us that there’s little chance this was fraud. Local election officials have very little incentives to engage in this kind of chicanery, someone told him. They would steal votes in elections that concern them not in this kind of race.

He should try telling that to people who voted for Mr. Obama.

At the sprawling Riverside Park Community apartments at Broadway and 135th Street, Alician D. Barksdale said she had voted for Mr. Obama and her daughter had, too, by absentee ballot.

“Everyone around here voted for him,” she said.

And:

At the Archive, a cafe and video store on the border of Bushwick and East Williamsburg, the manager, Brad Lee, agreed. “There were Obama posters in everyone’s windows,” he said. “There was even Obama graffiti.”

Let me ask this. . How would you feel if, let’s say you caught Obama-mania and rushed out and voted for him only to find out the next day that not a single person where you lived voted for him? And they wonder why people don’t vote anymore.

Photograph by Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald recorded a version of this song that is at once beautiful, sad, funny, and heartbreaking all at the same time. Today’s New York Times story about Sen. Barack Obama’s struggle with the issue of race in his campaign to become the Democratic Party nominee for president makes me feel all of those things.

Mr. Obama has largely succeeded in muting the issue of race in this campaign. He has succeeded in making the campaign not about his race, even as he has benefited from race (the whole ‘a credit to his race’ thing). The Clintons, Bill especially, recognized what was happening and quickly ended their subtle attempts to remind people that Mr. Obama is black. They, instead, took up a megaphone and blared it to anyone who would listen.

Photographs by Ozier Mohammed/The New York Times.

They earlier made the false claim to the New Yorker Magazine that Latinos don’t vote for blacks. When Sen. Obama won in Iowa, they became more daring and explicit in New Hampshire before going overboard in South Carolina.

Former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, (D-N.J.), was fond of saying (and I forget who he’s quoting here) that race is America’s original sin.

Nowhere is it more explicit than in this race. Mr. Obama’s campaign, as great as it has been, has had some significant failures. The deficits in his support now are testaments to those failures.

His seeming inability to craft a message that could appeal to lunch bucket, blue collar white voters is telling. It is my belief that Mr. Obama’s message benefits this constituency far more than the people who have been flocking to his campaign so far. He needs to find the language to talk to them.

As for Latinos, it is right that Sen. Obama has to work to earn their votes, just as he had to work (with no small amount of help from Bill and Hillary Clinton) to win over African-Americans. Latinos are diverse and not one single message will reach them. Again, reaching them is not an insurmountable challenge.

This just means Mr. Obama and his staff have to work harder to earn their votes. That is part of the promise of Mr. Obama’s movement. The solutions to our nation’s problems have to be deep and lasting. The blood, sweat and tears in this effort will only make sure both the achievements and the progressive coalition more enduring.

This is not to exclude Sen. Hillary Clinton. First, let me say that any other year I would be banging the drum hard supporting her. It is just a fluke that she is running at a time when her opponent is this remarkable man. She has taken some unfortunate steps in this campaign which she’ll ultimately have to atone for.

What must not happen is troglodyte John McCain winning the presidency.

That said, I will support Sen. Clinton if she wins the nomination. She will have the task of crafting the same progressive coalition, which I hope she is working on now, to carry her to the presidency.

Photo by Max Whittaker for The New York Times: Barack Obama, then known as Barry, in a 1978 senior yearbook photo at the Punahou School in Honolulu. At Punahou, a preparatory school that had few black students, he talked with friends about race, wealth and class.

Back at the time the New York Times explored in today’s paper, running for president of the United States had to have been the furthest thing in Sen. Barack Obama’s mind. He must have been around 20 years old and he was trying to figure out his way in this world.

What seems clear is that Mr. Obama’s time at Occidental
from 1979 to 1981 — where he describes himself arriving
as “alienated” — would ultimately set him on a course to
public service. He developed a sturdier sense of self and
came to life politically, particularly in his sophomore year,
growing increasingly aware of harsh inequities like
apartheid and poverty in the third world.

He also discovered that he wanted to be in a larger
arena; one professor described Occidental back then
as feeling small and provincial. Mr. Obama wrote in
his memoir that he needed “a community that cut
deeper than the common despair that black friends
and I shared when reading the latest crime statistics,
or the high fives I might exchange on a basketball court.
A place where I could put down stakes and test my
commitments.”

Sen. Obama, (D-IL), wrote in “Dreams From My Father” about youthful drug use prior to and during this period, drug use that stopped after he transferred to Columbia University in New York City.

Mitt Romney, who abandoned his candidacy for the Republican nomination this week, disgracefully tried to make some political hay out of this admission. He got nowhere. Later, Bill Shaheen, an adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, also tried to make it into a campaign issue, suggesting that Mr. Obama’s history with drugs would make him vulnerable to Republican attacks if he became his party’s nominee.

“It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs
to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’” Shaheen told
reporters in New Hampshire. “There are so many openings
for Republican dirty tricks. It’s hard to overcome.”

Hillary disavowed the comment and forced Shaheen to resign as one of the co-chairs of her campaign.
People in the past questioned whether Mr. Obama took some literary license in “Dreams of My Father” to make the book more dramatic. In this article, the Times tracked down people who knew Mr. Obama back then and almost to a one none remembers him as a drug user.

“He was not even close to being a party animal,” one friend from the day told the Times.

Serge F. Kovaleski, the Timesman, wondered and speculated about this:

Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs, though,
significantly differs from the recollections of others who do
not recall his drug use. That could suggest he was so private
about his usage that few people were aware of it, that the
memories of those who knew him decades ago are fuzzy or
rosier out of a desire to protect him, or that he added some
writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he
overcame seem more dramatic.

In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and
mentors from his high school and Occidental recalled
Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised,
someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug
problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.

In short, it was a portrait of a remarkable young man poised to do great things, not unlike someone any father would wish their sons and daughters to grow up to be like. He displayed the allure he now poses for voters even back then.

Mr. Obama displayed a deft but unobtrusive manner
of debating.“When he talked, it was an E. F. Hutton
moment: people listened,” said John Boyer, who lived
across the hall from Mr. Obama. “He would point out
the negatives of a policy and its consequences and
illuminate the complexities of an issue the way others
could not.” He added, “He has a great sense of humor
and could defuse an argument.”

Voters in caucuses and primaries this weekend, next week, and the next several months will have opportunities to take the measure of this man and decide whether to make him the Democratic Party nominee for president. They could choose to vote, as he is fond of saying, for him, rather than against somebody.

I found this New York Times story very fascinating. The Sanchez sisters’ story was affecting but the story that affect me the most was the one involving Christopher Edley and Maria Echaveste.

Christopher Edley and Maria Echaveste, a married couple who met while serving in the Clinton administration, have actually started debating each other. Not just at their kitchen table, but in front of audiences across California and on television.

“It’s not easy,” Ms. Echaveste, who is a paid consultant to Mrs. Clinton, said in a joint telephone interview with her husband, who advises Mr. Obama. “You’re having a discussion and your husband is basically saying that your candidate doesn’t have a moral compass.”

With that, Mr. Edley broke in. “Or your wife is saying that your candidate isn’t smart enough to figure out where the bathrooms are,” he said.

“I never said that,” she replied.

The couple has relived some of the campaign’s most rancorous moments, such as when Ms. Echaveste, echoing Bill Clinton, told her husband that Mr. Obama was “naïve.” The word conjured up racial stereotypes for Mr. Edley, who is black, and has known Mr. Obama since he taught him in law school. “There’s the childlike Negro,” he explained. “There is the superficial but glib minstrel.”

Ms. Echaveste, who is Hispanic, now understands why her husband exploded in response. “Regardless of being dean of a law school” — at the University of California, Berkeley, where both teach — “he’s still in a box called being a black man,” she said. Still, she said, “I ought to be able to make that point and not trigger these reactions.”

And with that, Mr. Edley responded, his wife countered, and they started to debate once more.

This couple’s conflict played out for me this way:

I was open-minded about Hillary Clinton’s campaign for nomination and could have seen myself voting for her. Then, in a Jan. 13 appearance on ‘Meet the Press,’ she refused to answer Tim Russert’s question about whether Obama was qualified to be president. Obama has more years in elected office than she does and he’s the exact same age Bill Clinton was in 1992. So what is the problem? And this was going on at a time when Hillary and Bill were channeling Lee Atwater in South Carolina by turning Obama into “the black candidate.”

Call me sensitive, thin-skinned, but it became hard for me to support her after that. I started wishing John Edwards had been a stronger candidate, that his message had resonated with the voters more. I did not want Obama to benefit from my disappointment with Hillary Clinton.

So, this is where we’re at.

The Clintons and the national media covering the Democratic Party race for the presidential nomination have broken out a new story line regarding Barack Obama: That he’s “angry” and “frustrated.” Hillary Clinton practically taunts him with this. It does not help that the media has not only totally bought into this, they’re mischaracterizing their news coverage to turn normal or innocuous exchange with the candidate into “tense” encounters. ABC News breathlessly reported on its website that it had filmed a “testy” exchange between Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times and Obama. Their tape, however, does not match their description of the encounter.

A measured Obama was trying to both sign autographs for voters and talk to the reporters as he campaigned in South Carolina. His voice was not raised. A bemused smile played on his face, as if he recognized the trap he was in. The reporters were trying to manufacture a story where there was none and he was not about to give them one. He even tried to go off the record at one point.

It’s a singular achievement of the Clintons that and the media in this campaign that they’ve managed to turn Barack Obama into the “Angry Black Man” without any evidence of him being one.

I have said previously (as have others) that I believe Barack Obama is Bill Clinton’s truest heir.

The New York Times has a curious story today that I am still thinking about. I am not sure what I think about the strategy.

I know that I am happy that the Clintons are not ceding the ‘black’ vote’ to Obama. The most gratifying aspect of this campaign to me has been Obama’ run as a candidate who happens to be black, rather than as the ‘black candidate.’ For that reason, he has had to work hard to earn black support, which he still doesn’t have, not totally. Black women, for instance, may still end up supporting Hillary (because I may not return to this subject, consider this in the meantime).

Hillary, at first, did not think she would have to contest for the ‘black vote,’ such was the reservoir goodwill built by Bill Clinton over the course of his political career. Bill Clinton was no less exploitative of African-Americans in his political career than other Democrats. And the party during his reign still took African-Americans for granted. But, even if short of tangible gains for blacks, Bill Clinton was at least empathetic.

That was a change from the open hostility that Ronald Reagan in particular and Republicans in general have exhibited, something that continues today in some of the coded and overt gestures that the current crop of Republican candidates are making on the campaign trail.

Which is why Obama should have to explain better his apparent Nevada apostasy regarding Reagan and the gibe about the Republican Party being the ‘party of ideas.’

Reagan and those ‘ideas’ that the Republican Party continue to traffick in demonized African-Americans and devastated cities, preyed on communities of color , and the imperiled the poor during the past generation. It is not enough to say “I want me some’ Obama Republicans.’ ”

I remember some of the reasons the so-called “Reagan Democrats” deserted the party to vote with Republicans. I am not going to discuss them here but the consequences of that decision are still being felt today.

In any case, Hillary knows she’s in a race now and she’s truly fighting. I hope to take the cudgel to Obama some more on this subject but the person I want to talk about is Bill Clinton and his struggle for a tone against Obama.

Clinton has been too emotional, too hot, and some of his language too freighted for me not to wonder why he seems so bothered by Obama. This is a contest and Bill, of all people, should enjoy the arena and this battle. But he does not seem to.

Ok. I have to run now. I want to think more about this.