According to reporter Michael Powell’s article in the New York Times today, “Senator Barack Obama is a man of few rhetorical stumbles.” Perhaps Powell and his editor were on vacation when Obama described small town whites as “bitter” and “clinging” to guns and God; when he characterized Rev. Wright’s church, with its anti-American and anti-white rants as pretty much like all other black churches; when he described his own grandmother as a “typical white person” because of the racial fears he attributed to her; when he said, recently, that he favored “properly structured” racial quotas; etc.
Now that we’ve established the reliability of Powell’s estimation of Obama’s views, let’s move on to his main topic in today’s article, that “Obama is Careful on Race” and that his campaign,
a carefully controlled lot on the best of days, reacted most cautiously as it sought to tamp down any sense that it was at war with Mr. McCain over who was the first to inject race into the contest….
“I was in Union, Mo., which is 98 percent white, a rural conservative, and what I said was what I think everyone knows, which is that I don’t look like I came out of central casting when it comes to presidential candidates,” [Obama] told The St. Petersburg Times. “There was nobody there who thought at all that I was trying to inject race in this.”
Whatever the good citizens of Union, MO, thought BO was trying, or not trying “to inject,” it is impossible to regard his absorption and repetition of what he “looks like” as anything other than reminding voters that he’s black and about to become a victim of Republican racial slurs.
The impossibility of viewing these comments in any other light explains why his efforts to “tamp down” the widespread recognition of the obvious falls so flat. David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s chief strategist, attempted to explain the “looks like” remark Friday morning by saying:
“He’s not from central casting,” Axelrod told a national TV audience Friday [ABC’s “Good Morning America”],”when it comes to candidates for president of the United States. He’s new to Washington. Yes, he’s African-American.”
Axelrod repeated the same line on CBS’s “The Early Show.”
The effect of all these defensive attempts to put an innocent gloss on Obama’s “look like” comments by repeating, like a mantra, that all he meant is that he isn’t from “central casting” is, ironically, to make Obama, Axelrod, et. al. appear to be exactly that, actors dispatched from central casting desperately trying out for a part by reading the same line off the same script.
And, finally, there is one more delicious irony about all these explanations that Obama’s references to what he “looks like” mean only that he doesn’t look like the “central casting” version of what a president looks like: actually, he does look exactly like the central casting version of two presidents in one of the most popular recent shows on TV (and probably the most popular show among conservatives), “24.”
Here is what President David Palmer looked like. And after he was assassinated, and his evil successor dispensed with, here is what his successor, President Wayne Palmer, his younger brother elected in his own right, looks like.
Barack Obama, a young celebrity candidate with little experience and fewer accomplishments, with little going for him except his celebrity status, does in fact look exactly like he “came out of central casting.”
ADDENDUM
Dan Glickman, a former Congressman and Secretary of Agriculture who has been president of the Motion Picture Association of America since 2004, and thus should know something about central casting, thinks Obama is as much from central casting as McCain. Writing on the Huffington Post, Glickman argues that
[both of] our presidential candidates seem straight out of central casting — one a decorated veteran and former prisoner of war, the other a Kennedy-esque voice of a new generation, summoning the ‘audacity of hope.’
And not only the candidate himself. According to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Politics Blog:
The Obama children, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, are straight from central casting.
