But I’ve become increasingly convinced that liberal hubris comprises more than moral and intellectual condescension, or perhaps it’s just that their condescension knows no limits. It’s not that they believe they have more morality and wisdom than their opponents; they believe they have a monopoly on virtue and knowledge, that those who don’t share their views are not members of what they are fond of calling the “reality-based community.”

Consider this all too typical comment from Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat representing parts of Fairfax County and some surrounding towns in Northern Virginia. Connolly, mind you, is more sensible than many of his fellow caucus members. President of the freshman class of Democrats in the House and widely and with some reason described as a “moderate” (of course, Pelosi et al. can make many liberals look moderate), Connolly recently told ABC News regarding the coming “health car summit”:

At some point, the public is going to demand that Republicans participate like mature adults, and not just say ‘no’ to everything.

The liberal view — what we propose is “everything”; opponents favor nothing — is perfectly consistent with (who knows? May even derive from) the view of Obama as The Messiah.

Revelation 22:13:

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.

On the same day Real Clear Politics linked an article by Jacob Weisberg, editor of SLATE, who involuntarily volunteered to be a case study of what Alexander had in mind with an article whose advice was to Blame the Childish, Ignorant American Public. The content of Weisberg’s article, however, was less nuanced and balanced than its title. Its message was that “the biggest culprit in our current predicament” is “the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.”

Now comes the New Yorker, that arbiter of taste and right (i.e., left)-thinking that all the cognoscenti read when they’re not reading the New York Times or listening to NPR, with an article by James Surowiecki, the magazine’s financial writer, on what it regards as The Populism Problem. To Surowiecki, the “problem” is the advice voters are giving to politicians these days:

This advice may be contradictory, but then so are the economic opinions of the many angry voters who are animating what’s being called the new populism. Whereas the economic populism of the eighteen-nineties and the right-wing cultural populism of recent years represented reasonably coherent ideologies, this new populism has stitched together incompatible concerns and goals into one “I’m mad as hell” quilt. The people may have spoken. It’s just not clear that they’re making any sense.

UPDATE

And here’s another one: Sen. Ted Kaufman (D, Del) said in a TV appearance this morning that Sarah Palin’s supporters “don’t follow what’s really happening.”

Presumably if they knew what was really going on, they’d all be liberal Democrats.

Adults more or less agree. A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology took a look at which disciplines children and adults thought were the most difficult to learn. For the most part, people of all ages think psychology is easy and physics is hard. That bias begins early and changes some, but not much, the older we get.

Surber offers three explanations, “all of them what common sense might predict, all rather obvious, and none in need of fancy research involving such things as ‘occupational role modeling’ and ‘vocational engendering.’”

1. Class envy

First, ... virtually all instructors in the liberal arts are aware of the disparity between their level of education and their financial situation.... You don’t have to be a militant Marxist to recognize that people’s political persuasions will align pretty well with their economic interests. It’s real simple: Those who have less and want more will tend to support social changes that promise to accomplish that; those who are already economic winners will want to conserve their status.

would want to preserve a situation in which others who are equivalently educated and experienced — doctors, engineers, lawyers, scientists, colleagues in other areas, and, yes, chief executives — receive vastly more compensation, sometimes by a factor of 10 or 100?

2. Deep knowledge of history

A second reason that liberal-arts professors tend to be politically liberal is that they have very likely studied large-scale historical processes and complex cultural dynamics. Conservatives, who tend to evoke the need to preserve traditional connections with the past, have nonetheless contributed least to any detailed or thoughtful study of history.

... if you actually take the time to look at history and culture, certain conclusions about human nature, society, and economics tend to force themselves on you. History has a trajectory, driven in large part by the desires of underprivileged or oppressed groups to attain parity with the privileged or the oppressor.....

As President Obama recently put it, any open-minded review of history (and perhaps especially American history) teaches at least one clear lesson: There is a “right side of history,” Obama said — the side of those who would overcome prejudice, question unearned privilege, and resist oppression in favor of a more just condition.

If you don’t study history, whether because it doesn’t pad quarterly profits, isn’t sufficiently scientific or objective, or threatens your own economic status, then you won’t know any of that. But most of those in the liberal arts have concluded that there really isn’t any other intellectually respectable way to interpret the broad contours of history and culture. They are liberal, in other words, by deliberate and reasoned choice, based upon the best available evidence.

3. Liberal arts professors are liberal because they have been taught by liberals, who have “values”

Finally, most liberal-arts professors come from a background of liberal education, which emphasizes the role that values play in human affairs.... More important, they’ve learned that values inevitably conflict, and they have developed the skills to interpret these clashes with nuance, envisioning various forms of resolution or mediation....

It is this open perspective on what types of values can be considered legitimate, the various ways they can be approached, and the different redefinitions or reconfigurations that they may assume that most differentiates liberal-arts faculty members from their colleagues in business, law, medicine, or the natural sciences. (I don’t mention the social sciences here, because there is no longer any really meaningful line that can be drawn between the humanities and the social sciences.) All of those other fields are structured around specific values that remain relatively fixed: profit and exchange in business; justice and social utility in law; health and wellness in medicine; objectivity, explanation, and prediction in the natural sciences. The liberal arts are distinctive because they are open to considering any of those values outside their narrow professional contexts.

Those are the three reasons. Surber’s conclusion:

It is because we liberal-arts professors have a personal stake in our relative economic status; we have carefully studied the actual dynamics of history and culture; and we have trained ourselves to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways about the human condition that so many of us are liberals. Most of us agree with President Obama that there is a “right side of history,” and we feel morally bound to be on it.

But I do have an explanation that’s not that different from Prof. Suber’s but is much shorter: liberal arts professors are liberal because they’re liberal arts professors; being liberal is in their job description.

Please read those posts for a more thorough discussion than I will provide here, but an un-nuanced (though not, I think, unfair) summary of Espenshade’s research on data from eight elite colleges is that he and his co-authors find a massive racial achievement gap, correspondingly massive racial preferences in admissions that benefit blacks and Hispanics and bar large numbers of Asians, combined with a commitment to “diversity” that causes them to refuse to recognize the discrimination against Asians for what it is and even to lament what they see as the imminent demise of the race preference regime.

For example, as I noted here, Espenshade and Alexandra Radford noted in a recent article that

[c]ompared to white applicants at selective private colleges and universities, black applicants receive an admission boost that is equivalent to 310 SAT points, measured on an all-other-things-equal basis. The boost for Hispanic candidates is equal on average to 130 SAT points. Asian applicants face a 140 point SAT disadvantage.

[d]oing away with racial preferences for underrepresented minority students would substantially reduce the number of such students at selective colleges.

I bring all this up, again, because Prof. Espenshade steadfastly continues, either obstinately or obtusely, to acknowledge what his numbers, charts, graphs, and statistical analyses clearly reveal: that “affirmative action” as practiced by admissions officers at elite colleges results in massive discrimination against Asian-Americans. (I discussed an earlier example of this refusal here and here.) He professes, lamely, in a recent interview about his new book with the Princeton News Service that he can’t conclude that

because I’ve never actually sat in on an admission committee. But I’m convinced they don’t have an equation like this and say, “OK, if you are Hispanic, you get a certain number of points; if your SAT scores are in this category, you get a certain number of points,” right down the list.

People may read this and want to say, “Oh, because I’m Asian American, my SAT scores have been downgraded.” That is not really the way to interpret these data. Many times people will ask me, “Do your results prove that there is discrimination against Asian applicants?” And I say, “No, they don’t.” Even though in our data we have much information about the students and what they present in their application folders, most of what we have are quantifiable data. We don’t have the “softer” variables -- the personal statements that the students wrote, their teacher recommendations, a full list of extracurricular activities. Because we don’t have access to all of the information that the admission office has access to, it is possible that the influence of one applicant characteristic or another might appear in a different light if we had the full range of materials.

This is neither lame nor silly; it is both dumb and offensive.

holds the promise of improving how colleges serve students of different hues. On the fundamental question of whether racial and ethnic diversity produces educational benefits, the latest studies’ bottom line is: Sometimes. With the right mix of students. If handled delicately.

Many of you will recall the controversial report by University of Michigan psychologist Patricia Gurin that played such an important role in UM’s defense of its racial preference policies. (Those two posts, by the way, did not discuss the competence of Gurin’s work so much as its honesty.) Now some scholars are having second thoughts about this and other similar work. “In the period leading to the Grutter decision,” Schmidt writes,

researchers had been focused on the basic question of whether diversity produced any educational benefits, because the courts’ view of the legality of race-conscious admission policies appeared to hinge on the answer.

“There was a rush to get stuff out quickly,” says Mr. Milem, of Arizona, who helped generate research used by proponents of affirmative action to make their case. “The lawyers did not want the nuance. They said, ‘Show us what the outcomes are.’ They pushed us to sort of talk in better, shorter sound bites because that is the way it needs to be communicated.”

The debate over the persuasiveness of research on this point has remained very much alive in the years since Grutter. In an article published in the Stanford Law Review in 2006, for example, Justin Pidot, who was then a third-year Stanford law student and now is a Justice Department lawyer, reviewed the research that had been before the Supreme Court in 2003 and found it inconclusive on the key question of whether colleges must maintain minority enrollments above certain levels to achieve educational benefits.

Of course one need not be a new scholar, or the author of new scholarly research, to find enormous and fatal flaws in the research of Gurin and other early apologists for “diversity.” For example, the Michigan Association of Scholars demolished this research (without, somehow, persuading Justice O’Connor et al.) in an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court in Grutter (which I discussed in some detail here). “In an effort to quantify the educational benefits of diversity,” they wrote,

the University solicited and then issued a report written by Patricia Gurin, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Professor Gurin sought to correlate the racial diversity of classrooms on the one hand with hundreds of educational outcomes on the other. Among her results was the conclusion that students' self-reported intellectual self confidence improved more sharply in classrooms where there was greater racial diversity. But only by wading through pages of regression tables will one find the fact (not much emphasized by the University!) that student self-reported intellectual self confidence in racially mixed classrooms increased for white students. For black students Prof. Gurin found either no correlation or a negative correlation. Black student self-confidence, according to Prof. Gurin, either did not improve, or it declined in more racially mixed classes.

As the University would have it, the University is justified in abandoning normal admissions criteria so as to boost the number of black students in order that white students (but not black students) may feel more self-confident. Whether this shows a need for diversity at all is arguable; that it shows a compelling need for diversity is absurd.

Schmidt’s article surveys a number of recent studies — some of those, such as those by Thomas Espenshade of Princeton I’ve already discussed — and his entire article is well worth reading. I was particularly interested, for a reason you will see below, in Schmidt’s comments about one of those new studies:

Among the latest studies is a soon-to-be-published paper by two Duke University scholars — Peter Arcidiacono, an associate professor of economics, and Jacob L. Vigdor, a professor of public policy and economics — suggesting that colleges interested in promoting educational diversity face a Catch-22: If they relax admissions standards to take in more black and Hispanic students, their white and Asian-American students are much less likely to reap educational benefits, at least as measured by their acquisition of diversity-related skills assumed to increase long-term earning potential.

On the whole, the study, slated for publication in the journal Economic Inquiry, found only weak evidence that the racial composition of a college's student body has a long-term impact on the success of white and Asian-American students in the areas it measured. And where colleges enrolled black and Hispanic students whose academic credentials were lower, on average, than those of other students, the effect of diversity on the success of white and Asian-American students appeared, if anything, to be negative.

This article evaluates the frequently argued but heretofore little tested hypothesis that increasing minority representation in elite colleges generates tangible benefits for majority-race students. Using data on graduates of 30 selective universities, we find only weak evidence of any relationship between collegiate racial composition and the postgraduation outcomes of white or Asian students. Moreover, the strongest evidence we uncover suggests that increasing minority representation by lowering admission standards is unlikely to produce benefits and may in fact cause harm by reducing the representation of minority students on less selective campuses. While affirmative action may still be desirable for the benefits it conveys to minority students, these results provide little support for “spillover” effects on majority-race students....

And, if I do say so myself (well, who else is going to say so?), the discordant, grating song that “diversity uses blacks for the benefit of whites” has been sung here, loudly and frequently, since 2002 (!). Critics of “diversity” often note the unfairness of excluding some whites and Asians so that other whites and Asians could receive the alleged benefits of being exposed to the preferentially admitted minorities. They properly regard such treatment as unfair, I noted in the November 2002 post just quoted,

because they were not treated with what Ronald Dworkin (and others) would call “equal respect.” Their interests were subordinated to the (presumed) interests of others in being exposed to more "diversity" than the rejected applicants could provide. In short, they were treated as a means to the more important ends of others.

Even though they were awarded the prize of admission, they too were treated as a means of providing a benefit to others, i.e., the non-minorities who will benefit from being exposed to them. They are not treated as individuals. They are not admitted, after all, to provide “diversity” to themselves but to others. True, they may receive some benefit from being in a “diverse” student body. But they would receive that benefit no matter what majority-white institution they attended. That is, admitting the preferentially treated blacks admitted to any highly selective university does not provide them with any diversity benefits they would not receive at less selective majority-white institutions. The diversity benefit that preferences are said to provide, that is, flows to the non-minorities exposed to the preferentially admitted minorities. This is treating them as a means, not an end, every bit as much as the rejected whites....

They may well receive some benefit from being admitted to more selective institutions than they would have absent the racial preference they received (or course, they are also less likely to graduate), but the diversity benefit they receive cannot justify those preferences because the preferentially admitted minorities would have received the same diversity benefits at the less selective institutions they would otherwise have attended.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the elite institutions that offer racial preferences are using minorities to provide “diversity” to their non-minority students. In return, those students are allowed entry into institutions whose requirements would have excluded them if they had been judged by the same standards as the other students. This bargain may or may not be beneficial to the instiutions or to the preferentially admitted, i.e., differentially treated, minorities, but it is a fallacy to point to diversity benefits allegedly received by the preferred to justify the preferences extended to them. If “diversity” justifies racial discrimination, it is because of the benefits received by the non-minorities who are exposed to the preferentially admitted minorities. To claim otherwise is less than honest.

I could quote more, such as Paul Brest, former dean of the Stanford Law School, being

honest enough to recognize that admitting minorities so that the other students may benefit from being exposed to their allegedly different perspectives places a burden on them. He notes that “[w]hile minority students complained of the burden of constantly having to educate their white classmates, the minority students learned as well.” Of course they did, but the fact they did does not validate the diversity justification for racial preferences. They would also have learned at the schools to which they would have been admitted without preferences. The diversity argument is based on the contributions the preferentially admitted minorities make to others, not on the benefits they undoubtedly receive.

Tote that barge! Lift dat bale!

According to state Republican Party Chairman Pat Mullins,

“Monday’s bipartisan vote illustrates just how far out of touch Democrats like Rep. Tom Perriello, D-5th, and Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-11th, are on the issue of health care,” Mullins said. “When Republicans asked Senate Democrats to join them in standing up against federal overreach, five decided to put the rights of their constituents ahead of the wishes of Washington, D.C....”

“Even Democrats in the Virginia Senate realize that the health care nightmare being negotiated behind closed doors across the Potomac is bad news for their constituents,” Mullins said. “Monday’s vote shows again that Reps. Perriello, Connolly and the rest of the Democrats in Washington, D.C., aren’t listening to their employers — the voters of the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

Opportunities Abound for Female Athletes, but Less So for Coaches and AD’s, Report Says

New data in a study that has tracked women’s involvement in collegiate sports over 33 years suggest that while more women compete on college teams than in previous years, they are still in the minority among coaches and leaders of athletic departments. Nineteen percent of athletic departments have female athletic directors, down slightly from 2008, the last time this biennial report, “Women in Intercollegiate Sport,” was published. Meanwhile, 43 percent of women’s athletic teams have female head coaches, a figure that is unchanged from two years ago but a steep drop from 1972, when more than 90 percent of women’s teams had female head coaches.

The fact that women make up a smaller proportion of coaches and athletic directors than they do of athletes does not mean there are less “opportunities” for them in those positions. Maybe their lower representation in those positions implies the presence of discrimination; maybe it doesn’t. The numbers, in short, don’t speak for themselves, and don’t say anything at all about “opportunities.”

But what’s the point of having your own blog if you can’t be snarky on it? At least I behave better in public (something my mother always complained about. She’d have much preferred better behavior at home.)

Senate Democrats held back from asking President Barack Obama about healthcare reform during a carefully scripted question-and-answer session in front of television cameras.

With the cameras rolling, a group of senators selected in advance by the Democratic leadership asked questions about such topics as partisan gridlock and GOP obstruction.

And then came this presidential bomb:

“We’ve got to make sure that our party understands that, like it or not, we have to have a financial system that is healthy and functioning, so we can’t be demonizing every bank out there,” Obama said. “We’ve got to be the party of business, small business and large business, because they produce jobs.”

1) those who don’t like having “a financial system that is healthy and functioning” but understand the need for one, and who thus “demonize” only some banks (many? most?) but not all of them; and

2) those who don’t understand the need for a healthy and functioning financial system and who consequently demonize all banks.

What a party.

The article’s actual title accurately summarizes its argument: “Follow the Leader. We elected him to do the right thing — Not take dictation.”

Quindlen believes Massachusetts sent no message in electing Scott Brown. His election “was a classic toss-the-bums-out event, neither specific nor illuminating.” For some reason, though, Obama’s election came with a clear mandate to do ... what Quindlen would like him to do.

It’s not surprising that Quindlen was not illuminated by Scott Brown’s election, because her quotient for illumination seems quite limited. Her understanding of the past, for example, is a dim as of present:

... we forget that most of the things that make America great—civil rights, the safety net, Social Security—were pushed through despite their unpopularity.

In the final analysis, Quindlen’s theory — we should follow the president wherever he leads because he won — falls of its own weight, even though that weight is slight. True, Obama won, but so did the senators and representatives whom Quindlen blames for blocking his path. She must think that they, unlike Obama, were not “elected to do the right thing.”

Standard procedure requires the Senate and House to pass identical bills before submitting the legislation to the president for his signature. When the versions differ, those differences are usually ironed out in a conference committee, with the resulting compromise sent back to both houses for approval. The trouble here for the Democrats is that the new version is also subject to filibuster in the Senate, and now the Democrats have “only” 59 Senators, not their pre-Brown filibuster-busting 60.

But Democrats don’t like standard procedures when they threaten to get in their way. So their first attempt at bypassing them came when they eschewed a conference committee altogether (because those pesky Republicans would have been present) in favor of having Democratic leaders from both houses agree among themselves. Even some Democrats couldn’t stomach this deviousness, but that train was on the verge — or “precipice,” in the president’s term — of arriving at its destination when Scott Brown’s election derailed it.

Their apparently pending second bypass attempt is persuading the House to pass the Senate bill as is, based on a promise that the Senate will then “correct” the flaws in the bill — “provisions such as a new tax on high-end ‘Cadillac’ health plans and special aid for Nebraska,” abortion restrictions, etc. — with legislation that could be passed — even though by “reconciliation,” i.e., by a simple 51 vote majority, which they could probably get even though some Democratic senators oppose this maneuver. This stratagem has been widely discussed in the press, but I don’t recall seeing any articles describing it for what it is: a fraud.

Under this scenario, the House would be asked to pass, as is, the current Senate bill based on winks from Obama, Reid, and Pelosi that it’s not the “real” bill, which would emerge only after the Senate passes its un-filibusterable fixes. In short the House would knowingly be voting for a fraudulent Potemkin bill.

On the other hand, that’s about par for course in the House of Pelosi.

President Obama’s campaign to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system is officially on the back burner as Democrats turn to the task of stimulating job growth, but behind the scenes party leaders have nearly settled on a strategy to salvage the massive legislation.

They are meeting almost daily to plot legislative moves while gently persuading skittish rank-and-file lawmakers to back a sweeping bill.

This effort is deliberately being undertaken quietly as Democrats work to focus attention on more-popular initiatives to bring down unemployment, which the president said was a priority in his State of the Union address on Wednesday. [Emphasis added]

In a 24-hour news cycle, with the Internet and bloggers and cable news, sometimes a lot more can be accomplished, especially with healthcare, when it happens behind closed doors,” said Drew Altman, a healthcare policy expert who heads the nonprofit Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

“A little bit of time and quiet could help,” he said.

“Human nature being what it is, it's always easier to be against something than to be for it. And if you create any uncertainty with change, opponents can jump on that and just try to scare people. . . . That has been hard to overcome politically,” Pryor said. “Maybe over time, people will have a chance to understand what is in the legislation.”

Democratic leaders do not reserve their condescending scorn for voters who disagree with them; they have similar contempt for many of their own skittish followers (or not) in Congress who were, for some reason, “rattled by Brown’s winning campaign in Massachusetts.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) particularly want to give members time to recover from the shock of Republican Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race two weeks ago. The election cost Democrats their filibuster-proof Senate majority.

But in the coming weeks, Pelosi and Reid hope to rally House Democrats behind the healthcare bill passed by the Senate while simultaneously trying persuade Senate Democrats to approve a series of changes to the legislation using budget procedures that bar filibusters.

The Dem leaders thus assume not only that voters are too dumb to appreciate the wisdom of the Dems’ health reform but also that they are so dim they will forget their opposition, thus allowing the “rattled” Democrats in Congress to recover from their Brown-induced “shock” and stick by their former willingness to impose massively unpopular legislation on a forgetful public.

Given the regard in which Obama-Reid-Pelosi-Pryor Democrats hold their constituents, this may work.

“Let me be exactly clear about what health care reform means to you,” the president told residents of the Garden State. “First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan....”

Our approach would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan.

... let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the package that we’ve presented — and there’s some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.

More seriously, though, “let me say this about health care and the health care debate”: for once I find myself in total agreement with the president. It is absolutely true that the way he has debated the issue “bears on a whole lot of other issues.” He has repeatedly said things that are not true. He has repeatedly denied responsibility for his own decisions — those stray dogs and stray cats somehow “got in” without his knowing about them; those provisions that “might have” violated his pledge “got snuck in” without his knowledge or approval.

One final question: who, Mr. President, were the sneakers?

is both obvious and simple: “eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.”

Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.

Now comes frequent DISCRIMINATIONS commenter and retired editor extraordinaire, Linda Seebach, who has a thorough analysis of the “equity”-induced Berkeley educational fiasco on the Breitbart “Big Journalism” site. Read the whole thing.

After the State of the Union speech last night, Matthews inadvertently revealed quite a lot about ... Chris Matthews, as reported, well, everywhere (the following from the Washington Post’s “Politics and Policy” blog):

On MSNBC News Wednesday night, “Hardball” host Chris Matthews had an idiosyncratic take on President Obama’s first State of the Union. He told Keith Olbermann that during Obama’s speech, “I forgot he was black.”

Matthews seemed to be trying to articulate how Obama had moved beyond race. “He is post-racial by all appearances. You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country and passed so much history in just a year or two. I mean, it’s something we don’t even think about,” Matthews said. “I was watching, I said, ‘Wait a minute, he’s an African-American guy in front of a bunch of other white people.’ And here he is. President of the United States, and we’ve completely forgotten that tonight. Completely forgotten it. I think it was in the scope of his discussion -- it was so broad-ranging, so in tune with so many problems, of aspects, and aspects of American life that you don’t think terms of the old tribalism, the old ethnicity.”

I forgot he was black.

Most of the time Matthews thinks of Obama as a black president, but last night he forgot.

He is post-racial by all appearances

Obama doesn’t look like a Negro.

You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country ...

Once he’s been president another couple of years he might actually be a leader

... and passed so much history in just a year or two.

Not sure about passing history. I don’t think Matthews means passing history like passing gas, but he couldn’t be referring to passing legislation. Maybe this is Matthews’ way of saying We Have Overcome. But liberals don’t agree with that view — still too much to be done to have overcome already, etc. — so let’s just say Matthews misspoke here, whatever he meant.

‘Wait a minute, he’s an African-American guy in front of a bunch of other white people.’

Wow! Other white people! Imagine that! Matthews is saying. Obama’s as white as you and me and all those Congresspeople!

... we’ve completely forgotten that [he’s black] tonight. Completely forgotten it.

But if we’ve completely forgotten it, why are “we” spending so much time talking about it? Matthews is quite proud of himself for forgetting about race ... for a few minutes. But more to the point, why did he forget it about it at all? Because...

... it was in the scope of his discussion -- it was so broad-ranging, so in tune with so many problems, of aspects, and aspects of American life that you don’t think terms of the old tribalism, the old ethnicity.

In short, Obama is not black “by all appearances” because he is so well-spoken ... and on so many topics (look at that “scope”!) that blacks don’t usually talk about. All the African Americans we're used to are so, well, tribal. But Obama talks just like us on the very things we talk about, so he doesn’t even look black.

Now I think I’ve finally figured out who Chris Matthews really is. He’s a more verbose, less articulate Joe Biden! Remember, Biden said all of the above, much more concisely, back in 2007:

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”