The Golden Child

O Brother, Where Art Thou?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 2, 2007

"I'll press your flesh, you dimwitted sumbitch! You don't tell your pappy how to court the electorate. We ain't one-at-a-timin' here. We're MASS communicating"
-Coen Brothers film O Brother Where Art Thou?

As reported second-hand here, Marueen went uptown to the Apollo to check out rising soul star Barack Obama. Being in that hallowed hall of music put here in a musical mood.

His advisers and fund-raisers have pressed him to go fortissimo. Many voters with great expectations are hovering, hoping for a crescendo.

She even invokes erstwhile singer Eddie Murphy.

Despite his uneven efforts and distaste for the claws of competition, they can see he is a golden child, one who moves, speaks, smiles and thinks with amazing grace.

The rest of the article is a litany of folk that have jumped aboard the Barackesh Express. She leads off with token non-heterosexual Andrew Sullivan, but let's see if we can spot a pattern:

In Time, Shelby Steele agrees that a President Obama could show “that race is but a negligible human difference.”

But he notes that Obama’s abandonment by his African father at the age of 2 marked him. “Much of the excitement that surrounds him comes from the perception that he is only lightly tethered to race,” Steele writes. “Yet the very arc of his life — from Hawaii to the South Side of Chicago — has been shaped by an often conscious resolve to ‘belong’ irrefutably to the black identity.”

Jesse Jackson has chastised Obama for not focusing enough on black voters or fussing more about the Jena Six. But Obama wrote that he grew up knowing how to disarm whites worried about angry black men.

But Obama did get to sup at Sylvia’s soul-food restaurant — the place where Bill O’Reilly was shocked to find such genteel black folk — with the still-up-for-grabs Al Sharpton. The only endorsement Sharpton offered afterward was: “A man that likes chicken and corn bread can’t be that bad.”

Obama got an introduction from Chris Rock, who warned the audience that “you’d be real embarrassed if he won and you wasn’t down with it. You’d say, ‘Aw, man, I can’t call him now. I had that white lady. What was I thinking?’”

And he got a benediction from Cornel West, the Princeton professor who took Obama to task earlier this year for not attending a national gathering of black scholars and civil rights leaders.

He said he’s running because of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the fierce urgency of now.” Now can the prodigy muster that fierce urgency?

Now that we know Obambi is black enough and white enough, we just have to find out if he is man enough to defeat the siren song of Hillzilla.