Obama the Blank Slate

It happened again.  I thought I had an original idea, or had at least seen a new analogy, as I was pondering the fact that Obama got elected by being extremely vague about what he thought about everything, so that Black voters could vote for him just because he's Black (they did) and White liberals could vote for him because he's a clean and well-spoken Black (in the words of goofy old Joe Biden) and some other people could vote for him to "get it over with" and vote for a Black guy who at least didn't seem as bad as Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton and maybe things would calm down a little and Maxine Waters would shut up.  Didn't work.  But it worked for Obama — he was the blank slate that everybody could draw in their ideal of what a Black President could and should be.  And he's still trying to work the same scam.  Part of me wants Cain to get nominated just to see Obama have to switch gears and do without the race card, which, except for the clean and well-spoken part, is all he's got.

Anyhow, it suddenly hit me, at the end of Being There, when Chauncey Gardner is being sized up to become President, precisely because he mouths what seems to be wise, comforting platitudes while he's actually an ignorant idiot who knows precisely nothing that isn't either in his garden or on television (and he clearly doesn't understand the latter), is remarkably similar to our Obama, who doesn't really know anything but golf and community organizing.  And he seems to have been picked to run in pretty much the same process.  Alas, though, just in case I Googled "Chauncey Gardner," and sure enough, somebody already thought of it, and went to the trouble of Photoshopping Obama into Gardner's suit, in the illustration here. And he thought of it a couple of years ago.  See his site HERE.

And this whole train of thought started when I read Steve Sailer's review of Randall Kennedy's book, The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, and you ought to read it, too.  Interesting insights, both in the book and in Steve's interpretations.  Read it HERE.