Obama’s new 60 second TV spot, entitled “Country I Love,” continues his central campaign theme of running for President based on his biography. Unfortunately for Obama, he wrote a 442 page autobiography that shows that much of this commercial is a tendentious distortion of his life story. Fortunately for Obama, the book is too boring to hold anybody’s attention.

The new commercial emphasizes his white relatives (Matthew Yglesias says the the title of the ad should be “My Mom’s White! And I’m From America!”). It’s part of his effort that began in 2004 to promote himself as the promised prince, the long-awaited offspring of a historic marital alliance, who, just as Henry VIII’s birth of Lancastrian and Yorkist parents ended the War of the Roses, will end the War of the Races by unifying blacks’ and whites’ divergent interests in himself.

“I’m Barack Obama. America is a country of strong families and strong values. My life’s been blessed by both.

Huh? He wrote tens of thousands of self-pitying words about how bad his family life was. He only spent one month with his father that he can recall. His mother dumped him twice on her grandparents so she could go back to Indonesia to work on her 1067 page anthropology Ph.D. dissertation on peasant blacksmithing.

I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents.

If he was blessed with such a strong family, why was his mother a “single mom?” Actually, his mother was married about 90% of the time up through his 18th birthday, assuming that you count her bigamous marriage to Barack Sr. as “being married.” She just despised her second husband, Lolo, in part for his being too pro-American and too pro-capitalist for her tastes, unlike her beloved pro-socialist first husband (who had abandoned her and little Barack because the New School for Social Research, which had offered a scholarship ample enough to support the three of them, wasn’t as prestigious as Harvard — now that’s a strong family!)

We didn’t have much money …

He attended Hawaii’s most famous prep school from 5th grade on and lived mostly in a Honolulu highrise with a fabulous view. But to the extent that it’s true that they didn’t have much money, it’s because he wasn’t from a “strong family.”

but they taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up.

The Chicago Tribune’s article “Mother not just a girl from Kansas” gives a much more accurate picture of her Seattle-area upbringing as a leftist, feminist, and atheist who told her high school friends that marriage and children weren’t for her, but surprised them all by getting knocked up at age 17 by a 24-year-old married man. He was from the Third World, so I guess that made it okay.

Accountability and self-reliance. Love of country.

Oh, come on … His mother married two foreigners and spent most of her adult life in foreign countries. She dumped her son on his grandparents twice because she preferred to live abroad without him than in America with him. His mother angrily refused to attend her Indonesian second husband’s business dinners with Americans because, as she shouted, “They are not my people” (italics Obama’s). She was shattered to discover Indonesia was no longer the anti-American leftwing state she’d heard about, but was now a pro-American rightwing one.

Working hard without making excuses. Treating your neighbor as you’d like to be treated. It’s what guided me as I worked my way up — taking jobs and loans to make it through college. It’s what led me to pass up Wall Street jobs

His “international business consultant” job he got out of college was actually being a copy editor at a low-rent newsletter sweatshop. (By the way, I’ve never seen much evidence, pro or con, on whether Obama’s quantitative skills come anywhere close to his superlative verbal skills. Anybody know? That might explain why he wasn’t snapped up by an investment bank when he graduated from Columbia in booming 1983. Judging from the kind of job he accepted, he would have taken a high-paying Wall Street job if anybody had offered him one.)

and go to Chicago instead, helping neighborhoods devastated when steel plants closed.

The intended implication here is that he went to Chicago to help steel workers with names like Stan Grabowski. No, he went to politically organize blacks, and only blacks, to build himself a black power base in a city where blacks had just gotten the powerful mayor’s office.

That’s why I passed laws moving people from welfare to work,

In the 442 pages of his 1995 Dreams from My Father, I can’t find one word of criticism of welfare.

cut taxes for working families and extended health care for wounded troops who’d been neglected.

This is an extremely accurate depiction of his political emphases!

I approved this message because I’ll never forget those values, and if I have the honor of taking the oath of office as president, it will be with a deep and abiding faith in the country I love.

Obama has a deep and abiding faith in Obama.

McCain meets with Hispanic leaders, mostly Democrats, of course:

“This was not a secret meeting,” said Rafael Rivadeneira, a vice chairman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly of Illinois, who was among more than 150 Chicago-area Hispanic leaders who attended. “There was nothing he said that they wouldn’t want people to hear.”

Other attendees said they were not so sure.

“He’s one John McCain in front of white Republicans. And he’s a different John McCain in front of Hispanics,” complained Rosanna Pulido, a Hispanic and conservative Republican who attended the meeting.[The Associated Press: McCain meets with Hispanic leaders, McCain meets with Hispanic leaders, By MICHAEL TARM – 18 hours ago]

What McCain told these guys is that he

would push through Congress legislation to overhaul federal immigration laws if elected, several people who attended a private meeting with the candidate said Thursday.

Mickey Kaus writes

If McCain is going to sell out his party’s conservatives, renege on his primary campaign repositioning and return to his righteous push for “comprehensive immigration reform,” wouldn’t it be better to do it in public than in a closed-door meeting, where it looks like a guilty, furtive secret pander? … P.S.: And The Corner stays silent! …

Also check out Jake Tapper’s interview with Rosanna Pulido, a patriotic Hispanic mentioned above, who was not only a member of the original Minuteman Project, but is also an Illinois representative of “You Don’t Speak For Me,” a patriotic immigration reform group that insists on the rule of law, unlike La Raza.

In a post called Is There A Pattern Here? If So, Is There A Name For It?,  John Rosenberg at the Discriminations blog writes that Barack Obama:

• opposes school vouchers for poor families but sends his own children to a private school;
• supports “campaign finance reform” but opts out of public financing since he can raise more money privately under the old, presumably corrupt system;
• attests to the centrality of his religious experience in shaping his identity but regards others, who are less privileged and culturally and politically different, as “clinging” to religion;
• promises an end to bitter partisanship even though his own record (what there is of it) is one of the most partisan in the Senate and his opponent’s is one of the most bi-partisan;[More]

Of course, what John Rosenberg is hinting at is “hypocrite.” He writes:.

“I know there’s a word for a pattern of saying one thing and doing the opposite, but I can’t call it to mind right now. Let’s see, it’s not “Messiah” (despite caring for the sick for the first time, halting the rise of the oceans, and healing the planet) … it’s not “New Politician.” Oh well, I’m sure I’ll think of it in a while.”

But hypocrisy is not necessarily a bad thing–the “homage vice pays to virtue,” said La Rochefoucauld. In this case, it’s the principles that are wrong.

The problem with Obama’s leftism is what he plans to do if he’s elected, not that he’s sending his kids to private school. And McCain’s “bipartisanship” is a bug, not a feature. He’s called a maverick, because as, I wrote before, he’s

• totally without party loyalty
• unconcerned with the wishes of his constituents, or Americans in general
• extremely friendly with members of the conventional media–he panders to them, they pander to him, and that’s why they call him a “maverick” rather than, say, a hatemonger.

,

Awhile back, a British TV talent show was won by a dumpy-looking guy named Paul Potts who wowed the crowd by singing Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” aria from Turandot.

Americans don’t know anything about opera anymore, so they don’t realize how thrilling it can be. (The British viewers were probably vaguely familiar with the aria from the connection between soccer and the Three Tenors, “Nessun Dorma” being more or less Pavarotti’s theme song.) So it was only natural for the American Idol-style show “America’s Got Talent” to have as the anchorman of their season premiere this week an American contestant singing “Nessun Dorma.” Neil E. Boyd, an insurance salesman of Pavarotti-like girth, floored the audience, making him the frontrunner.

I imagine the producers of the show auditioned a lot of part-time opera singers to find the one they were going to anoint as the American Paul Potts. The fellow they came up with, Boyd, is (not too surprisingly) part black, with a white mom with whom he is very close.

A couple of years ago, my wife predicted early in the American Idol season that Jordin Sparks, the daughter of an NFL cornerback and a redhead, would win, since she could sing both black and white.

I think there’s a general lesson emerging: whites like blacks, but black teens these days don’t like much of anything they consider white. They like just hip-hop and basketball (and, okay, football, too). Almost everything else is considered a violation of keeping it real.

Even though blacks may tend to have a natural advantage at creating resonant vocal tones, the very idea of singing opera is totally off their radar. Sure, there were big time black opera singers like Marian Anderson as far back as between the Wars, but black youths aren’t interested in that kind of acting white anymore.

So, the small number of mulattos who grew up with one non-black parent and thus get introduced to a wider range of cultural options beyond rap and hoops are disproportionately taking the plums that people a generation ago assumed blacks in general would be achieving.

Back in 1968, when the top American rock guitarist was Jimi Hendrix and top American tennis player was Arthur Ashe, everybody assumed that integration meant that blacks would continue to show up near the top in an ever wider variety of fields.

Today, though, superstar rock guitarist Tom Morello is the great-nephew of Jomo Kenyatta; and the second best American men’s tennis player James Blake has a black father. But they both have white mothers. Similarly, five different black golfers won 23 PGA tournaments between 1961 and 1986, but since then Tiger Woods is the only player of any visible fraction of African ancestry to win a tournament.

There’s somebody who’s an even better example of this rise of the new mulatto elite, but I can’t quite think of his name at the moment.

If Michelle’s the First Lady, then Bill would be the Second Gentleman, right? But, then, who’s the First Gentleman?

Sure, it sounds silly, but it points out the problem that was never addressed in terms of either Hillary for President or for Vice President: what’s Bill’s role? Because we were all supposed to celebrate Hillary’s candidacy as this great triumph for women that all patriotic Americans were supposed to take pride in (kind of like those bogus women’s team sports competitions that corporate America puffs up when American women win even though the only competition is China and Norway), nobody was supposed to mention that Hillary was running for President only because her husband was term-limited out of office, just like in banana republics like Argentina.

I, Ectomorph notes:

After all that has happened, [Obama] must feel that he has earned the nomination in his own right and won’t govern effectively if the press is constantly preoccupied with whatever the Clintons are up to at One Observatory Circle (the little-known VP residence that would suddenly be a lot better known if Socks the Cat moves in). … If he needs to have her onside, then he’ll have the common sense to promise her a job in the new administration that she can be fired from.

And since Obama can’t fire Hillary if he makes her VP, he doubly can’t fire Hillary’s husband from his ill-defined but inevitably large role as the Looming Presence or whatever. An Obama-Clinton administration would be the best thing that ever happened to the gag writers for late night talkshow hosts, but Obama would be nuts to saddle himself with the Hill and Bill Show. Just imagine Obama getting all geared up to promote some boring carbon emissions bill, when it suddenly leaks out that the Vice President is divorcing the ex-President. Nobody would pay any attention to the President for months.

Bill is the exact opposite of the ideal husband of a lady leader, Denis Thatcher, a convivial man not very interested in politics or the spotlight. He was 10 years older than his wife, and so was winding down his business career as she reached the top of her political career. He had enough money and wasn’t particularly on the prowl for more. Mr. Thatcher only gave short speeches and never gave interviews.

A curious headline on a New York Times article bylined “Iowa City:”

For Bush, a New Town, a New Disaster, but Always the Memory of New Orleans

Mass outbreaks in Iowa of looting, rape, cops fleeing, and even cops looting? Who knew?

Poking around on Google News for 15 minutes, though, I have found some stories like this:

WATERLOO, Iowa - Two Waterloo teenagers have been accused of looting at some apartments that were evacuated because of flooding.

Authorities say police, acting on a tip about a suspicious noise, found Darryel Schwarz Jr. and Erin Schmidt, both 17, in the lobby of the apartment building early Monday.

So, it’s clearly exactly the same as New Orleans in 2005.

By the way, Dennis Mangan has an email from a reader from Cedar Rapids comparing the two cultures’ responses to flooding.

Audacious Epigone wonders whether there will be another flood in New Orleans when all the water gets there down the Mississippi.

Beats me. One thing to keep in mind is that the population of New Orleans has changed substantially since 2005. The population is way down. When I spent a couple of days in New Orleans in 2007, almost all of it in the wealthy old above-sea level parts, most of the people I saw looked like they had trust funds.

Indeed, New Orleans is turning into a college town, with Tulane and a few other colleges now accounting for a sizable fraction of the population. The Tulane campus police are now authorized to patrol for a mile off campus. Tulane students have organized their own ambulance service to take sick members of the Tulane community to the Tulane Medical Center downtown.