The president continues to fantasize that he’s a campaign asset this fall:

Obama himself has largely shucked his “postpartisan” ideal, and you can expect some sharp rhetorical elbows thrown at Republicans when he addresses a Labor Day rally in Milwaukee on Monday. That’s likely to escalate in coming weeks as Obama – and first lady Michelle Obama – go stumping for Democrats.

“They’ve forgotten I politick pretty good,” he told a crowd in Austin, Texas, last month.

Oh, yeah? Tell it to Creigh Deeds, John Corzine and Martha Coakley.

I continue to challenge the conventional wisdom that Barack Obama is either a good campaigner or a smart politician. He won the nomination because the Dems wanted an alternative to the arrogant and “inevitable” Hillary and he was black. He won the election because McCain was a horrible candidate and ran a horrible campaign, people were fed up with the mushy Bush-era Republicans, and because he was black.

People have gotten to know him now, and they don’t like it.

…of the bourgeois:

A New York Times survey earlier this year occasioned shock when it found that “Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class.” We’re so accustomed to the notion of a revolt of the dispossessed that a revolt of the possessed (in the non-demonic sense, of course) strikes us as a strange offense against the nature of things. But it’s threatening to wash away the Democratic congressional majorities in a historic wipeout.

In extremis, Democrats and liberal commentators have dragged the debate over the tea party into the well-worn rut of elite condescension to the bourgeois, a term coined in its modern sense by Rousseau and not meant as a compliment. For more than a hundred years, the bourgeois have been accused of being insipid, greedy, and unenlightened. To the long catalogue of their offenses can now be added another: unenthralled by Barack Obama, the Romantic hero seeking to transform the nation.

Apres Barack, liberte.

Jason James Lee died. Today’s really inconvenient truth. There’s a lot more evidence that he was influenced by Gore than that McVeigh was influenced by Rush Limbaugh, or talk radio in general (which is to say, there was none for the latter). But don’t expect the press to spoil the narrative.