Lileks has some thoughts on Obama, and his acolytes:

There is tremendous faith in his ability to just wave a love-wand and get things done. I remember the same zeitgeist afoot in the land in 1992; change was the mantra then, too. Odd how things turn out – I’d be happier with Hillary as President than Obama, simply because she seems a bit more seasoned and realistic. And I do find it interesting that people who have decried the shallow, theatrical, emotion-based nature of contemporary politics are now so effusive in their praise for someone’s ability to move crowds. Perhaps they don’t mind a fellow on a white horse if he promises to nationalize the stables.

Lileks has some thoughts on Obama, and his acolytes:

There is tremendous faith in his ability to just wave a love-wand and get things done. I remember the same zeitgeist afoot in the land in 1992; change was the mantra then, too. Odd how things turn out – I’d be happier with Hillary as President than Obama, simply because she seems a bit more seasoned and realistic. And I do find it interesting that people who have decried the shallow, theatrical, emotion-based nature of contemporary politics are now so effusive in their praise for someone’s ability to move crowds. Perhaps they don’t mind a fellow on a white horse if he promises to nationalize the stables.

Lileks has some thoughts on Obama, and his acolytes:

There is tremendous faith in his ability to just wave a love-wand and get things done. I remember the same zeitgeist afoot in the land in 1992; change was the mantra then, too. Odd how things turn out – I’d be happier with Hillary as President than Obama, simply because she seems a bit more seasoned and realistic. And I do find it interesting that people who have decried the shallow, theatrical, emotion-based nature of contemporary politics are now so effusive in their praise for someone’s ability to move crowds. Perhaps they don’t mind a fellow on a white horse if he promises to nationalize the stables.

The question almost answers itself–the press is in love with him. Glenn thinks that he has, but as his reader points out, it’s only been by the left. Interestingly, when the Clinton campaign attempted to go at him obliquely from the right, tainting his electability by talking about his race or past drug use, it was viewed with opprobrium. But in fact there are a lot of unanswered questions about him, and now that he’s looking like the likely nominee, the true vetting on the right is starting. For instance, was he a red-diaper baby? If so, should we care? Is to ask the question (and yes, I am asking the question) intrinsically dirty politics? Is it “McCarthyism”?

But here’s a more interesting issue that is just starting to surface. Michelle Obama hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, and particularly negative attention, to date. But that’s starting to change as well, with her apparent inability to come up with anything about which to take pride in America in the past quarter century. They’re supposed to be the first “post-racial” candidates. But are they?

…the evidence is plain that Barack and Michelle Obama both belong to that subset of educated black Americans to whom their own blackness is of obsessive interest, or at very least was up through their college years. Barack famously wrote “A Story of Race and Inheritance”, about his own long struggles with his racial identity.

Now here’s Michelle Obama in the current Newsweek cover story. She graduated from Princeton in 1985 with a major in sociology and a minor in African-American Studies. Sociology, huh? At first sight that’s encouraging — I mean, at least she didn’t spend her entire college career obsessing about her blackness. Then Newsweek tells us the title of her senior sociology thesis: “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” (I have this mental image of her thesis adviser saying: “Michelle, isn’t there some way we can squeeze another ‘black’ into that title?”)

Again, does it matter? At least in her case?

A little history is in order here. Once upon a time, a man ran for president. He had a law degree. So did his wife. Both from Yale, to be specific. In fact, the wife was lauded by an adoring press to be one of the most brilliant women in America, if not the world. But there were things about her that were not only not reported, but actively kept hidden (and we’re not just talking about the Rose law firm billing records). One of them was her college thesis, which only recently became available for the public’s perusal. Why was it secreted away for the eight years of the presidency? And why should we have cared?

Well, one of the themes of that presidential race was that the superwoman would be a “co-president,” that the fortunate nation would be getting “two for the price of one.”

So now enter Barack Obama, a charismatic young man with a message of, if not from, Hope, with a law degree of his own and a wife with a law degree as well (both from Harvard). Now he hasn’t been campaigning as a two-for-one special, but it’s very clear that his wife strongly influences him in his campaign, and there’s no reason to think that she wouldn’t do the same as commander-in-chief. So, even setting aside the issue of whether we want someone who values “feeling” over “thinking,” it seems reasonable to wonder about her political views and methods as well, particularly if we’re going to get a “co-president” by stealth.

And as we wonder, what do we discover? That (assuming the report is correct) her college thesis has been embargoed until election day. Like Jonah, I wonder why as well. What are they trying to hide? Something that can’t simply be laughed off as the naivety of youth?

I also wonder what other similarities to another aspiring first couple there are.

[Update a little later]

I hadn’t read that entire WSJ piece, but deeper down in it, we find this:

In her senior thesis in 1985, Mrs. Obama wrote that her college experience “made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ ” than ever before, adding, “I will always be Black first and a student second” on campus. At Harvard Law, Mrs. Obama, involved in the Black Law Students Association, pushed hard to improve the low numbers of African-American faculty and students.

“We got into big debates on the condition of black folks in America,” says Harvard classmate Verna Williams. “She’s got a temper.”

I guess someone read it before it was locked away.

Does she remain this aggrieved? Based on her very recent statement that her husband’s presidential campaign is the only thing praiseworthy about America, one suspects so.

[Update an hour or so later]

How do they do that? I only posted this an hour or so ago, and it’s already in the top ten of a Google search for “michele obama princetonn thesis.” And they didn’t even spell “Princeton” or “Michelle” right.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Someone just did a search on it spelled correctly (after reading this post?), and it was only in the top thirty, not the top ten.

Weird.

[Late afternoon update]

Per the commenter who answered my rhetorical questions above about “red diaper” babies. I agree. So does Andrew Stuttaford over at NRO. It will probably be a counterproductive avenue of attack.

But here’s something interesting in regards as to whether or not Obama is an empty suit. One of the questions was how effective his speeches are without a teleprompter. Now the issue is how effective his speeches are without his ability to plagiarize others’ speeches:

Speaking at a Town Hall in Texas, and the Deval things appears to already be having an effect. He was reading straight from a speech in front of him on the lectern, instead of the famous sweeping oratory, complete with hand gestures and eye contact. He stumbled a lot, and the ideas were awkwardly phrased. He was talking about the mortgage crisis, which I’ll admit, I don’t fully understand myself, but he clearly didn’t understand it either. I don’t know if he’s tired, or if he feels he can’t use his normal stump speeches for the time being, or if it was the format, or what, but it was weird for sure. I’ve grown used to the other Obama, the confident, consummate Obama.

Apparently, if true, he’s not only lost without his teleprompter–he’s been using a lot of stock phrases as part of his magician’s patter that he’s no longer able to use, and his speeches are suffering for it.

[Mid-evening update]

The Anchoress is thinking along the same lines as I am–is Michelle Obama the new Hillary?

[Another update a few minutes later]

Is David Axelrod the man behind Obama’s curtain?

I would love to see this happen:

The word on the street is that the Obama campaign and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg have already met and devised an incredible plan if Clinton wins the nominee [sic]. Mayor Bloomberg would give nearly $1 billion to Obama’s campaign after which Obama would bolt from the Democratic Party and run as an Independent candidate with king-maker Bloomberg as his running mate.

That would make it a walk-in for McCain. In fact, it would be deliciously ironic, because it was exactly that kind of situation (with nutty billionaire Perot) that allowed Bill Clinton to slip into the White House in the first place. If Bush had gotten all the votes that Republicans normally get, Bill wouldn’t have had a chance. So the justice would be poetic if Hillary’s nomination was torpedoed by an independent run that pulled a lot of the Democrat vote.

Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s likely. Even if Hillary does win (or steal) the nomination, much as I’d like to see it, I don’t believe that Mike Bloomberg is so politically stupid as to think that he can run as a “centrist” on an Obama ticket. And “centrist” (nannyism and all) has always seemed to me what he fancies himself as. But an Obama campaign, whether Democrat or Independent, isn’t going to pull centrists, particularly once his voting record gets highlighted. It would split the Democrats, not the Republicans or “independents,” and it would probably not only give McCain the presidency, but possibly give the Republicans the Congress back.

If Bloomberg really does something like this, it can only be because he deludes himself that McCain is a “right winger” and that there is plenty of room to his left. As I said, I’d love to see it, but I’d have to see a lot more evidence than “the word on the street” from Armstrong Williams.

An interesting comment from this post:

Me and my family used to be the biggest fans of Bill Clinton. Everyone in my community can’t stand to see Bill on TV anymore. I’m not sure if its his older age or maybe the lack of sleep lately, but I truly believe his lost his mind. He makes no sense anymore, cares about nothing other than attempting to get his wife elected, plucks words right out of the air while stating nothing, and now even goes against the voices of mass voters…

Bill Clinton is really not he same person I USED to respect and admire!

Sorry, he’s exactly the same person you used to (foolishly and myopically) respect and admire. He’s the same person he’s been his entire political career, going all the way back to the seventies in Arkansas. Anyone who has followed his career, or read non-hagiographic biographies of him knows this. The only thing that’s changed is that you’ve found a new empty vessel into which to pour your emotional political longings, and he’s attacked it, so now you see the Bill Clinton that the rest of us have seen all along.

As I’ve said many times, I don’t now, and never have “hated” Bill (or Hillary Rodham) Clinton. I find them far too trivial and unworthy subjects on which to expend such an intense and miserable emotion. I think that I’m in fact far more clinically objective about them than most Democrats have ever seemed to be able to be. The problem is not the “Clinton haters” (most of whom were merely pointing out the reality), but the far too many people who have loved him, far beyond reason, for decades. That was the source of his power.

And now that the scales have fallen from the eyes of many like the commenter above, the end may be very ugly, particularly if they are perceived to have stolen the nomination from Obama (something that they are surely plotting as I write this). Denver may make Chicago in 1968 look like a Sunday-school picnic.

They’ve never cared about the Democrat Party, other than as a convenient vehicle for the conveyance of their unlimited and insatiable ambition and lust for power, and they’ve been a disaster for it ever since they hit the national scene. They cost it the Congress for the first time in four decades, and the party couldn’t hold on to the White House at the end of their term, at least partly because of the stench of it in the minds of the voters in 2000. Having Bill Clinton campaign for a Democrat has generally been the kiss of death, but because of this irrational love of them, they’ve managed to keep on doing it.

When it comes to the Clintons, it’s always about them, and they always come first, and the national Democrats are finally starting to realize it, sixteen years later. If they’d been smart, and listened to Arkansas Democrats at the time, they could have had the much earlier epiphany, and spared their party a lot of corruption and embarrassment.

Oh, when the end comes, it won’t be as bad as the Ceausescus (this is America, after all), but it will certainly be as final. There will be no more comeback kids. If he’s still around in a couple decades, I suspect that Bill Clinton will be continuously enraged and deeply envious of the legacy of George W. Bush.