Older But Worth Noting

Illness has delayed my impressions of the DNC & RNC conventions, but I believe this piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates identifies the GOP's basic problem with Obama, upon which I'll expound later:

To paraphrase a commenter from a few years back, in GOP eyes, Barack Obama is a spellbinding orator always in need of teleprompter; the disciple of a radical Christian preacher who reigns like a secular-atheist determined to bring about a new era of Islamo-fascism; an Ivy-league wimp hailing from the gutters of Chicago; a white culture-hating racist who is not really black, but half-white; an anti-military peacenik who pals around with terrorists, who insists on killing terrorists, who insists on bragging about killing terrorists; an avowed Marxist specializing in the shadow arts of crony-capitalism and Leninist theories of banker bail-outs.

They've never figured Obama out. They have no contact with people who like him, or remain utterly blind to people like him, even as people like him become America.