Duh....You meet a guy and its all roses and flowers. Then you marry and discover he uses your toothbrush, snores, tells the same 2 stories endlessly and has a secret addiction to porn. It could be worse.

For me, no surprises with Obama. The question on Hillary's war vote was always whether Obama would have done the same thing. And the answer, given his waffling throughout his brief political career in Chicago and Illinois, is most definitely. So the challenge is not to move him back to the left...he was never there and never will be...but to become reconciled to a centrist President who lacks a civil rights agenda, an economic program, a foreign policy or a social agenda of any scope. The lesson here is not that Obama is a wimp, but that he can be pressured to do the right thing on social issues (probably not on economic policy where his advisors are of one voice)...but will not take to it easily. Clinton too was a centrist when he entered office, ambivalent about abortion, supportive of gun rights, capital punishment and the like. But Hillary moved him on health, we got him to trade abortion for domestic violence (and he gave us VAWA), we got the Family Leave Act and the Don't Ask, Don't Tell...we lost ground on Welfare Reform, foreign and economic policy...and we'll probably lose with Barack too, though its a shame the neoliberals in the Obama camp were able to get him to ditch Powers after her Hillary comment, the only progressive in the inner circle. The rest, as anyone following the campaign knows, are all the Bill Clinton groupies...So once you've wiped your eyes, get down to the hard work of this soon-to-be-President earn his keep and thank God he's facing a poor, bumbling idiot, not a Bush.

With summer blockbusters forcing critics to bend over backwards to differentiate junk from real junk, staying home in an air conditioned bedroom to catch up on lost DVDs is my choice. So I finally saw The Walker, Paul Schrader's 3rd in a trilogy of films about an overly appealing narcissist. This is far and away the best film in the trilogy and Woody Harrelson who plays the lead is brilliant, backed by Lauren Bacall, looking only a few decades older than big sis in The Big Sleep. He's a confidante of a group of wealthy women married to Washington pols and there's a mystery here, about whether the House Minority leader, a democrat or the VP, a Republican who is evil, but not quite up to Cheney, lies behind the murder of a blackmailing investor. But the real story is Harrelson's relationships to the women and to his male lover, his conflicted loyalties and his capacity to salvage more principle than all the pols together. Its a sleeper well worth staying awake for.

Its no less liberal chique to defend than to deny the satire in the New Yorker cover. The challenge is to understand it. To defuse, think of the New Yorker cover picturing New York City as the center of the country. What's being mocked there is the mental innards of New Yorker readers...their inner map externalized. So, here too, the satire has less to do with Linbaugh and co. than with the inner map of Obama groupies who comprise a good portion of New Yorker readers. A lot of the reaction reflects the difficulty white liberals have seeing racial (not racist) satire or, which is the same thing, seeing race in something other than Manichean terms, i.e. not seeing racr at all. You either love or hate the man, going from love to hate with no time to stop at reality. The reaction of the Obama camp reflects the tacit agreement rarely breached during the primary-- the Obama-Oprah pact-- any frank talk about race is anathema. And this is being mocked too. These are not racial stereotypes, exaggerating features to make them look grotesque. This is not Sambo or the "nappy haired" ho's. This is Michele Obama as Kathleen Cleaver, a liberal/left fantasy. Ditto Barack as Muslim. These racial fantasies are as much a satire of left projections as they are of the fears of the Right. And the relevance to the week's events is the shortest marriage in recent political history, the rampant disillusionment that has preoccupied left wing blogs since Obama caved on surveillance, gun control, and the death penalty. The cartoon mocks the inability to see Obama and Michele as what they are, a decent pol with incredible rhetorical skills slogging through the muck towards the finish line and a competent business pro who wants nothing so much as to get back to work. These are not racial projections, but reflections on the gap between the race fantasies of the liberal left and the world around us.