It would be one thing for Salon to bash Obama if he actually had a track record-- if he had taken on the Machine of any variety and actually scored some chops. He didn't, and he hasn't. What the Obama-phenomena says more about is the vapidity and shallowness of the media than anything else. It's the shallow idealism that the Right rightly accuses many liberals of possessing, in the process of pandering to the working class.

He's a face-- a surface-level handsome one-- and for most people, whose politics are written on the tabloid front pages-- that's enough. Who cares if he's black? He's another Harvard/Yale child of entitlement running for President. The only thing keeping him from being as much of a disaster as G.W. Bush is that at least he's not a right-wing evangelical freakazoid waiting for Jesus to take him away.

Sometimes people of substance aren't that good looking- and they are a little stiff. Al Gore, even though he definitely also comes from privilege, was on to the environment not as an issue, but a facedown for the survival of the human race. And he went to VIetnam as a soldier/journalist as well. There are others out there. But why would they run? How could they reconcile the fact that they actually knew something with the fact that they just didn't cut the right look in a Dolce Gabbana suit?

Hi Amanda,

I'm sorry you quit. It was obviously a long newsweek in Repo-land (deteriorating war in Iraq, ambiguous evidence misrepresented by the President, yet another announcement by same First Occupant that No Child Left Behind is succeeding when it isn't, etc.) and they needed something nonsensical to cover it.

A week seems like a long time, but it really isn't. There's only the shock of one story that will carry so long, before a poodle wearing a clown hat riding a bike with a shocking liberal bumper sticker will replace it. Everyone must make their own decisions with these kinds of things, but the Repo jerks will always find something to squawk about when it comes from our best talent.

I hope you do find a place in the campaign, and stick with it. We need more like you.

As someone who is in a happy marriage, and married one of my students, and being one of the biggest student advocates that I know, I've got some news for the folks that say the only reason a student gets involved with a professor is because of fascination with a power imbalance.

Sometimes people fall in love. When I met my wife, she was 20, and I was 28. We had what was probably the most storybook year of both our lives-- traveling to the redwoods, hiking in the mountains, running rivers together. She was also in my class.

There are creeps out there. We have a term for the kind of behavior associated with that type of person, and we call it sexual harassment. We have policies for it, and they are connected to processes. It is not the same as consensual relationships.

Sometimes people fall in love. Sometimes they get hurt. Sometimes the lesson that gets taken away from that is that the other gender sucks. Whatever.

When I was younger, I found myself becoming infatuated with students because I truly liked them. I didn't have any other relationships other than the one with my wife, but I found myself thinking about it, and not in any sort of a manipulative way. Now that I am so much older than them (old enough to be a younger father) I don't perceive them in the same way. But I still like them a lot-- and if you ask me, if there's anything the academy could really use, it's professors actually liking the students they teach. The last thing we need are more policies that will create more of a chill in the classroom-- because the intent might be to prevent people from injury, but the effect will be one more reason to place distance between students and professors.

There are cases where I can see faculty/student relationships might violate some ethical premise-- such as being involved with one's thesis advisor. But as far as banning the general milieu associated with typical large classes, I'd rather side on the side of interaction than not. We're already alienated enough as a culture. And besides, these people are young adults. It's just insulting to them.