Oh yeah. Maybe we'd be better off nominating Hillary, thereby guaranteeing a Republican win of astronomical proportions.

But the "uppity" headline has already been screen captured and posted. What the heck do you think you're doing using a term like that?

Let's say that you're Barack Obama's campaign manager. You've just launched your man's presidential campaign. And you click on Salon to find that a popular online magazine with a liberal reputation and large Democratic readership has used the word "uppity" in a headline to describe your black candidate. And does so on an article that starts out bashing him and ends up just as fawning and adoring as the articles the author sneers at in the first graf.

Then you read the letters, where dozens of people are screaming bloody murder over Obama-bashing, cancelling their subscriptions and demanding that Salon apologize and compensate with multiple articles trashing your man's main competition.

What are you doing right now? You're hauling in the online contributions with both hands.

This is GREAT! Great for Obama and great for Democrats. We're getting all the trash, pseudo and otherwise, out front ONE ENTIRE YEAR before the primaries. Long before New Hampshire, it'll be old news. Not to mention that the MSM will be falling all over itself not to make the same mistake by writing anything remotely critical of the man's personality traits.

Bring on the trash! Let's lay it out right now in all its noxious glory. Right now when the weather keeps everybody indoors reading online.

Get it out of your system, Salon. And do it for ALL the candidates. Maybe by summer we'll be able to start concentrating on actual issues.

Even before this shameful piece, I'd decided not to renew my subscription, which thankfully expires this week.

Salon isn't about equal opportunity for all. It's about equal opportunity for white liberals. In my view, this piece is published to take down Hillary Clinton's major rival.

Obama is clearly in Clinton's league as far as intellectual abilities and completely overshadows her in terms of the charisma and wow factors.

I have nothing personal against her, but this publication in my view seems to go out of its way to tip the scales in her favor.

As a black person, I find it offensive the way (I believe) you are deliberately trying to undermine Obama's candidacy - again.

Goodbye!

Debs

Good god, do we really have to go through this whole "Al Gore is too wooden" thing again?

How intellectually if not morally bankrupt do you have to be to write and then run this kind of shallow, surface-level crap?

The more I read Obama's words, the more I hear his ideas (EXCEPT FOR ETHANOL!!!but I understand it's a corn-belt thang) the more impressed I get.

Yet all you stupid press people do is harp on his "blackness" and "patrician demeanor."

Sheesh.

Easy to see why the Dems self-destruct so much reading all the attack letters on Salon. You think Salon is uppity? Wait until the Swift Boat crowd gens up. I like Obama, and he is electable which says a hell of a lot about the country since 1956, the first convention I remember and the 20 agonizing years afterward. Race in North America is like dangling electric wires flapping in the wind. But instead of 220 back then, they now carry about 12. Cutting to the nut, only two candidates exist now that can win, Obama and Edwards. The rest of them have spent too much time preening, honing, shifting, sifting, and polling, are war-mongering or religious nutjobs. That Obama aint perfect and was proud of Harvard means nothing. Who wouldn't be. Give me a beautiful mind, a heart full of empathy, and the capacity to admit error every time. Look at Hillary and her attitude on her vote on Iraq. That tells you all you need to know.

Meanwhile impeach the assholes NOW.

The difference between Obama then and Obama now? He was playing to someone he thought he ought to be, rather than who he truly was. He was branding himself based on a set of manufactured standards, and the consumer wasn't buying. Customers, just like voters, can smell a sales job from miles away. So what are we to make, McClelland asks, of a campaigner whose persona changed so drastically in four years? My answer is unequivocal--Obama is finally comfortable with himself, and in sync with his own authenticity--his unmistakable, unshakable personal brand is out in front and riding high.

I was reading People magazine, not Salon. Enough about his physical characteristics andhow he messed up when he was young and inexperienced--who didn't? How about concentrating

on his stands on the important issues--you know the stuff that really matters in an election. The writer sounded like a jealous teenager.

I've found that in the past few years, Salon has moved more and more to the pro-Clinton definition of 'democratic'. When I first started reading Salon.com in 1998, the diversity of opinions and embracing of real political discourse made it such a refreshing change from teh Washington Post and other mainstream media but not as loony and poorly written as the alternative media. However, the addition of people like Sidney Blumenthal and other inside DC hacks has poisoned the political coverage for me now. Now that someone is challenging the Democratic status quo and the Clinton political machine, out Salon.com trots doing the Republican and Clinton agenda for them. Does this remind anyone of the way Howard Dean was treated by the Clinton machine when he had the audacity to win the Democratic National Chairman position?

BTW, I'm not a Democrat, I'm non-aligned because I find the Democrats way too center right for me. As much as I would love to have a woman president, Hillary lost me when she 'signaled' her move by coming out weak on pro-choice last year. Obama has real charisma and some positive ideas that actually motivate me and make me think that there might be a life beyond voting anti-Republican year after year.

I don't know for whether this reluctance of blacks to support Obama is a real thing, or just a media construct. Jesse Jackson has signed up to his campaign so Obama is building bridges.

Sadly though, many of us know about the crab bucket syndrome. When one crab tries to climb out of the bucket and makes it to the top, the other ones grab it and pull it back in.

I hope that's not where we're going with this.