I'm with you, Joan. Davis is going to have to work a lot harder to reframe McCain as a victim in this campaign.

"Obama's already set back race relations in this country a good 20 years. He must be stopped. Period."

Perhaps race relations have not progressed much in your cozy knee-jerk kneck of the woods out in Texas, but where I live and find people, they are found to be of both different and varied nationalities, religions, races, and sexes.

And really, to be quite honest, "He must be stopped" sounds ugly, paranoid, and a little bit coldly ominous.

It's pretty clear to see, that you and me, we don't live in the same kind of society.

It's disingenuous for Obama to make statements that he "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills," but then says it doesn't refer to race. What pray tell is Obama referring to?

I have heard a ridiculous hypothesis on an AP article that was then echoed on CBC.ca that Obama could have meant he isn't as old as the presidents on American currency. Obama is 46 and will be 47 if he is sworn into office, which would make him the same age as Ulysses Grant($50) when he was sworn in. Grover Cleveland($1000) was 48 when he was sworn in. If you take the 9 presidents on $, their average age is 55.2, which makes Obama much closer in age to them than McCain who would be 72 if sworn into office. In fact, McCain is 10 years older than the oldest $ president, Andrew Jackson($20) who was 62. Obama being 46 turning 47 is not quite as precocious as he would like his Facebook followers to believe.

Obama spokesman Robert Gibb states:

"What Barack Obama was talking about was that he didn't get here after spending decades in Washington. There is nothing more to this than the fact that he was describing that he was new to the political scene. He was referring to the fact that he didn't come into the race with the history of others. It is not about race."

What truth is there in this statement? Let's get rid of the obvious first. George Washington($1) did not spend decades in Washington before he was president, bec. Washington D.C., of course, didn't exist before he was president. Of course, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson($2), James Madison($5000) are considered 3 of America's Founding Fathers. I'm not sure if any president since them has the history of creating the United States of America and writing the Constitution. Though, Barack Obama did teach classes in Constitutional law, just like Woodrow Wilson.

William McKinley, Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson had no experience as Washington politicians before being sworn into office. They did not get there after spending decades in Washington.

Abraham Lincoln of course served in the Illinois House of Representatives. Hmmm... a politician from Illinois, sound familiar?

The presidents on the dollar bills come from varied backgrounds, some were military generals, some had no formal education, some were lawyers(like Obama), some had been governors, some wrote the Constitution, some taught Constitutional law(like Obama), and some had served in their state legislatures(like Obama). To say that these presidents had the same history and background is clearly not true. And to say that Obama in his background and history has nothing in common with these men, is clearly not true either.

So yeah, unless Obama meant that he doesn't "look" like these presidents because he doesn't ride a horse, have a beard, wear a wig, have wooden teeth, or wear a pipe-stove hat, then yeah he did mean race.

Thanks for that pointless meandering mess, here's to much "he must be stopped" success.

This whole issue is about nothing. Typical argument here is "racists will take McCain's language to mean...." Yeah, right, you need to make an appeal to racists, otherwise they might vote for the black guy. Meanwhile Obie gets a free box seat to watch honkies tearing into each other about who really means what. Most hilarious is the idea that any of this will cost McCain votes. It won't affect anybody.

Period.

It's all spin and histrionics with you, isn't it.

"Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" when she was judging the flying contest. By the second paragraph you'd referred to the "celebrity" ad. as "scurrilous", without taking into account, the overwrought crowds and the wild chanting at the mass rallies when Hillary Clinton was the enemy. Barack Obama was practically unknown a year ago and Mr. Axelrod had to combat that so he had to present his protoge (no accent on this laptop) as a super-dooper rock star, emphasising his "coolness", youth (although he's just short of 47) and his cosmopolitan chic. Axelrod should have taken more notice of the Biblical injunction "He who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword" and, by extension, those who thrive on celebrity status can be felled by that very same glittering bauble. HRC was a stodgier version of Dolly Parton while Barack was someone from the stratosphere. Chicago politics may be ruthless but now that the celebrity ad. has jumped up to bite them all they can do is yelp in horror.

If not Madam Hooch, Joan might consider the part of Hermione, Harry's girlfriend who's good at solving puzzles. Why does Barack find it necessary to mention his "funny" name so often. America has surnames which originated all over the globe and Barack has a brother with the surname Ndesandjo who lives in China and whose mother is also American. I'm inclined to think that brother Mark's surname would stand out more in America than the much more mellifluous "Obama". All this self-deprecation is so contrived. We can see his ears and lots of people have strangely-shaped ears. One solution is to let your hair grow so that they're partially hidden and the other is to forget all about them and be grateful for the gift of hearing. If Joan finds his self-referential comments a sign of a great sense of humour, I don't. They're not great; they simply grate. The far-from-subtle game is going on for quite some time now, creating division and fractiousness. If Europeans can look at what's happening in America, long regarded as the paragon melting-pot, the European electorate already uneasy about multi-etnicity and multi-culturalism, will definitely be turned off by the liberal ideal.