‘Admiring incomprehension’

Media dreams of Barack Obama:

While journalists have swarmed to Alaska with admirable alacrity to ferret out every detail of Sarah Palin‘s energetic life, the media have drawn a curtain of admiring incomprehension in front of Obama’s own exquisitely written autobiography, Dreams from My Father. Because few have taken the trouble to appreciate Obama on his own terms, the politician functions as our national blank slate upon which we sketch out our social fantasies.

America does not know, or does not understand, who the man really is. The media has portrayed him, with his eager cooperation, as something he is not. The people who are trying to warn America about this yawning chasm between the perception and the reality of Obama are being demonized, stigmatized and marginalized. If you don’t listen to them now, Nov. 5 will be too late.

So, please, read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Having read the whole thing, I’d like to call your attention to something the author writes  about the other major-party candidate for president:

John McCain doesn’t seem to have noticed that the Grand Strategy of the Bush Administration — Invade the World, Invite the World, In Hock to the World (or as blogger Daniel Larison put it, “Imperialism, Immigration, and Insolvency”) — has driven us into the ditch.

One of the most important things for conservatives to understand about this election is that the fundamental problem of the Republican Party stems from having heeded the advice of its enemies, including some enemies who wrongly call themselves “conservative.” If John McCain loses this election, it will be a defeat for McCain and a defeat for the GOP, but it will not be a defeat for conservatism, if conservatism were understood correctly.

It is unfortunate that the term “conservatism” has been abused to describe policies of the Bush administration (hello, No Child Left Behind) that aren’t even remotely conservative. It means nothing to shout “liberal! liberal! liberal!” at the Democrats, if the conservative alternative is not clearly and accurately defined — or, even worse, if liberal policies are wrongly labeled “conservative,” as is the case with so much of what Bush and McCain have done over the years.