A Blue View

"First Family Sees ‘Avatar’ in 3-D"

The Caucus:

New Year’s Eve turned out to be Movie Day for the First Family. Vacationing in Hawaii on a rainy day, President Obama, his wife and their two daughters headed to a local shopping mall movie theater to take in the Digital 3-D showing of “Avatar.”

The Secret Service cleared one of the 10 theaters at the Windward Mall’s multiplex in Kaneohe for the Obamas, who arrived for the special screening around 9:20 a.m., well before the day’s regular showings get underway so as not to inconvenience other moviegoers. The other nine theaters at the multiplex are open as usual.

The president headed out to the movie after separate phone calls with John O. Brennan, his counterterrorism adviser, and Janet Napolitano, his secretary of homeland security, to discuss preliminary findings of their reviews into the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

They're Outta Here

 

Barack & Michelle Dancing

 

The President & First Lady's Solemn Visit To Arlington National Cemetary

Their Veteran's Day trip:

A Proud Dad

The Obama family visited the Grand Canyon where this cute vignette was reported by the NY Times:

The family followed the rail of the South Rim along Hopi Point, elevation 7,071 feet, where the rim overlooks a 5,000-foot drop. Looking over the vista, with its view of a red-rock butte and a big bend in the Colorado River down below, the president remarked that Malia wanted to know why the tops of the canyon were so perfectly straight.

“There used to be 3,000 feet of sediment up there,” one of the rangers, Scott Kraynak, explained, adding that because the Obamas could not make the hike down to the bottom of the canyon, “I brought the bottom up to you.”

Mr. Kraynak produced some rocks and showed Malia and Sasha, 8, his samples. This brought on a fatherly prodding from the onetime law professor.

“You just studied this, right?” Mr. Obama asked Malia, who will enter the sixth grade this fall at Sidwell Friends School in Washington. “What kinds of rocks are there?”

“There’s a kind of rock that’s made out of lava, right?” she replied. “Now what is that?”

“It starts with ‘I’,” the park ranger injected.

“Igneous rock,” declared Malia, who went on to name the other types of rock, sedimentary and metamorphic, without further coaching.

“High-five!” Michelle Obama said, raising her hand to catch her daughter’s palm, midair.

Mr. Obama, who last visited the Grand Canyon when he was 11, just Malia’s age, put his arm around his daughter and squeezed, beaming.

First Lady Begins To Step Into Policy; Emphasizing Health Care

From the NY Times:

After several months of focusing on her family, her garden and inspiring young people, Mrs. Obama is stepping into more wonkish terrain. She is toughening her message and talking more openly about influencing public policy as she works to integrate her efforts more closely with those of policy makers in the West Wing.

In June, Mrs. Obama traveled to San Francisco with Melody C. Barnes, the president’s domestic policy adviser, for the start of the administration’s initiative to promote volunteerism.

A week later, she went to a Washington clinic with the director of the Health Resources and Services Administration to announce the release of stimulus money for clinics. This month, her policy director joined a new interagency working group, including health, agriculture and housing officials, that will develop policy, legislation and public outreach to combat obesity.

While her efforts are most visible in the health care arena, Mrs. Obama is also focusing on other issues.

In May, she convened a meeting — with James L. Jones, the president’s national security adviser; Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Peter R. Orszag, the White House budget chief, among others — to consider new policies and programs to help military families. Her staff is also working with nonprofit, corporate and philanthropic groups to help rally resources to support such families.

Mrs. Obama’s aides say the substantive speeches and increased coordination with the West Wing reflect the first lady’s determination to have an impact on the issues she cares about.

“The listening portion of this is over,” said Camille Johnston, her communications director. “Let’s make sure that we’re having an impact and delivering things as well.”

But Mrs. Obama, a Harvard-educated lawyer and former hospital executive, is still treading cautiously as she fleshes out her priorities: promoting healthy living and community service and supporting military and working families.

The Right To Bare Arms

An essay from Sally Quinn, on Mother's Day & Michelle Obama:

... Michelle Obama's arms, we determined, were transformational. Her arms are representative of a new kind of woman: young, strong, vigorous, intelligent, accomplished, sexual, powerful, embracing and, most of all, loving.

Today is Mother's Day. Today we should celebrate Michelle Obama's arms as the arms of a mother.

This is a woman who has the courage to say "I am mom in chief" and make her children and her family -- unapologetically -- her No. 1 priority. She is able to do this because she is so intelligent and accomplished that she doesn't have to prove anything to anyone. She is healthy enough to be able to say, this is who I am, these are my values and my priorities.

She has come under attack for exposing her arms. They are toned and muscular, burnished and beautiful. That has to be threatening to some. For some men, often, a strong woman makes them feel diminished. For some feminists, the idea of an educated woman not taking on a full-time serious job is a frightening throwback.

They are wrong. Nothing could be more empowering than to see a woman with all of the attributes of Michelle Obama embrace her children the way she does. She loves those girls, and she is giving them a role model for the kind of strong woman that she wants them to be. A woman should have the right to choose. In every respect. Having a great education, a job, a career is fulfilling. She has a Harvard Law degree and had a powerful job herself. She will take on projects in the White House that will ultimately prove to be transformational. And she likely will return to her career one day when her children are older.

"Sojourner Truth would be proud to see me, a descendant of slaves, serving as" FLOTUS

From Michelle Obama Watch:

Joined by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, First Lady Michelle Obama unveils the bust of Sojourner Truth in Emancipation Hall of the US Capitol today.

Sojourner Truth, the first Black woman to be honored with a bust at the Capitol, was a an abolitionist and crusader for women’s rights to vote. Truth met presidents Abraham Lincoln in 1864 and Ulysses S. Grant in 1870, and delivered her signature “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851.

To a loud and resounding applause, the First Lady said:

[O]ne can only imagine what Sojourner Truth, an outspoken, tell-it-like-it-is kind of woman—and we all know a little something about that, right—just to imagine what she would have to say about this incredible gathering, just looking down on this day, and thinking about the legacy she has left all of us—because we are all here because, as my husband says time and time again, we stand on the shoulders of giants like Sojourner Truth.

And just as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott would be pleased to know that we have a woman serving as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, I hope that Sojourner Truth would be proud to see me, a descendant of slaves, serving as the First Lady of the United States of America.

And just as many young boys and girls have walked through this Capitol—I see them now, and they see the bust of suffragists and hear the stories of the struggles of women, what they had to endure to gain the right to vote—now many young boys and girls, like my own daughters, will come to Emancipation Hall and see the face of a woman who looks like them.

Michelle Obama On Work Life Balance

Poll: 100 Days In, High Marks For Obama

From CBS News:

As his 100th day approaches, more than two in three Americans approve of the job Barack Obama is doing as president, a new CBS News/New York Times survey finds.

But while the president earns high marks from Democrats and independents, he has not won the support of Republicans, less than one third of whom approve of the president's job performance so far.

Mr. Obama's 68 percent approval rating at the 100 day mark is better than the ratings of his two immediate predecessors, George W. Bush (whose approval at this point was 56 percent) and Bill Clinton (whose approval was 49 percent). Going back to 1953, only two presidents - John F. Kennedy (83 percent) and Dwight Eisenhower (72 percent) - had a higher approval rating at this point in their terms.

The president has the overwhelming support of Democrats, nine in ten of whom approve of the president. Just 31 percent of Republicans agree, however. The party divisions are similar to those seen under President's George W. Bush and Clinton - Mr. Bush had the support of just 35 percent of Democrats at the 100 days mark, while Mr. Clinton was backed by just 26 percent of Republicans at this point.

Mr. Obama enjoys the approval of Americans overall on every major issue: Iraq (63 percent approval), the economy (61 percent), foreign policy (59 percent), Afghanistan (56 percent) and terrorism (55 percent). He is widely seen as a different kind of politician, one who Americans say cares about them and can unite different groups. Most say he has already made progress on critical issues and that he is tough enough to make the hard decisions required of a president.

There are doubts, however, that the president he will be able to end the recession and the war in Iraq by the end of his first term in office. Just 37 percent say Mr. Obama will get the country out of the recession in his first term, while 44 percent say he will end the U.S. involvement in Iraq in four years in office. Still, a majority of Americans say the president has made progress on both fronts during his first 100 days.

(CBS)

One in two Americans, meanwhile, do not think the president has started making progress on cutting taxes for the middle class - even though tax cuts were part of the President’s economic stimulus plan that was passed in February.

Majorities say it is either "very" or "somewhat" likely that Mr. Obama will bring about significant reform in health care (67 percent say so), immigration (59 percent) and energy policy (75 percent) during his first term - though the percentage that say such reform is "very" likely is relatively low.

Americans have high expectations for Mr. Obama's term in office, with 72 percent saying they are "optimistic" about the next four years. The percentage of Americans who say America is headed in the right direction is 41 percent - less than a majority, but substantially more than said so in February (23 percent) or October (just seven percent).

Fifty-nine percent of those surveyed, meanwhile, say Mr. Obama's presidency has improved the U.S. image around the world. Just 11 percent say his presidency has worsened it.

Michelle Obama's Slow, Steady, Savvy Media Strategy

From the NY Times:

By focusing on her domestic persona and harnessing the fascination with her family, the first lady and her communications team have emerged as the key architects of one of the most remarkable political transformations in years. Only 10 months ago, Mrs. Obama was described as an angry black woman by some conservatives and as a liability to her husband. Now, she is widely admired for her warmth, and her vibrant and accessible manner, and her race seems almost an afterthought to many Americans. She has the highest favorability ratings of any incoming first lady since 1980, and is even more popular than the president.

Obama administration officials say this shift has occurred organically as more people have had the opportunity to see and hear the first lady for themselves rather than through the lenses of her critics.

But David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser, does not deny that the efforts of the first lady’s team — headed by communications director Camille Johnston and press secretary Katie McCormick Lelyveld — have also influenced perceptions.

“I wouldn’t say we’re trying to soften her,” Mr. Axelrod said. “But is there an effort to get people to know her? Yes. We want people to know her. There were caricatures of her during part of the campaign” ...

Barack Obama Still Riding High In New Poll; Michelle, Meanwhile, Has Skyrocketed

First, the Wash Post on Barack Obama (poll data):

The number of Americans who believe that the nation is headed in the right direction has roughly tripled since Barack Obama's election, and the public overwhelmingly blames the excesses of the financial industry, rather than the new president, for turmoil in the economy, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

At this early stage in his presidency, Obama continues to benefit from a broadly held perception that others should bear the bulk of responsibility for the severe economic problems that confront his administration. Americans see plenty of offenders, but only about a quarter blame the president and his team for an economy that's in the ditch.

Despite the increasing optimism about the future, the nation's overall mood remains gloomy, and doubts are rising about some of the administration's prescriptions for the economic woes. Independents are less solidly behind Obama than they have been, fewer Americans now express confidence that his economic programs will work, barely half of the country approves of how the president is dealing with the federal budget deficit, and the political climate is once again highly polarized.

The percentage of Americans in the new poll who said the country is on the right track still stands at just 42 percent, but that is the highest percentage saying so in five years and marks a sharp turnabout from last fall, when as many as nine in 10 said the country was heading in the wrong direction. Fifty-seven percent now consider the nation as moving on the wrong track ...

Two-thirds of Americans approve of the way Obama is handling the country's top job, and six in 10 give him good marks on issue No. 1, the flagging economy. Those figures are little changed from last month. But he receives lower marks for dealing with the federal budget deficit after submitting a plan that would see continued huge deficits over the next decade. Fifty-two percent back Obama on his approach to the deficit, with the public split about evenly over whether belt-tightening or big increases in spending should be used to try to improve the economy.

There is now a pronounced divergence between Democratic and Republican perceptions of the economy, a bigger partisan divide than the one that occurred 16 years ago after Bill Clinton took office. In early 1993, people in both parties were about equally likely to see the economy as improving, but now the number of Republicans who say it is souring is more than double that of Democrats.

A sharp rise in optimism has occurred among Democrats, who are about three times as likely to approve of the country's course as they were just before Obama's inauguration. Independents, too, are more optimistic, with twice as many feeling positive as in mid-January. Among Republicans, there has not been significant movement in either direction.

Obama's overall approval rating among independents has dipped six points, to 61 percent, and fewer than half, 45 percent, said he is doing a good job of handling the deficit. His approval rating among Republicans has dropped seven points, to 30 percent.

Michelle Takes To The World Stage

From the Politico:

President John F. Kennedy once quipped that he was merely “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” This week, Barack Obama might find out how he felt.

The first couple’s trip to Europe Tuesday takes Michelle Obama to a land that likes her husband but seems positively fascinated by her. The British press in particular has followed Michelle Obama’s every move breathlessly, from her dresses to the “kitchen garden” behind the White House. One London paper tracked down her high-school prom date. Another asked plaintively, “Why Doesn’t the UK Have a Michelle Obama?”

So while the president has to juggle the politics, Michelle Obama's job is in some ways more subtle and just as complicated. France’s first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, was judged recently on her curtsy before the Queen, and back in the day, Jackie O.’s outfits and her command of the French language were closely scrutinized ...

Michelle Obama’s official schedule says she will accompany the president to many of his events – they both will have tea with Queen Elizabeth II, for instance – but she’ll have some solo outings as well. She’ll visit an all-girls school in London where the population is mostly minority and the second language is English — an echo of her work in Washington, DC ...

In France, Obama will join NATO spouses in visiting a hospital and a cathedral. And at all of these events, she'll stand next to some of the world’s most high-profile political spouses— including Bruni-Sarkozy, the Italian-born ex-supermodel who is an admirer of the self-described girl from the Chicago’s South Side.

Aides say Michelle Obama is aware of the moment and she has been reading up on her fellow members of the first ladies' club ahead of the trip ... And for all the attention that will be paid to the arrival of America’s first black president, there is also a deep fascination with his wife — her humble roots, her Ivy League education, her groundbreaking role and her ability to juggle being first lady and raising two daughters out of the spotlight.

Making The White House Home

From the NY Times:

Now the White House is really kid-friendly: On Wednesday, the Obamas had a swing set installed at the executive mansion, just outside the Oval office ...

The new play equipment marks the Obamas first effort to put their personal stamp on the White House grounds. President Bill Clinton installed a new putting green. President George H.W. Bush added the basketball court and horseshoe pits.

First Lady Michelle Obama — who has two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, — has vowed to give the White House more of a family-friendly feel. And Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, has predicted that emphasis will become more evident as the weather warms.

“I’m looking forward to backyard barbecues,’’ Ms. Jarrett said in an interview earlier this year. “Just the fact that they have young children lends itself to a different kind of entertaining.”

The American Family Robinson

Though they're not exactly ship wrecked on a remote island, this Wash Post story does convey the sense of wonder the extended Obama clan feels--and by extension, how any "normal" American family would feel--with their new found position (apologies to Johann David Wyss!). Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

The Robinsons [Michelle's family] used to vacation in White Cloud, Mich., where they shared rustic cabins in the woods, so transitioning to sleepovers at the White House has required some fine-tuning. A few hours after Obama took the oath of office, he asked Wilson if she and her husband were going to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.

"Oh, no, I can't do that," Wilson said. "I'd be the one who broke the glass and spilled my coffee on the Gettysburg Address."

Wilson stayed in Room 303 instead -- a suite with its own bathroom -- and Craig Robinson and his wife slept in the Lincoln Bedroom. Craig, who had never even toured the White House before, retired to a rosewood bed from the 1860s. He woke up and walked on the Truman Balcony, where 11 presidents have entertained the world elite.

"We're a pretty down-to-earth family from the South Side of Chicago, so nobody can get their arms around this whole thing," Craig said. "When all of our family was in there, it almost felt like: 'Wait. Are we at somebody's kitchen table? Because this can't actually be the White House.' The kids were off playing, and some of us adults sat back and just said: 'Can you believe this? Are you kidding?' "

Barack and Michelle Obama Fisting?

This wanna-be-relationship therapist does not know the meaning of the word:

A Living, Familial Portrait Of Change

A truly inspiring article from the NY Times:

The president’s elderly stepgrandmother brought him an oxtail fly whisk, a mark of power at home in Kenya. Cousins journeyed from the South Carolina town where the first lady’s great-great-grandfather was born into slavery, while the rabbi in the family came from the synagogue where he had been commemorating Martin Luther King’s Birthday. The president and first lady’s siblings were there, too, of course: his Indonesian-American half-sister, who brought her Chinese-Canadian husband, and her brother, a black man with a white wife.

When President Barack Obama was sworn in on Tuesday, he was surrounded by an extended clan that would have shocked past generations of Americans and instantly redrew the image of a first family for future ones ...

For well over two centuries, the United States has been vastly more diverse than its ruling families. Now the Obama family has flipped that around, with a Technicolor cast that looks almost nothing like their overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Protestant predecessors in the role. The family that produced Barack and Michelle Obama is black and white and Asian, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. They speak English; Indonesian; French; Cantonese; German; Hebrew; African languages including Swahili, Luo and Igbo; and even a few phrases of Gullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Very few are wealthy, and some — like Sarah Obama, the stepgrandmother who only recently got electricity and running water in her metal-roofed shack — are quite poor ...

Though the world is recognizing the inauguration of the first African-American president, the story is a more complex narrative, about immigration, social mobility and the desegregation of one of the last divided institutions in American life: the family. It is a tale of self-determination, full of refusals to follow the tracks laid by history or religion or parentage.

Mr. Obama follows the second President Bush, who had a presidential son’s self-assured grip on power. Aside from a top-quality education, the new president came to politics with none of his predecessor’s advantages: no famous last name, no deep-pocketed parents to finance early forays into politics and, in fact, not much of a father at all. So Mr. Obama built his political career from scratch, with best-selling books and long-shot runs for office, leaving his relatives astonished at where he has brought them ...

Though Mr. Obama is the son of a black Kenyan, he has some conventionally presidential roots on his white mother’s side: abolitionists who, according to family legend, were chased out of Missouri, a slave state; Midwesterners who weathered the Depression; even a handful of distant ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War. (Ever since he became a United States senator, the Sons of the American Revolution has tried to recruit him. )

But far less has been known about Mrs. Obama’s roots — even by the first lady herself. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, “it was sort of passed-down folklore that so-and-so was related to so-and-so and their mother and father was a slave,” Mr. Robinson said.

Drawing on old census data, family records and interviews, it is clear that Mrs. Obama is indeed the descendant of slaves and a daughter of the Great Migration, the mass movement of African-Americans northward in the first half of the 20th century in search of opportunity. Mrs. Obama’s family found it, but not without outsize measures of adversity and disappointment along the way.

<Continue reading>

"You can't really understand Barack until you understand Hawaii"

From the Wash Post:

Friends here say the country's first island-born president-elect has long carried more than a touch of the aloha spirit in his temperament. During the campaign, many admirers questioned whether Obama was too passive in his battles against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen.  John McCain.

"That's Hawaii," declared Rep.  Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), a contemporary of Obama's parents who has known the president-elect since birth. "You take negative energy and you process it through you and it comes out as positive energy. . . . Every time Obama comes on television now, the collective blood pressure in the United States goes down 10 points. He cools the water. He's sober and he speaks sensibly in a calm manner that breeds confidence."

As Obama's wife, Michelle, has said, "You can't really understand Barack until you understand Hawaii." But to understand Hawaii is to make sense of America's most exotic outpost. It's the nation's last frontier, the 50th state, a string of volcanic mountains that rose from the sea to be settled first by Polynesians and later by a cultural melange of Asians and Anglos ...

The traditional Hawaiian way is to hold back rather than assert oneself, said Jerry Burris, a longtime columnist at the Honolulu Advertiser who co-wrote "The Dream Begins," a book about how Hawaii shaped Obama ... As Michael Carney, a Honolulu implant from the U.S. mainland, observed, drivers in Hawaii rarely cut you off in traffic. "You don't hear honking here," he noted.

Hawaii is no utopia, of course, despite its stunning natural beauty. Tourism drives the state's economy, but many of the jobs it provides are low-wage and low-skill. Pockets of poverty are spread across Oahu, which with nearly 1 million residents is the state's most populous island.

"Many people have two or three jobs to make ends meet because it's a very expensive cost of living," said Geoffrey White, chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Hawaii. That high cost of living has resulted in a growing homeless population. The state also struggles with a relatively high rate of crystal methamphetamine abuse.

There are consequences to living on a small land mass surrounded by the ocean. There is a theory of behavioral science that islanders behave differently than mainlanders, that on an island competition is not rewarded as well as it is elsewhere.

"When you live on a rock, on an island, you learn to understand that everyone is critical to the success and survival of that space," said Ramsay Taum, a Honolulu native and administrator at the University of Hawaii. "You have to get over your quibbles quickly." ...

On the campaign trail, Obama rarely talked about how growing up in Hawaii influenced his personal or political values. The politician's narrative has always been firmly rooted in Chicago, where he got his start as a community organizer and cut his teeth in the city's rough-and-tumble politics.

But in one set of remarks in 2004, he told a Honolulu audience of his love for his home state.

"No place else could have provided me with the environment, the climate, in which I could not only grow but also get a sense of being loved," he said. "There is no doubt that the residue of Hawaii will always stay with me, and that it is a part of my core, and that what's best in me, and what's best in my message, is consistent with the tradition of Hawaii."

"The beginning of a new era"

Hendrik Hertzberg writing in the New Yorker:

Barack Hussein Obama: last week, sixty-five million Americans turned a liability—a moniker so politically inflammatory that the full recitation of it was considered foul play—into a global diplomatic asset, a symbol of the resurgence of America’s ability to astonish and inspire ... ” Ten weeks from now, the President of the United States will be a person whose first name is a Swahili word derived from the Arabic (it means “blessing”), whose middle name is that not only of a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad but also of the original target of an ongoing American war, and whose last name rhymes nicely with “Osama.” That’s not a name, it’s a catastrophe, at least in American politics. Or ought to have been.

Yet Barack Obama won, and won big. Democrats have now achieved pluralities in four of the last five Presidential elections. But Obama’s popular vote was an outright majority—a little more than fifty-two per cent, at the latest reckoning—and the largest share for a nominee of his party since Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964. Obama made significant gains compared with John Kerry, four years ago, in nearly every category that exit polls record: black folks but also white folks; liberals but also conservatives; women but also men. His gains were especially striking among Latinos, the very poor and the very well-off, Catholics and the unchurched, and the two groups most likely to be concerned about the future—young people and the parents of children living at home. And although the Obama wave does not seem to have brought with it a filibuster-proof Senate, it did sweep into office enough new members of both houses of Congress to offer him the hope of a governing legislative majority.

This election was so extraordinary in so many ways that its meaning will take many years to play out and many more to be understood. But there is already the feel of the beginning of a new era. As in 1932 and 1980, a crisis in the economy opened the way for the rejection of a reigning approach to government and the forging of a new one. Emphatically, comprehensively, the public has turned against conservatism at home and neoconservatism abroad. The faith that unfettered markets and minimal taxes on the rich will solve every domestic problem, and that unilateral arrogance and American arms will solve every foreign one, is dead for a generation or more. And the electoral strategy of “cultural” resentment and fake populism has been dealt a grievous blow.

The Daily Show Reaction To The New Yorker Cover

Brilliant satire about another media outlet's satire. I love how they go after the MSM for doing exactly what the MSM is now accusing--with a straight face--the New Yorker of doing:

Is it only me, but does Jon seem personally miffed about this?

Obama's Reaction to The New Yorker Cover

Obama speaking with Larry King last night. From Ben Smith:

KING: But I've heard a lot of others comment on it. We haven't heard you speak about it yet. That "New Yorker" cover which depicts you and your wife, and you dressed in a Muslim outfit, your wife in a kind of military outfit, Osama bin Laden's picture burning, what do you make of that?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Well, I know it was The New Yorker's attempt at satire. I don't think they were entirely successful with it. But you know what? It's a cartoon, Larry, and that's why we've got the First Amendment.

And I think the American people are probably spending a little more time worrying about what's happening with the banking system and the housing market, and what's happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, than a cartoon. So I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it.

KING: But didn't it personally sting you?

OBAMA: No. You know, we've -- one of the things when you're running for president for almost two years is, you get a pretty thick skin. And, you know, I've seen and heard worse. I do think that, you know, in attempting to satirize something, they probably fueled some misconceptions about me instead.

And I wish he would do much more of this:

KING: Considering that, though, there's a lot of e-mails going around.  It gets rather terrible. A "Newsweek" poll shows that 12 percent of America believes that you're a Muslim, and 26 believe -- 26 percent believe you were raised in a Muslim home. A lot of misinformation. How do you fight that?

OBAMA: Well, you know, by getting on "Larry King" and telling everybody I'm a Christian and I wasn't raised in a Muslim home. And pledge allegiance to the flag. And, you know, all the things that have been reported in these e-mails are completely untrue and have been debunked again and again and again. So, all you can do is just tell the truth and trust in the American people that over time, they're going to know what the truth is. One last point I want to -- I do want to make about these e-mails, though. And I think this has an impact on this "New Yorker" cover.

You know, this is actually an insult against Muslim-Americans, something that we don't spend a lot of time talking about. And sometimes I've been derelict in pointing that out.

You know, there are wonderful Muslim-Americans all across the country who are doing wonderful things. And for this to be used as sort of an insult, or to raise suspicions about me, I think is unfortunate. And it's not what America's all about.

What's Wrong With This Picture

I'm currently reading Richard Shenkman's excellent book, Just How Stupid Are We - facing the truth about the American voter, and hope to have more substantive posts on the subject later this month, but one of the important points he makes is that too many American voters know a lot about b*shit and not so much about stuff that's life and death important.  And worse, they vote based on their "knowledge." He reveals for instance that:

• Only about 1 in 4 Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment yet more than half can name at least two members of the Simpsons.
  
• Even more depressing: 1 in 5 can name all five Simpsons while only 1 in 1000 can name all five First Amendment freedoms.

So this brings me to the controversial cover ...

... and what's wrong with it: the cover feeds into the some of the public's misconceptions about Obama.  Here are some sobering statistics from Newsweek's July 11th poll:

• 12% of voters surveyed said that Obama was sworn in as a United States senator on a Qur'an
• 26% believe the Democratic candidate was raised as a Muslim
• 39% believe he attended an Islamic school as a child growing up in Indonesia

I understand that most subscribers to the New Yorker know that this was a satire of the Obama rumors, and those who spread them.  Nor am I concerned that anyone who in July is reading this blog or watching election news will be confused about the New Yorker's message.  A person glancing at a newstand as they walk by it tomorrow, however, might not realize it was satire not a factual statement.  Nor I fear will the far too many American voters who are Simpsons experts.