Byron York says what every blogger thought as soon as he or she read all about John Edwards, his mistress, and his love child on Memeorandum:

Today Is Fitzmas for Mickey Kaus

Ann Althouse isn’t happy that onlookers at the hotel where Edwards was caught visiting his paramour and their baby were reportedly amused that he had to sneak around.

[quoting the Enquirer] “He was clearly surprised that we had caught him at this very late hour inside the hotel.

“Some guests up at this late hour watched the spectacle in amusement from a staircase nearby.”

Amusement.

Certainly there’s nothing amusing about this for Elizabeth Edwards, if that’s what Althouse is thinking. However, some of us don’t sympathize with the wives of presidential candidates, even the ones with breast cancer. Oh, we’re sorry about the breast cancer. But we certainly don’t sympathize with them as wives of obviously unprincipled men: power-mad, arrogant, self-loving, self-aggrandizing sleaze bags, every last one of them. They’re politicians!

So some of Althouse’s commenters, like me, can’t wait to hear the inevitable upcoming exchange between Kaus and Bob Wright.

All hail Mickey Kaus’s nose for undernews.

In a country of conformists, Barack Obama doesn’t fit into anyone’s preconceived notions. He does, however, fit Marc Ambinder’s notions of the dream candidate:

after the Democratic pollster, Peter Hart, whose focus groups of Pennsylvania voters showed that many just didn’t identify with Obama; they didn’t know what to make of him; their life was not his life; they could not hang their experiences on any of his. Now — race may certainly be a major reason for this lack of projective identification, particularly among older whites. But it is also true that Obama’s life is a 21st century American life; one of different countries, an unusual name, two races, a meteoric rise, a life of the mind (and a talented, incredible gift of a mind) and devoted to the ideals of expression. [e.a.]

Ambinder is clear-headed enough to admit that:

Those facts aren’t enough.

They’re not enough to sway voters in Obama’s direction and indeed make them vulnerable to be swayed away from Obama. Where Ambinders gets lost is in asserting that this makes Obama vulnerable only to all the terrible things people might say about him:

But absent a way for her connect to Obama, it stands to reason that she will be more likely to believe just about anything.

In this version of the scenario, Obama is obviously a superior being—anyone can see that, according to Ambinder: after all, his life is “a life of the mind (and a talented, incredible gift of a mind [--my emphasis])”—and 86-year-old Maria VanderMolen is just ripe to be duped, the poor old dear.

In my version of the scenario, it is Marc Ambinder and the Obama-bots who have bought into a notion that the Obama Messiah is, well, the Obama Messiah.

The Messiah himself gives them plenty of reason to believe in him:

Logan: “Do you have any doubts?”

Obama: “Never.”

What I wanna know is why nobody has named me a Messiah, me with my 20th-century life, and four out of six traits that I share with the Obama Messiah:

different countries? check

an unusual name? check (but you’ll have to trust me on that one; if you don’t trust me, look at my nom de guerre: Hepzeeba; is it unusual enough for you?)

a life of the mind? check (”talented” and “incredible”? you’ll have to ask my clients and colleagues)

devoted to the ideals of expression? check (I’m a blogger, ain’t I?)

Take it from someone who’s “different”: it’s not a plus.

Note: I’m in a rush and don’t have time to add the links required to document my assertions; I’ll fill them in later.

Shelby Steele gets at the essence of Obama’s profound appeal: he’s running on culture (i.e., as a celebrity, as I have noted many times over the last six months) rather than on his politics (which are all over the map, as has been well documented all over the interwebs, if not in the MSM (as noted by Pew) in the last two months:

[W]hite Americans have also been tormented by their stigmatization as moral inferiors, as racists. An Obama presidency would give them considerable moral leverage against this stigma.

So it has to be acknowledged that, on the level of cultural and historical symbolism, an Obama presidency might nudge the culture forward a bit — presuming of course that he would be at least a competent president. (A less-than-competent black president would likely be a step backwards.) It would be a good thing were blacks to be more open to the power of individual responsibility. And it would surely help us all if whites were less cowed by the political correctness on black issues that protects their racial innocence at the expense of the very principles that made America great. We Americans are hungry for such a cultural shift.

This, no doubt, is what Barack Obama means by “change.” He promises to reconfigure our exhausted cultural arrangement.

The McCain campaign is obviously aware of Obama’s cultural appeal, and it is seeding a “False Messiah” counter-culture campaign against him:

The important thematic part of the ad is not the gas prices, but the explicit, if still subtle, use of the False Messiah argument, which McCain’s senior staff has been talking privately about for months.

At first it sounds like the rush of a river, then the chants become clear. They are Obama’s minions, chanting his name in a kind of creepy, almost Orwellian repetition. Watch this theme develop over the coming months. As it stands, the McCain campaign already likes citing Oprah Winfrey’s claim that Obama is “The One,” like Keanu Reeves in a trench coat. The McCain campaign is trying to turn Obama’s enormous enthusiasm and crowds against him, to find a kryptonite for his superpowers. This is an arrogance argument, like the one made last week by Charles Krauthammer, but it is also a cultural argument. Subcultures are inherently insular. They have rules, customs and assumptions of their own. They tend to embrace lofty, abstract rhetoric. They also exclude. And in a political campaign, you do not want to exclude. In this spot, McCain is not just campaigning against Obama the man, but Obama the movement and Obama the subculture. He is trying to convince regular voters that Obama supporters are not regular. They are true believers, even worshipers. And it could be an effective attack, for at least two reasons.

1. America has a tradition of seeking out regular people as presidents, not demigods.

2. The conventional wisdom in politics today is you win by tearing down your opponent’s strengths. [e.a.]

Shelby Steele notes a further chink in Obama’s armor:

But here lies his essential contradiction: His campaign is more cultural than political. He sells himself more as a cultural breakthrough than as a candidate for office. To be a projection screen for the cultural aspirations of both blacks and whites one must be an invisible man politically. Real world politics, in their mundanity, interrupt cultural projections. And so Mr. Obama’s political invisibility — a charm that can only derive from a lack of deep political convictions — may well serve his cultural appeal, but it also makes him something of a political mess.

Already he has flip-flopped on campaign financing, wire-tapping, gun control, faith-based initiatives, and the terms of withdrawal from Iraq. Those enamored of his cultural potential may say these reversals are an indication of thoughtfulness, or even open-mindedness. But could it be that this is a man who trusted so much in his cultural appeal that the struggles of principle and conscience never seemed quite real to him? His flip-flops belie an almost existential callowness toward principle, as if the very idea of permanent truth is passé, a form of bad taste. [e.a.]

I can tell you that this appeal to the culture is working on the under-30 set (the part of that set which I see, at any rate). They don’t care about Obama’s policy ideas. They like the guy.

And they’re not the only ones. Why, on American Morning just today Kiran Chetry reported on the media’s pro-Obama’s bias, then her interview subject Rudy Giuiliani confirmed that pro-Obama media bias, and then moments later Chetry—with no apparentrony—reported the BREAKING NEWS: “any minute now! Barack Obama’s plane  will arrive in Amman, Jordan!!!”

John McCain had the great good fortune to fall into the hands of a NYT worm. The worm got his: David Shipley managed to give more publicity to McCain’s op-ed by refusing to publish it than it ever would have gotten in the paper itself.

Here it is (via CNN):

Here is the op-ed piece written by Sen. John McCain that the New York Times declined to run. The piece was released to CNN by the McCain campaign:

In January 2007, when General David Petraeus took command in Iraq, he called the situation “hard” but not “hopeless.” Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80% to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats. The situation now is full of hope, but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.

Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said on January 10, 2007. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

Now Senator Obama has been forced to acknowledge that “our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence.” But he still denies that any political progress has resulted.

Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City?actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism.

The success of the surge has not changed Senator Obama’s determination to pull out all of our combat troops. All that has changed is his rationale. In a New York Times op-ed and a speech this week, he offered his “plan for Iraq” in advance of his first “fact finding” trip to that country in more than three years. It consisted of the same old proposal to pull all of our troops out within 16 months. In 2007 he wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost. If we had taken his advice, it would have been. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance.

To make this point, he mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.

Senator Obama is also misleading on the Iraqi military’s readiness. The Iraqi Army will be equipped and trained by the middle of next year, but this does not, as Senator Obama suggests, mean that they will then be ready to secure their country without a good deal of help. The Iraqi Air Force, for one, still lags behind, and no modern army can operate without air cover. The Iraqis are also still learning how to conduct planning, logistics, command and control, communications, and other complicated functions needed to support frontline troops.

No one favors a permanent U.S. presence, as Senator Obama charges. A partial withdrawal has already occurred with the departure of five “surge” brigades, and more withdrawals can take place as the security situation improves. As we draw down in Iraq, we can beef up our presence on other battlefields, such as Afghanistan, without fear of leaving a failed state behind. I have said that I expect to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of my first term in office, in 2013.

But I have also said that any draw-downs must be based on a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground, not on an artificial timetable crafted for domestic political reasons. This is the crux of my disagreement with Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has said that he would consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his “plan for Iraq.” Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be “very dangerous.”

The danger is that extremists supported by Al Qaeda and Iran could stage a comeback, as they have in the past when we’ve had too few troops in Iraq. Senator Obama seems to have learned nothing from recent history. I find it ironic that he is emulating the worst mistake of the Bush administration by waving the “Mission Accomplished” banner prematurely.

I am also dismayed that he never talks about winning the war?only of ending it. But if we don’t win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president. Instead I will continue implementing a proven counterinsurgency strategy not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan with the goal of creating stable, secure, self-sustaining democratic allies.