Many people believe that all politicians are, at best, self-serving and prone to rely on deceit to win elections.  White victims of the Political Correctness movement—people who’ve been attacked whenever someone thinks they’re racially insensitive—especially find it impossible to believe that Obama isn’t a closet reverse racist or, at least a devotee of affirmative action. After all, they argue, Obama’s pastor said excruciatingly hostile, degrading things about our government and

John McCain is polling well when it comes to dealing with the Iraq war. That’s mostly for the same reasons that Bush succeeded in rallying even moderate and liberal democrats to give him the authority to go to war—fear that Islamic extremists will again strike our homeland and foment a bloodbath in Iraq and horrific unrest throughout the Middle East. Obama’s call for phased withdrawel accompanied by intense diplomatic efforts without preconditions both in Iraq and in other Middle Eastern countries is difficult to assess and too easily caricatured as a precipitous pullout. McCain can get away with this caricature mostlly because, I believe, the public knows next to nothing about the power of diplomatic efforts. Moreover, Syrian and Iranian leaders and the Iraqi insurgents seems like psychopaths. The seem obviously unreachable by reason and appeals to enlightened self-interest.

In "Let's Not, and Say We Did" (NYT Op-Ed,