WTF?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Campaign Edition:

So today, Sen. Obama endorsed the California Model as the road to energy independence.

The state of California has implemented such a successful efficiency strategy that while electricity consumption grew 60% in this country over the last three decades, it didn’t grow at all in California. There is no reason we can’t do the same thing all across America.

I was in California last in 2001. As the author points out, "rolling blackouts" was the watchword of the day. And "brownouts." This wasn't a "Model" to emulate, but a failure. As I recall, at the time we were last discussing who was responsible for the failure. Liberals cited deregulation as the cause of the failure (which means that for liberals the "California Model" is one to be avoided by governments in the future, as it was nothing but an abdication of their responsibility to act in the interest of the people); conservatives pointed to the governor (and succeeded in having him recalled over the point).

It's a demonstration of a complete misunderstanding of the facts, which ought to be telling in a man who is running as the smart guy. Sen. McCain may have the IQ, but Sen. Obama has the reputation. I assume Sen. Obama is not intending to "endorse blackouts," as HotAir puts it, but it's plain that he doesn't know what he's talking about. The whole thing was a misery for everyone involved, not a model to emulate.

More, it shows how short the candidate is falling from his rhetoric.

The Obaman New Politics was going to put the South in play. Tell me one more time how endorsing California and Europe as your models is going to win Southern votes? Are you sure Hank done it this way?

The media is doing its best to keep Sen. Obama in the bubble. They sent the son of the great writer James Dickey down South to take the waters:

Dent argues that when Southerners criticize Obama, "They say, 'He's a Muslim, he's a mulatto Muslim, or quadroon Muslim … [only because] they don't want to use the old N word."

"Quadroon"? Seriously?

I have lived in the South most of my life, and I have heard the word "quadroon" exactly three times. The first was in a class on 'the social construction of race' that I took as an undergraduate at Georgia State University, where it was used to explain that places other than the American South had an "escape valve" from "blackness." Whereas in the South there was the "one drop rule," in places like the Dominican Republic a family could move from black to white through a series of carefully-calibrated marriages. Americans, the professor explained, had a notion that this was much more racist than our system, because it tracked how "black" you were to a sixteenth percentage, and took serious stock of who your grandfathers and even great-grandparents had been; but islanders thought we were the racists, because we offered no escape.

The second time I heard the word it was from a fellow student at the university, who was making a satirical point. The third time was yesterday, when I read the article from the younger Dickey.

The younger Mr. Dickey seems eager to repeat the favor his father -- a man I once met, and whose experience as a night-fighter pilot in the Pacific Theater of WWII I greatly respect -- did for the South. As Deliverance painted the South for a generation of outsiders, so too the Newsweek articles manages to find a host of improbables. A guy who sells evil bumperstickers and muses about "quadroons." A sheriff with a noose-wielding supporter. A group re-enacting a lynching -- indeed, lynching occupies a remarkable percentage of the article. Given the actual prevalence of lynching -- that is, its close-to-nonexistence in the last forty years -- one might almost say it's what he came to find. If all he found of it was theater, well, we'll just talk about that, then.

He paints the immigrants to the region as fearful, whether Spanish-speaking girls yelling "la migra!" when he approaches, or Hindi-speakers in Savannah who didn't want to talk to him. Certainly there are many immigrants to the South, including Hindi-speakers: when I lived in Savannah, some of our neighbors included a family like this, headed by a kind-hearted grandfather that language proved no barrier to befriending. I can attest that Dairy Queens throughout Georgia are largely run by a family of Indians, including the one not too far from here: but I never heard of them suffering anything but wealth from their chosen occupation.

"Obama's going to win," the article closes. "And if he does not?" Well, if he does not, it may be because you came to the task with such an odd view of what it entailed. You can't sway people you can't even imagine.