Marcial Froelke Coburn begins her August, 2001, Chicago Mag story this way:

At 55, Bill Ayers, the notorious sixties radical, still carries a whiff of that rock ‘n’ roll decade: the oversize wire-rim glasses that, in a certain light, reveal themselves as bifocals; a backpack over his shoulder—not some streamlined, chic job, but a funky backpack-of-the-people, complete with a photo button of abolitionist John Brown pinned to one strap.

Yet he is also a man of the moment. For example: There is his cell phone, laid casually on the tabletop of this neighborhood Taylor Street coffee shop, and his passion for double skim lattes. In conversation, he has an immediate, engaging presence; he may not have known you long but, his manner suggests, he’s already fascinated. Then there is his quick laugh and his tendency to punctuate his comments by a tap on your arm.

Ugh to the tap on arm.  Yuck.

Double yuck, however, to the pic of Ayers standing on the flag, which is what’s going to be run in lots of places and in fact was just run on Hannity’s show on Fox.

He’s a friend of O.?  Held one of his first fund-raisers in Hyde Park?  Someone he met at Aldi’s?  Questions, we got questions.

Obama’s exaggerations, doubletalk, and systematic deception are “unappealing,” but also “unexceptional” for the politico on the campaign trail, says City Journal’s Fred Siegel in The Australian, but he fingers O. as a special case, with reference to his Chicago base:

What makes it different is that there’s not just a gap but a chasm between his actions and his professed principles, which would normally kill a candidacy. And because his deeds are so few, the disparity is all the more salient.

Obama, far more than the others, is the “judge me by what I say and not what I do” candidate. He wants to be the conscience of the country without necessarily having one himself.

Look to the Chicago Connection and his “conventional Chicago racial and patronage politics,” says Siegel, citing its “political and cultural tribalism,” where

racial reform has meant that the incumbent mayor, Richard M. Daley, has been cutting blacks in on the loot. Louis Farrakhan, Jackson, Jeremiah Wright and Obama are all, in part, the expression of that politics.

Siegel cites John Kass’s “Chicago way” and says:

At no point did Obama, the would-be saviour of US politics, challenge this corruption, except for face-saving gestures as a legislator. He was, in his own Harvard law way, a product of it.

Why did Chi pols anoint him?  To make themselves look good.

Obama first played a perfuming role as a state senator. His mentor, Emil Jones, the machine-made president of the Senate, allowed him to sponsor a minor ethics bill. In return, Obama made sure to send plenty of pork to Jones’s district. When asked about pork-barrel spending, Jones famously replied: “Some call it pork; I call it steak.”

He’s Jones’s boy — word used not as in Deep South but as at City Hall.   Tony Allen-Mills in The Times of London:

Long before Barack Obama launched his campaign for the White House, when he was considering a run for the US Senate in 2003, he paid an intriguing visit to a former Chicago sewers inspector who had risen to become one of the most influential African-American politicians in Illinois.

“You have the power to elect a US senator,” Obama told Emil Jones, Democratic leader of the Illinois state senate. Jones looked at the ambitious young man smiling before him and asked, teasingly: “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?”

According to Jones, Obama replied: “Me.” It was his first, audacious step in a spectacular rise from the murky political backwaters of Springfield, the Illinois capital.

The father-son motif arises:

Jones, 71, describes himself as Obama’s “godfather” and once said: “He feels like a son to me.”

Or, per Todd Spivak in the Houston Press, Jones became “Obama’s kingmaker”:

Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio ­program.

I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.'”

“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”

“Barack Obama.”

As a state senator, “he made a specialty of voting present,” says Siegel.  But in the U.S. senate, he was “such a down-the-line partisan that, according to Congressional Quarterly, in the past two years he has voted with the Democrats more often than did the party’s majority leader, Harry Reid.”

Likewise, for all his talk of post-racialism, Obama has played, with the contrivance of the press, traditional South Side Chicago racial politics.  . . . .   [W]hites who are at odds with, or who haven’t delivered for, Chicago politicians can be obliquely accused of racism on the flimsiest basis, but pillars of local black politics such as Wright, with his exclusivist racial theology, are beyond criticism.

More more more is at this site.

Mark Steyn does Obama’s Philadelphia speech, refusing to accept comparisons with “the Gettysburg Address, or FDR’s First Inaugural, or JFK’s religion speech, or [per Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books] Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860.”

It was never a great speech. It was a simulacrum of a great speech written to flatter gullible pundits into hailing it as the real deal. It should be “required reading in classrooms,” said Bob Herbert in the New York Times; it was “extraordinary” and “rhetorical magic,” said Joe Klein in Time – which gets closer to the truth: As with most “magic,” it was merely a trick of redirection.

With it he seemed to make Jeremiah Wright “vanish into thin air,  Having “sat in the pews of a neo-segregationist huckster for 20 years,” he

looked America in the face and said: Who ya gonna believe? My “rhetorical magic” or your lyin’ eyes?

This is his rhetoric problem.

The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama’s adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the senator’s speechifying “magic” came from Jeremiah Wright himself. “He’s a politician,” said the reverend. “He says what he has to say as a politician. … He does what politicians do.”

It’s this comment that finally got O’s dander up:

“What I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I’m about knows that – that I am about trying to bridge gaps and that I see the – the commonality in all people.”

Sure.  And he’s still sore, says the Mrs., who

told a rally in Durham, North Carolina, on Friday that only her husband’s desire to change US politics had helped him to control his feelings: “Barack is always thinking three steps ahead – what do we need to do to make change.”

Her husband was thinking “I can’t let my ego, my anger, my frustration get in the way of the ultimate goal,” she said.

She’s “a bizarre mix of condescension and grievance – like Teresa Heinz Kerry with a chip on her shoulder,” says Steyn.

But the common thread to her rhetoric is its antipathy to what she calls “corporate America.” Perhaps for his next Gettysburg Address the senator will be saying, “I could no more disown my wife than I could disown my own pastor. Oh, wait … .”

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the “God-damn America” man, is “a generally well-intentioned guy who sometimes says some crazy stuff by white people’s standards,” says Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown.

He’s not “this bad, scary guy” that “some people would have you believe,” and neither is his parishioner Obama.  We know this because we’ve been watching him for nearly a year and a half and “definitely have learned some things we didn’t know about him when we started.” 

By now we have “a sense of the man” as “a guy who generally tries to play it safe, who looks for the middle ground” in no way “covering up something sinister,” says Brown, adding an ironic “Please.” 

Brown wants it all to stop.  (His colleague Mary Mitchell cries out, “Leave Jeremiah Wright alone!)  We know all there is to know about Obama, he says.  We know he’s not bad and scary because we have seen him campaigning:

These political candidates can only manipulate their own image to a point. Even with a tightly controlled candidate like Obama, the veneer gets peeled back sooner or later. You see them more or less for who they are.

Right.  And that’s the process going on right now.  But Brown has bailed out.  He’s not paying attention.  As for those who are still paying attention, fascinated by the peeling process, they basically welcome the chance to act on their prejudices. 

Brown:

I take it as a positive that [Obama] didn’t try to sweep away this part of his life [Wright, etc.] in preparation for the campaign.

Obama probably didn’t fully appreciate, though, that there was always a segment of America that was looking for an excuse to justify being against him.

Ah.  The unwashed.  Obama’s unreasonable critics.

Mark Brown has good clean fun in his Sun-Times column with Indiana-Illinois hostilities, which frankly come as news to me, with talk along the way of bringing “the presidential campaign” — he means the Democrat primary — to a “merciful conclusion.”

Fun is fun, and it’s Sunday morning in Chicago, but the odd Republican here and there, and even the not-odd, thinks this Obama-Clinton fracas is the nicest thing to happen since Grant took Richmond.  The Civil War reference is apt.  Those Dems, tripping on their own petards of identity politics — black vs. female in this case — are in big trouble, heading for Denver in August when s—t will hit the fan and splash all over everyone.

So go, Hill, who has deflated or at least lowered pressure in the Barack balloon, as he did to hers a while back.  And Dems, keep parcelling out elected delegates proportionally, state by state, keeping the race close.  McGovernology rules!