a variant of the Right wing claim that every prominent black man is a shallow front for a white string puller

really?

it's seems more the other way round to me, coming from the left, directed against colon powell, clarence thomas, and herman cain, to name a few.

can you give examples of the direction you name?

this whole discussion describes the conflict between 'white' and 'AA', 'rich' and 'poor' values that obama embodies, the half white careerist who has known poverty, and is now a millionaire. just as he governs bipartisanly, just as he seems sometimes a Janus figure, talking up a vivid rhetoric that warms the cockles of those low on the totem pole, while taking more campaign money from rich white wall st fatcats than anyone else, campaigning on social justice, then letting the criminal architects of the biggest ever financial crisis walk free, gentrifying chicago and helping/hurting some black and white people in the process.

nothing wrong with resolving duality, per se, but when you keep going down the list, re making strides with global nuclear disarmament, while further decimating habeus corpus and increasing drone use on countries with whom no war has been declared, with significant civilian 'collateral' slaughter, strike one war, then surge in another...

are these an example of how widely we should be thinking, to stay abreast of the changing, ever-more pragmatic realities we are encountering, or is this man a 'human bridge' between two hitherto irreconcilable political poles, a bridge too difficult for ordinary people to conceive of, let alone follow him across?

he is an enigma. if he is a good man, then the presidency as real power is mostly illusion, and a mostly corporatist, corrupt congress and senate really determine the peoples' fate, or if not, as others on the right believe, he is a fraudulent, self-centred demagogue whose appeal to those on the left was just a good line in rhetoric and vapourware, and all this politicking is just a ploy to game a good post prez career in platinum paid speechifying to the converted, a la blair/clinton.

any centrist must accept being hated by the extreme left and right, it comes with the territory, and it seems he has made the choice so far to endlessly split the difference, neither trumpeting his achievements, letting them speak for themselves, nor apologising. a man of taste and distinction. rapidly greying hair, and an easy, assured smile. really disarming public figure. judged as a performer, his histrionic sense is orders of magnitude beyond anyone else on the political horizon, in a league of his own.

he's a triumph of political manoeuvrings, a changeling hybrid between noble statesman and manchurian candidate. a man of destiny, on whom historians will spend tomes dissecting his character and psychosocial underpinnings, the constituent formation of his persona's ~and personal~ journey through ideology to praxis.

can you imagine how gwb would have strutted if he had zapped osama? it would have made the flight suit braggadocio seemed mild.

fools rush in, and obama goes slow. where he's taking us remains to be seen, or even if he can do more than remain a voice of relative sanity as epochal change far beyond his power to influence, or do much to amend, simultaneously hits the whole world, revolutionising  societal systems as we know them. so far i still give him the benefit of the doubt that his acumen has been hobbled by unseen, opaque forces up till now, and his second term could unleash different sides to him, especially if european events continue to expose neolib economics as the corporate welfare clusterfuck it really is.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty