Barack Obama

Ivan Krstic: In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward. New York Magazine: The Democratic Party is closer than it’s ever been to…

Obama: But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union. For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means…

Here’s what I’m reading today: Iranian fundamentalists preach in cyberspace (The Guardian Newsblog) DC’s Best Embassies (Washingtonian) The Legend of Barack Obama (Washingtonian) The Demise of Hyphy (SF Weekly) Oops: Columbia j-school dean sends self-evaluation to class (Romenesko) Here’s what I did today: Cover the GDC for the CBC.

Slate: In turn, Barack Obama’s candidacy marks the fulfillment of the 15th Amendment guaranteeing black suffrage. Whereas Romney is the most aristocratic candidate, Obama is the least. Not because he is biracial, but because he is self-made. His parents had little wealth, prestige, and power to pass on, and both are now dead. He has chosen his own faith as an adult (Protestant Christianity, as it happens), and he remains far and away the least wealthy of the Big Four.…

The New Yorker: The alternatives facing Democratic voters have been characterized variously as a choice between experience and change, between an insider and an outsider, and between two firsts—a woman and a black man. But perhaps the most important difference between these two politicians—whose policy views, after all, are almost indistinguishable—lies in their rival conceptions of the Presidency. Obama offers himself as a catalyst by which disenchanted Americans can overcome two decades of vicious partisanship, energize our democracy, and restore…

Slate, November 2007: An upcoming issue of TV Guide has an amusing roundup of the 2008 presidential candidates’ favorite television shows. Nothing too surprising here: Hillary watches Grey’s Anatomy, Barack Obama likes The Wire (for the record, that’s the right answer), and John Edwards says his viewing guilty pleasure is “Fred Thompson on Law & Order.” Also, The Atlantic‘s Mark Bowden has a neat piece on David Simon.

So what does Barack Obama have that the other candidates don’t? Ringtones, baby, ringtones. Seriously.

NYT: Part of the Republicans’ difficulty in countering Mr. Obama, should they have to, is their own cynical racial politics. For the most part, race has been the dog that hasn’t barked in this campaign despite the (largely) white press’s endless fretting about whether the Illinois senator is too white for black voters and too black for white voters. Most Americans aren’t racist, most Republicans included. (Those who are won’t vote for the Democratic presidential candidate even if it’s not…

The New York Times: Renewal is about policy; it’s also about symbolism. Which brings us to Barack Hussein Obama, the Democratic candidate with a Kenyan father, a Kansan mother, an Indonesian stepfather, a childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia and impressionable experience of the Muslim world. If the globe can’t vote next November, it can find itself in Obama. Troubled by the violent chasm between the West and the Islamic world? Obama seems to bridge it. Disturbed by the gulf between…