For those of you keeping score, the third most damaging thing to happen to Obama’s reelect prospects this week was the undertones of the NYT Drew Westin story suggesting that Obama isn’t as smart as we thought coupled with the overtones of Bret Stephens’s WSJ piece this morning. Why are these two data points dangerous for Obama? Because the end logic of the narrative they create leads to the Third Rail of his presidency: affirmative action.

I’m not sure how I’d defuse this if I was David Axlerod. My guess is that I’d go pretty much what they’ve done from the beginning: Trust that America is too racially sensitive to allow itself to even contemplate having those thoughts. (At least until December 2012.)

Watching Obama try to talk up the American economy as the Dow tanked 635 points was pretty hysterical–because it was so entirely predictable.

Creigh Deeds.

Martha Coakley.

Jon Corzine.

The Chicago Olympics.

The Copenhagen Climate talks.

The 2010 House Democrats.

And now we can add America’s 401K accounts to the list of items our president’s magnificent oratory has worked its magic on.

WRM has a very carefully constructed piece up about race in America. It’s a good essay and I hope it’s not reductionist to sum it up as saying something like this: There’s lots of anti-white violence being committed by young black people this summer and it may (or may not) mean something larger, but it risks a backlash from white America.

Again, that’s just a crude summary and WRM is worth reading in full.

One data point I’d very much like to see him incorporate into his thesis is Obama’s share of the white vote in 2008, both in the primaries and in the general election. In the general election, his share of the white vote in a given district corresponded negatively with black population. Which is to say, the more black voters in a district, the lower Obama’s percentage of the white vote. The data on this for the general election was put together by Todd Donovan at Western Washington University.

I suppose the natural explanation for this would be the endemic racism of McCain voters. Except that this was pretty much the pattern we saw with purely Democratic electorates in the primaries. Obama would clean up among whites in areas where there were no black voters, but lose whites in racially mixed areas. I haven’t seen an academic work-up on this (though one may be out there), but it was the elephant in the room during the ’08 primary season. Totally unmentionable.

I’m not sure what it means. It’s entirely possible that it means nothing at all–that the differences are explicable by other cross-tabs (say, that the voters in all-white Democratic precincts tended to be young voters, Ph.D. voters, and wealthy voters–groups Obama did great with everywhere).

But it seems interesting enough to pick up and at least examine a bit. I’d love to know what Prof. Mead makes of it.

Wait–so Christopher Nolan directs in a blue blazer and khakis?

That is awesome.

The New York Times publishes a lot of embarrassing stuff in its opinion sections these days. By which I do not mean “stuff I do not politically agree with”–I mean writing so lazy and/or foolish that both the authors and editors should be embarrassed by it.

But this giant piece by Drew Westin sets a new standard:

As a practicing psychologist with more than 25 years of experience, I will resist the temptation to diagnose at a distance, but as a scientist and strategic consultant I will venture some hypotheses.

He’s not just a practicing psychologist. He’s not just a strategic consultant. Drew Westin is a scientist!

That’s just a fact. Science.

James Taranto does terrible, unspeakable things to Jacob Weisberg. Someone should have stopped this fight:

To Weisberg, the failures of the Obama administration prove not only that Republicans are “intellectual primitives” but that you are stupid: Among the “sobering lessons” that “we” have “learned,” he writes, is “that there’s no point trying to explain complicated matters to the American people.”

The FT, by the way, is a London-based newspaper with a far-flung world-wide circulation (though it is smaller than The Wall Street Journal’s by an order of magnitude). So when Weisberg says you’re stupid, he isn’t exactly saying it to your face. Remember when dissent was the highest form of patriotism? We suppose the definitions are flexible here. Bad-mouthing the American people–for dissenting!–is the highest form of patriotism, at least this week.

Weisberg criticizes Obama, too, but only in a backhanded way. “The president has tried reasonableness and he has failed,” Weisberg sobs. “A Congress dominated by mindless cannibals is now feasting on a supine president.” (News you can use: Always sleep on your side and you’ll wake up uneaten.)

This all reminded us of another Weisberg piece, published in 2008. Back then, he was much more enthusiastic about the “handsome, brilliant, and cool” Sen. Obama, whose policies, Weisberg claimed, even those who disagreed with them were obliged to acknowledge constituted “serious attempts to deal with the biggest issues we face.”

But Weisberg’s attitude toward the American people, if not as openly hostile as it is today, was characterized by a deep suspicion. Obama was not doing as well in the polls as Weisberg thought he should have been, given the all-around awesomeness of the junior senator from Illinois. If Obama lost to John McCain, it could mean only one thing: America was irredeemably racist. (As we noted at the time, in reaching this conclusion Weisberg committed a rookie error of logic, which makes today’s pompous pronouncements about “science” all the more hilarious.)

Weisberg’s latest amounts to a lament for democracy. Even if the American people aren’t as racist as he suspected you were back in 2008, you aren’t up to the challenge of being governed by the handsome, brilliant and cool Barack Obama.

And then he gets around to taking after Obama. Cue the Super Mario Bros. magic star music.

Over at the Standard my piece “Faked in China” is up.

You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise . . .

This story about Rick Perry being a C (and D) student at Texas A&M is pretty great.

That is, it’s great because it means that if Perry wins, it will be completely in bounds for his surrogates to ask–over and over and over, if necessary–for President Obama’s college and law school transcripts. In fact, Perry should preemptively release his SATs, since Obama’s SAT and LSAT scores are even more interesting.