A bunch of catch-up items:

* I’ve got another longish essay on Obama’s vanity. I’ll stop writing these pieces when he stops giving me material.

* Galley Friend Mike Russell has a long, angry, awesome defense of David Foster Wallace.

* President Obama wants to remind Americans that just because they elected him president three years ago, they’re not off the hook for being a bunch of racists yet.

* The history of the Nature Boy’s legal and financial problems is yet another depressing chapter in the story that is professional wrestling. Styling and profiling have their costs.

* That over-under we had going on when Perry would overtake Romney in the RCP average was a sucker’s line. Perry passed Romney on 8/24. The next question is, when does Perry open up a double-digit lead? Before, or after, Ron Paul passes Romney? We’ll have more–lots more–on Mitt Romney . . . coming up next!

As pointless as Twitter is for private use, it’s commercial uses are pretty interesting. For instance, if you’re a coffee shop you can push out alerts that you’re having a sale on baked treats at 2:00 pm. Twitter is basically an advertising pipeline that (1) you don’t have to pay for, and (2) your customers ask to be included in. Win-win!

Since presidential campaigns are essentially really big, abstract sales operations, it makes sense that they use Twitter, too. Again, you can see lots of interesting uses: fundraising, alerts on candidate appearances, rapid response.

But it strikes me that having a candidate use Twitter to attack his opponent is–at least at the presidential level–a really, really bad idea.

There’s a story out this morning about Mitt Romney trying to elevate himself (surprise!) by having pizza sent to Obama’s campaign HQ. Yes, Mitt, we get it–you’re such a front-runner that it’s like you’re already going mano-a-mano in the general election and all the other Republican are just minor side-shows. But buried in the story is a nugget that reflects even worse on Tim Pawlenty:

Presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty also took a swipe at Obama today with this tweet:  “@barackobama sorry to interrupt the European pub crawl, but what was your Medicare plan?”

Ugh. Presidents–even today in the internet/Facebook/Twitter age–act presidential. You know what presidents don’t do? They don’t attack their rivals with the kind of drive-by snark you see on gossip sites and blogs. I’m all for Tim Pawlenty (or anyone else–even Mitt Romney!) savaging Obama at every opportunity by pointing out the administration’s incoherent foreign policy, the continuing housing disaster, rising inflation, awful unemployment numbers, and total disconnect from America. Pawlenty could have simply Twit-picked these two pictures from Tuesday and asked if the president would come back to look after the people of Joplin:

But the low-rent Twitter flame should be beneath anyone who aspires to the White House.

One of the most unattractive qualities in writers is the impulse to believe you’re the source of all ideas. You see this all the time, especially with bloggers who begin posts by archly noting “As I wrote last month . . .” before linking to something someone else has written that’s vaguely similar.

I try, as best I can, to check that impulse in myself because, the truth is, there’s very little that’s really new under the sun.

All of that said, last year I wrote a story about Barack Obama’s narcissism for The Weekly Standard, “American Narcissus”:

Last night, I came across an add for a book from St. Augustine’s by a fellow named George J. Marlin. It’s called Narcissist Nation:

I’m sure the book is great.

Galley Friend Chris Caldwell has an incisive review of David Remnick’s Obama book over at the always excellent Claremont Review of Books. It’s really not to be missed. The thrust of Caldwell’s essay is examining how (and why) Obama self-consciously built a black identity for himself. You will not often see this subject discussed. Samples:

As an American boy growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, Obama was in a confusing position. He looked black, but he didn’t know any blacks. He was descended from slave owners but not from slaves. Most disorientingly, Hawaii—where he was brought up by his white grandparents—lacked even those lingering remnants of racism, the exposure and expunging of which was, by the 1970s, the main preoccupation of the burgeoning establishment that had grown out of the civil rights movement.

In a way that strikes Remnick as both “touching” and “awkward,” Obama began “giving himself instruction on how to be black.” . . .

Obama is, racially speaking, a self-made man. If there were a citizenship examination for blackness, he’d have passed it. Remnick hints that Ann Dunham’s idealization of black people may have rubbed off on Obama, and that it may be responsible for the immodesty that is his besetting flaw. Remnick sees that blackness can, in some circumstances, be deployed to great effect on the political stage—and that the 2008 presidential election was one of those circumstances. . . .

At root, though, Remnick is without a drop of cynicism as to why Obama, as both a youth and a middle-aged man, might consider a confident blackness of a politicized kind to be something worthy of aspiring to. The struggle for racial equality appears in these pages as a moral lodestar, the only real litmus test of contemporary political morality. Mastering the history and rhetoric of civil rights, reading the rest of American history through it, rendering one’s personality acceptable to those who speak in its name—to Remnick, all of this is so self-evidently admirable as to need no explanation.

I won’t tease you with more. Go read the whole thing.

Over at the Standard.

Over at the Standard I’ve got a medium-sized piece on President Obama’s vanity. There’s nothing really new in–it’s mostly a compendium of stuff we’ve all seen for the last two years, but tied together and in one place. Mind you, it’s an incomplete list. And the catalogue keeps growing.

Mentioning the piece, Scott Johnson adds a few bits, my favorite being that Obama’s vanity “almost disposes of the speculation that Obama is a Muslim. The man can’t be a Muslim; he worships himself.” Scott also notes a line from Obama in India about the Mahatma, MLK, and, well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. But here’s Scott: “Obama gives us history in the form of an arc bending inevitably toward himself.”

The Belmont Club’s Richard Fernandez also adds a much more literate and philosophical riff, contrasting Obama’s sense of self with that of Churchill, who was never bashful about his own merits:

Both men saw themselves as agents of greatness. Where they differed was where they ascribed its source.  That and the fact that Lincoln and Churchill have already achieved that mantle of greatness which Obama so confidently believes is his. In the case of Lincoln and Churchill their presentiments are confirmed by the fact that they fulfilled them. They have already walked the walk. And now we see the talk was true. In the president’s case his claims have not yet been confirmed by events. . . .

It may be that his presentiment will prove true, though perhaps he  should have waited until those events actually took place before claiming the due. But that would have been for lesser men, for minds less certain of their powers. And the central point of Jonathan Last’s entire essay was that for Barack Obama, destiny shone so clearly before him that he could touch it and hold it in his hand.  And therein lies the danger. For if fate can promise, it can also betray.  The three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth knew that some things should only be reckoned in the end.

And the great Jennifer Rubin teases out some of the implications of Obama’s vanity-driven administration:

the colossal failure of his international endeavors, specifically his Muslim Outreach, is traceable to the faulty notion that one can construct a nation’s foreign policy based on the persona of its president. It sounds daft — why would the Israelis and Palestinian simply reach a deal because Obama has arrived on the scene? Why would the mullahs be enticed to curb their nuclear and hegemonic ambitions because he allegedly ”understands” the Muslim World? The Ego has made hash out of foreign policy because he believes, as the saying goes, that the world revolves around him. He can’t imagine that rivals, foes, and allies are immune to his charms.

Among the anecdotes I left out was a scene I witnessed at an Obama campaign rally before the Nevada caucus in 2008. Michelle Obama was introducing her husband to a crowded school cafetorium (?) and she said made a very concerted point of the following: “Barack is one of the smartest men we will see in our lifetime.”

Now look, many (most?) wives have idealized visions of their husbands. This is not a bad thing. On the contrary, it’s quite good. And perhaps even necessary for the survival of the species. But it’s one thing to think that your spouse is better looking, or more charming, or more intelligent than he really is. And it’s another to insist–to a room full of people–that he’s a Stephen Hawking-level genius. Even if we were to stipulate that Barack Obama is really, really, really smart–maybe the smartest guy ever in American politics (which, by the by, is almost certainly not true), you could walk into the cafeteria at MIT right now, swing a bat, and knock over three people who have 20 IQ points on him.

Exit question: The piece came out online Saturday morning. What’s the over-under on the “uppity” charge? Tuesday?

PS: I may update this thread through the day.

Update 7:02: A reader passes along this fantastic bit from a 2004 Ryan Lizza profile of Obama in the Atlantic:

I couldn’t help noticing, when we sat down to talk in the dilapidated storefront that houses his Springfield campaign headquarters, that the blue-pen drawing he’d doodled on his newspaper during fundraising calls was a portrait of himself.