If you're not aware of who he is, Steve Sailer is a conservative, Academically-racist writer for a variety of conservative publications (Think lesser versions of the National Review, such as American Conservative). Most of his writing, to one degree or another, focuses on race and IQ. In a recent column for example, he argued that blacks prefer basketball to golf because it is less cognitively demanding. It could just be me and my inability to parse through all that he writes, but his more controversial articles seem to not turn up when I search for them months later. Perhaps he thinks better of it and takes them down?
Anyway, as you can imagine, Sailer has been having a field day writing about the presumptive Democrat nominee, Barack Obama. In particular, he pores over Obama's first book, the racially-charged memoir Dreams From My Father, in nearly obesessive detail. The quotes and synopses are so extensive it's a good way to read Obama's story for free, actually.
In the past few months he has come at Obama in his pondering, slow to the point way from almost every conceivable angle, save actual analysis of his policies. I can't be bothered to search through it and link to it all right now, but here's a fairly typical recent column. I've tuned in to his work in bemused curiousity off and on since college, but never seen him so fixated on a single person, yet so at a loss to articulate his concerns. I've begun to get a little worried about him, and thought I'd write him something.
Steve-
While you've been mining Dreams from my Father for a while, the focus of your criticisms seems to have shifted somewhat.
In the past, the implication seemed to be that underneath the veneer, Obama was essentially an angry black man, and that if put in a position of power, he would betray the whites he reached out to by "letting the black people do whatever they wanted".
Now, perhaps sensing that this kind of angle doesn't work quite as well in America as it used to, or just by fear of the "scarlet R" (as you phrase it), you've shifted to using the book as a testament to Obama's underlying emotional instability, as if it reveals him to be a person of dangerously strong mood swings, liable to crack under pressure.
I doubt this will work for you, or anyone you care to pass your ideas on to. First of all, Obama has made it clear that while he still stands by the overall message of the book, and is well aware that it will be mined for political reasons by people such as yourself, the voice is that of a much younger man, and no longer his. This may be difficult for you to understand, but many might well see his willingness both to deal with those important and charged issues of race in America as a young man and apparently move past them as an adult a sign of maturity, not weakness.
Second, given the events of the past few months, you'll have a hard time convincing anyone that Obama is prone to emotional swings. He has suffered several scandals recently, any one of which would have finished off a lesser man. Throughout it all, he has been unflappable, and as May 6th has shown us, unscathed. Even FOX's Chris Wallace, drilling him with the toughest questions Rove could muster, could not raise his ire or pin him into a vulnerable position.
In a way, its reassuring to see people like yourself grab at these disparate, occasionally contradicting narratives in attempts to frame Obama negatively. He is both an empty suit, and a liberal with bold, dangerous ideas. Both a teflon politician who has mastered the art of skillfully saying nothing, and an angry black liable to hurt America with profoundly radical thinking. Both a snobbish elitist and drug-using, basketball-loving minority. Both a hippy fantasizer that believes everyone can just get along, and, in the opinion of a National Review columnist, a man who shows a profoundly paranoid "us vs. them" mentality. But even with all that has been written, you have yet to find your silver bullet. And worse still, contradicted by what came before, each new tack seems less convincing and on the mark than the last.
Its grabbing at straws. It shows you don't really understand what you're up against, or just how formidable an opponent he really is. While I wasn't so sure 6 months ago, I'm beginning to suspect he will make short work of you and people like you this year.
