James Wolcott, on Shelby Steele's "why Obama can't win" book:
Obama not only could win, he did win, and he won big, winning a majority of the popular vote, flipping red states blue, and thrilling the world. He flew high, and kept flying, and the thesis of your book was wrong, arrogant and wrong. As wrong as the editor who rejected Poe's "The Raven" for publication. As wrong as Dow 36,000. As wrong as Dick Morris is with every book he publishes. So when you write a ponderous thumbsucker about the election for the LA Times, the first thing you should do is come clean, be a mensch, own up, and perform a small act of contrition, conceding your jumbo-sized error of judgment. Instead, you play pontiff and pretend as if what happened this Tuesday conforms with your panoramic perception of race relationsCome on, no one can possibly be more consistently wrong than Dick "Condi vs. Hillary: the Next Great Presidential Race" Morris. Posted by Stephen Silver at November 7, 2008 04:59 PM