...is that Ryan Lizza's article is a Herculean feat of reporting. If you haven't read it, read it now. Here is one of the many, many great images Lizza give us of our next potential president, as he beefs with a fellow state legislator in Illinois:
Obama voted—a parliamentary error, Obama says—to block funding for a child-welfare facility in Hendon’s district. Hendon rose and criticized Obama for the vote. The two men became embroiled in a yelling match on the Senate floor that looked as if it might become physical; they were separated by Courtney Nottage, then the chief of staff for Emil Jones. Nottage led Obama off the floor to a room that legislators used to make telephone calls. “It looked like two men that were having a serious disagreement and they had walked up to one another really close,” Nottage told me. “I didn’t think anything good could come of that.”
Hendon told me, “He’s the one that got mad, because he said I embarrassed him on the Senate floor. That’s when he came over to my desk.” Before Nottage broke them up, Obama, who had learned to box from his Indonesian stepfather, supposedly told Hendon, “I’m going to kick your ass!” Hendon said, “He said something like that.”
Hmmm. Sounds like a black president to me.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
I am surprised you are only picking up on it now.
So let me explain it to you. The Ryan Lizza piece IS the reason why Obama made a fuss about the cover.
Not that the cover was not offensive but there was no reason to create such a heavy brouhaha which would propagate the cover more widely than it would have ... unless you wanted liberals to get riled up at the New Yorker, therefore distracting them from that piece - brilliant but not completely positive about Obama's image, which we know he is very attached to.
Posted by benjamin | July 20, 2008 10:22 AM