Obamaweek, cont.

Wow. Give this piece a read. At least the good folks at Newsweek were honest about it this time, entitling Evan Thomas’s piece “A Memo to Senator Obama.” In it, they give him advice–straight up advice, no real news–on how to defuse the issue or race in the campaign.

Now, as I’ve written before, I’m not one to criticize the media for being overtly liberal.* Organs like Newsweek and Time are usually straight down the middle. But this article reads like an editorial for the New Republic. “It’s also important for you not to play the race card yourself,” Newsweek tells the good senator. “You can’t imply, or be seen to imply, that anyone who criticizes you is a racist, closeted or otherwise. … Whites resent being accused of racism for remarks they regard as innocent or innocuous. It’s hard to think of what would turn off whites quicker than playing the thin-skinned victim. One of the strengths of your campaign has been to get past the old-style politics practiced by the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and other ‘race men’ who use skin color as a political tool.”

Combine that with the beatific cover image (one that would fit in quite nicely with Jonathan V. Last’s excellent piece on Obama iconography from the Weekly Standard a few weeks back) and it becomes pretty clear which way Newsweek wants this election to go. Such nakedly partisan cheerleading is, simply put, embarrassing.

*And in the same issue of Newsweek I’m getting so worked up about, Michael Isikoff has a nice little article on Obama strategist David Axelrod’s more questionable lobbying practices–a piece that, unfortunately, doesn’t go nearly far enough into Axelrod’s history. The non-puff Axelrod profile is something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. He is by every account a genius strategist, but he made his bones in the swamp that is Chicago politics, and there have to be skeletons lurking somewhere in that closet. Isikoff’s 300 words are only the tip of the iceberg, I’m sure…