From my "Obama's Mr. Wright" article in the April 7, 2008 issue of The American Conservative on why the press overlooked for so long the obvious fact that Barack Obama wasn't actually Tiger Woods:

"That Barack Obama is black offers the country a potential advantage: it makes his intellectual sophistication and verbal adeptness more acceptable to the bulk of voters, many of whom found Al Gore and his 1330 SAT score too inhumanly cerebral to trust. If Obama, a superb prose stylist, were white, he’d be written off as an effete intellectual. But white voters are hungry for a well-educated role model for blacks. And blacks see the preppie from paradise’s membership in Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ as evidence that he’s keepin’ it real."

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