Was he watching Gentle Ben re-runs?

It is a bit unnerving when I agree entirely with Maureen Dowd: “But he does not want the ‘take’ on him to become that he’s so tightly wrapped, overcalculated and circumspect that he can’t even allow anyone to make jokes about him, and that his supporters are so evangelical and eager for a champion to rescue America that their response to any razzing is a sanctimonious: Don’t mess with our messiah.”

Speaking of over-active response teams, is Barack Obama’s failure to hold a subcommittee hearing really what the McCain team wants voters to focus on? As any veteran C-SPAN watcher knows, most of these ordeals are comical or useless, or both.

George W. Bush is still running laps around Congress in popularity.

This is disappointing news. TV news, nothing to write home about at the beginning of the year, was already heading downhill with the the loss of Tony Snow and Tim Russert.

From overseas comes word that the Brits don’t much like Obama’s Iraq stance: “Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, made plain his distaste for withdrawal timetables from Iraq, saying that they do ‘not serve any of us’.” Making friends is harder than it seems.

Democrats who worried that Obama was losing his cross-racial appeal have something new to fret about. Can he win with just 30% of the white vote? Well, it’s a good thing he has all those excited young voters. Oh, maybe not as many.