Oozing in condescension and shoveling out the stereotypes, Kathleen Parker proclaims:

The traditional GOP is getting younger and less pale. Rubio, a Tea Party favorite who is challenging Florida Gov. Charlie Crist for the U.S. Senate, may be the Republican Party’s Barack Obama.

You see, they are alike because they are both non-white. Just like one another. Except that one speaks in short, comprehensible declarative statements about the greatness of America, and the other talks in vapid phrases, apologizing for America’s ills. And except that one is a dogged advocate of the free market and a robust response to the war against Islamic fundamentalists, and the other isn’t. And except that one inveighed against an inanely crafted pork-a-thon, and the other is still trying to convince us it saved us from an even worse depression. And then one said he’s not prematurely running for president, and the other unfortunately did.

In fact, Marco Rubio and Barack Obama are nothing alike except for their relative youth and non-whiteness. But that’s enough for the Parker. She actually seems to like Rubio and spends the rest of her column touting his many fine qualities, but the reflective insistence on defining him by race and age and through the prism of Obamaism tells us much about Parker and nothing about Rubio. (To be fair, Parker is also obsessed with gender, so it’s not only race that ensnares her.) At least among the punditocracy, it seems we have not yet reached that post-racial nirvana.