The Dish

The meme that she could have won if she’d done the white blue-collar schtick earlier is belied by a simple point: John Edwards had that covered.

A fascinating interview with my colleague, Jeffrey Goldberg:

Obama and I spoke over the weekend about Hamas, about Jimmy Carter, and about the future of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. He seemed eager to talk about his ties to the Jewish community, and about the influence Jews have had on his life. Among other things, he told me that he learned the art of moral anguish from Jews. We spoke as well about my Atlantic cover story on Israel’s future. He mentioned his interest in the opinions of the writer David Grossman, who is featured in the article. “I remember reading The Yellow Wind when it came out, and reading about Grossman now is powerful, painful stuff.” And, speaking in a kind of code Jews readily understand, Obama also made sure to mention that he was fond of the writer Leon Uris, the author of Exodus.

“I remember reading The Yellow Wind when it came out." No wonder he’s having trouble in some parts of Kentucky.

If you missed it:

Take a bow, Charles Murray:

What accounts for the decline of ideologically mixed localities? Bill Bishop, a journalist, and Robert Cushing, a sociologist, who have studied this issue, stress that the age of “white flight” to the suburbs is over. Instead, during the past two decades, many whites have moved to one group of cities and many blacks to another. Meanwhile, young people have deserted rural and older manufacturing areas for cities like Austin and Portland. Places with higher densities of college graduates attract even more, so that the gap between such communities and less-educated areas widens further. Zones of high education, in turn, produce more innovation and enjoy higher incomes, generating communities dominated by upper-middle-class tastes. Lower-educated regions, by contrast, tend to be more family-oriented and more faithful to traditional authority.

The Bell Curve‘s fear of an increasingly divided and stratified society – based on intelligence and education – keeps coming closer to reality.

Carrboro, North Carolina, 7.57 pm.

A glimpse to make a theocon’s blood run cold:

So I’m sitting at the kitchen table around 1:30 when my 16 year old daughter finally gets up. I’m reading the Times with a Starbucks’ latte on the table along with the remaining two petite vanilla scones and my MacBook is blaring Castro’s "Over the Rainbow". I’m a single dad and we have a very honest relationship and I should note she’s an officer in her high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance.

She hits the mute on the Mac and says "Dad, you know that if you wanted to date men it would be OK with me". She put the volume back on and asked me to make french toast while she took her shower.

Television got a lot more gay-inclusive in the last month or so as well.

"I heard that Obama is a Muslim and his wife’s an atheist," – Leonard Simpson, a West Virginia Democrat. Then this:

Josh Fry, a 24-year-old ambulance driver from Williamson, insisted he was not racist but said he would feel more comfortable with Mr McCain, the 71-year-old Vietnam war hero, in the White House. "I want someone who is a full-blooded American as president," he said.

Meanwhile, I get an email like this:

This guy is a muslim trying to take over religion, rights, gunns, and lastly our country.

Does anyone remember 911. He’s cunning and a racists. He is connected with dirty money and bad connections in the rest of the world.

Obama’s got his work cut out with these people when he gets the nomination. A summer of engaging and listening with rural non-college educated white folk would help – why not hold a series of town hall meetings in rural America? I don’t think any region should be written off by any candidate, especially if the major objections seem racial or religious.

(Photo: Jeff Swensen/Getty.)

From Ezra Klein’s article on the future of reading:

The true promise of the Kindle, and its inevitable descendants, is in creating a product that goes where the book cannot. Printed text is fundamentally limited. Once on the page, nothing more can be done with it. With digital text, everything is a draft, to be edited, altered, broadened, remixed, and redirected. As better conveyors of electronic text are developed, the big question is how content itself will change to take advantage of the new opportunities.

Rebutting the myths.

I’m so proud of the Republican nominee. Whatever happens in this campaign, he has single-handedly wrested the GOP from its pro-torture position, which is a huge, by no means inevitable, advance over Bush-Cheney. Yes, he has made a few compromises that were disappointing – and more disappointing for those of us who admire him. But he took on the issue when it could have hurt him badly – against demagogues like Giuliani and say-anything opportunists like Romney – and stood up for American and Western values. Because of McCain, we now know that the next president, unlike the current one, will not be a war criminal. That’s an immensely important part of winning the propaganda and intelligence war against terrorism. We get better, more reliable intelligence and we regain the moral highground from the Islamists (however maddening it is to think we lost it).

I am still open to McCain’s arguments for the presidency, and want to listen carefully to the Obama-McCain debate in the coming weeks and months. But McCain’s imperfect but still vital leadership on this core, fundamental question – the most fundamental question in our politics for the past seven years – will not be forgotten by future generations, whatever happens in November. I’m grateful.