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Maybe Obama isn’t so bad after all

I’ve done a bit of bitching about Obama before, and taking criticism because of it. In short, I’ll say that Kucinich is the man, but completely hopeless, and I think Edwards would also make a good candidate. But he’s also hopeless. Gore isn’t coming back, and that leaves us with Obama. (Oh, right, and Hillary. Can we talk about that later?)

Somewhat recently I stumbled across an article that documents in slice-of-life fashion just how erudite Obama is.

No presidential candidate in history — not the polymath Thomas Jefferson, not the orator William Jennings Bryan, not the egghead Adlai Stevenson — has ever uttered a sentence like this: “My mother was an anthropologist [and] the Margaret Mead reference I’m always hip to.”

I found that pretty funny. It’s so calculatedly casual that it wins me over. The guy’s obviously very bright and extremely well-spoken, but neither of those things is fun without a gloss of humor to round out the package.

On that subject, Huckabee is doing a damn good job advertising his sense of humor, as he’s appeared on The Colbert Report three or four times already, and recently The Daily Show, too. Even though he’s cooked squirrel in a popcorn popper, the guy is charismatic, and isn’t afraid to showcase his ability to toss jokes back and forth with and it’s doing him well.

But I’ve heard nothing out of him to indicate that he’s hip to Margaret Mead.