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I know the DFW piece on McCain2000 is a big time commitment, but wanted to state again that it’s worth the effort. Not least because of “the Chris Duren Incident,” which is beautifully recounted by Wallace and then used as a fulcrum to make his larger point about our inability in the modern world to know when we’re being played. There’s an angle to everything. The younger generation knows and expects to be manipulated. One rational response is to opt out. Chris Duren was a teenager who had thrown all his energy behind McCain2000. He got a phone call from a push-poll group, presumably set up by Bush2000, saying some really nasty things about the man who once lived in a box. Young Chris was disillusioned. Or was that really the way things happened? Who knows?

Fast forward to 2008 and you have these kinds of reports popping up everywhere. Looks like these calls, which link Obama to Hamas, are going to Jews in Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

But lots of interesting stuff to point to, and perhaps even comment on if there’s time.

First, I just love these maps from a psych paper called “A Theory of the Emergence, Persistence, and Expression of Geographic Variation in Psychological Characteristics.” Dig the distinctions between the maps for “openness” and for “agreeableness,” then note NC’s profile. Mirrors.

Dare I get into the election stuff? Well, given that I’ve spent so much of my free time fixing and fixating on it, I might as well. I’m naively optimistic that Obama knows what he’s doing and is playing it cool and letting the incessant lies wash over him. The mainstream press is perhaps starting to point things out, though their predilection for “balanced” rather than “accurate” reportage means they roughly equate Obama’s selectivity with the facts about McCain to the other camp’s utter distortions of the records. Luckily, the ladies of the View didn’t hold themselves to that kind of absurd standard, resulting in McCain’s google-eyed guffaw when his air of self-importance got punctured by… Joy Behar? Yep.

This is a really, really important piece in Time about Obama not hitting back in part because he can’t afford to be seen as an angry black man.

Race is the elephant in the room of the 2008 campaign. In West Virginia’s primary, one out of every four Hillary Clinton voters actually admitted to pollsters that race was a factor in their vote; that may be an Appalachian outlier, but even in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio the figure was a troubling 1 in 10. It’s a tribute to America’s racial progress that a biracial man born before Jim Crow died could come this close to the presidency, but if you believe that contemporary America is color-blind, you probably also believe the Georgia Congressman who recently called Obama “uppity,” then claimed he had no idea it was a traditional Southern slur for blacks who didn’t know their place. (”Uppity” often modified the slur everyone knows is a slur.) Blacks are still known as “minorities” because this is still a majority white country, and Obama is just as anxious to avoid running as “the black candidate” as McCain is anxious to avoid running as “the Republican candidate.” (See photos of Barack Obama’s family tree here.)

This is something to keep in mind now that the Thomas Friedmans and Arianna Huffingtons of the world are imploring Obama to get angry, to shed his above-the-fray cool and fight back against the McCain campaign’s silly-season accusations that he’s a charismatic chauvinist who wants to teach kindergartners how to have sex. Over the past 18 months, Obama has been attacked as a naive novice, an empty suit, a tax-and-spend liberal, an arugula-grazing élitist and a corrupt ward heeler, but the only attacks that clearly stung him involved the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — attacks that portrayed him as an angry black man under the influence of an even angrier black man.

The Wright stuff is coming back. You know it is. Over under on number of days before the election: 12. Take a side.

Joe Klein has a good piece up here on McCain and the Republicans and the current financial crisis. We had six years of a Repub-controlled congress AND White House and regulations were correspondingly eroded or gutted. Now we find ourselves in this mess. There are lots of other factors, sure, but absent regulations the system runs amok.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide over the weekend. It’s worth taking a step back and reading this fabulous new journalism-inspired piece he did for Rolling Stone on McCain’s 2000 campaign. There are better passages than the one pulled below, but this is most timely:

There’s another thing John McCain always says. He makes sure he concludes every speech and THM with it, so the buses’ press hear it about too times this week. He always pauses a second for effect and then says: “I’m going to tell you something. I may have said some things here today that maybe you don’t agree with, and I might have said some things you hopefully do agree with. But I will always. Tell you. The truth.” This is McCain’s closer, his last big reverb on the six-string as it were. And the frenzied standing-O it always gets from his audience is something to see. But you have to wonder: why do these crowds from Detroit to Charleston cheer so wildly at a simple promise not to lie?

Well it’s obvious why. When McCain says it, the people are cheering not for him so much as for how good it feels to believe him.

Here’s what would feel good now: the realization of a belief that such brazen disavowal of a mantle so proudly worn will quite simply come back to bite in the ass, with nasty, festering consequences.

Football ref Sergei Schmolik, here helped off the field of play, was suspended for being drunk.

Name-stickered city council members and planning commissioners from across the southeast must visit downtown Greenville by the vanload. I’m guessing that in North Carolina alone there are 6-8 mid-sized cities alone that have sent teams. And Greenville seems quite pleased and proud to accomodate, trade in its expertise, show off its success: “Bring us your Winston-Salems, your Greensboros and Durhams, even your High Points and Fayettevilles,” the sidewalks scream.

Not sure how much of what is going on will translate. Greenville is a mountain town, for one thing. Asheville is a short drive, and the Blue Ridge mountains are easily visible. That’s an appeal that Fayetteville won’t soon match. There is also a pretty heavy corporate presence in this area which, for good or ill, means that there is a healthy economy and a steady stream of visitors (like me) to come downtown. And it helps to have a focal point in the form of the Reedy River, which makes things infinitely easier.

I was pleased to see that not all of the mountain mad had been purged from the streets in the grand civic scrubbing. They’re a special breed, come down from the hills to shuffle along in sandals that seem stitched by the one nut in their hamlet who acquired special skill in sanitorium. Not that Greenville has embraced them, but from my perspective in Chapel Hill they are far more interesting and less agenda-driven than common panhandlers.

Went to the former Johnny’s Sporting Goods’ this morning - our second visit in two weeks. Great place. The essence of Carrboro. To prove the point: My wife got out of the car to run in and see what was avail this morning, and a Carrboro legend we know, we’ll call him Abraham Pumpernickel, immediately said to her, “are you divorced?” She claims she pointed to the car and told him her husband and two sons were inside, but who knows - youth being a fleeting thing, the temptation to return to it can be intense.

Great analysis of it in the Guardian.

A decent recap from the US News site.

Finally, as was apparent in his remarks last night, Obama has to decide how to deal with this guy. Former Times reporter Todd Purdum, working anonymous sources, has produced a fascinating description of Bill’s “cavernous narcissism”.

Caught John McCain oratoraborating off the teleprompter a month ago and was shocked at how wooden and ineffective he was. Known as a a formidable confabulator, he must remain seated at all times — from the lectern he’s a disaster. As many pundits pointed out, the difference in his speech and Obama’s was profound.

Finally, Hillary Clinton did not come close to conceding things in her speech last night, despite the fact that she officially lost. This provoked a frank, and spot-on, assessment of the Clintons from Jeff Toobin, referring to their “deranged narcissism, which in turn drew incredulous doubletakes from the genteel David Gergen. Watch it here:

Update: The Times is reporting through its caucus blog that on Friday Clinton will suspend her campaign, endorse Obama and pledge to get behind him.

Good read from WSJ on how beat reporters with lousy broadband access missed Clinton’s assassination reference, while those at home with better connections caught it.