Beanpole-gate

Hillary may be campaigning for Barack this week, but her spouse still hasn't, to use the vernacular, gotten over it.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a politician muster less enthusiasm than when ABC's Kate Snow asked Bill Clinton whether Barack Obama was ready to be president.

There are a thousand things the former president could have said that sounded respectful toward his party's presumptive nominee without a full-throated endorsement. Instead, he said this:

"I think everybody's got a right to run for president who qualifies under the Constitution . . . You can argue that nobody is ready to be president. I certainly learned a lot about the job in the first year." Clinton went on to say that Obama can "inspire and motivate people" and is "smart as a whip, so there's nothing he can't learn." But I found myself saying wow. He is not going to lift a rhetorical finger for the guy who beat his wife. Saying someone has a constitutional right to run is a long way from saying that person should be president.

Every day seems to bring a new debate about Obama's character, as opposed to, say, his energy plan. This is understandable, as Obama himself has said, when someone is new to the national scene, but it's also playing on Republican turf. Conservatives seem to be leading the who is he, really? charge. You know: Is he Paris Hilton or JFK in Berlin? And it's just possible that the election may turn on whether the freshman senator can make voters comfortable with him, or at least those working-class voters who so far have resisted his charms.

This psychological excavation can be silly at times, as in the WSJ feature that questioned whether Obama is too skinny to win the Oval Office. Slate's Tim Noah dines out on the piece by reporter Amy Chozick:

"Most Americans, Chozick points out, aren't skinny. Fully 66 percent of all citizens who've reached voting age are overweight, and 32 percent are obese. To be thin is to be different physically. Not that there's anything wrong, mind you, with being a skinny person. But would you want your sister to marry one? Would you want a whole family of skinny people to move in next door? 'I won't vote for any beanpole guy,' an 'unnamed Clinton supporter' wrote on a Yahoo politics message board. My point is that any discussion of Obama's 'skinniness' and its impact on the typical American voter can't avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race . . .

"Are Obama's eating habits a political liability? The question may be trivial, but at least it's not offensive. The only real objection you can make there is that Chozick's litany of healthy foodstuffs favored by Obama (he 'snacks on MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and drinks Black Forest Berry Honest Tea, a healthy organic brew') echoes a similar litany from the day before by John McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis. ('Only celebrities like Barack Obama . . . demand MET-RX chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew--Black Forest Berry Honest Tea' . . . )."

I don't see a racial aspect at all, and Noah quotes Chozick as saying it never even occurred to her. But the No More Mister Nice Blog has uncovered a problem with the piece, as picked up by Gawker:

"Well, it turns out that 'beanpole quote' came from a sort-of jokey anonymous reply to a message board topic the Journal reporter herself created, and was the only remotely quotable line in that thread."

The correction:

" A Weekend Journal article Friday about Barack Obama's weight included a quote from a Yahoo bulletin board that was posted in response to a question from a Wall Street Journal reporter who initiated the discussion. The article should have disclosed that the reporter used the bulletin board to elicit the comment, 'I won't vote for any beanpole guy.'