Courtesy MR, Keith Hennessey on The Roles of the President's White House economic advisors. Tyler Cowen is right to say: to excerpt would be to diminish the impact. Read the whole thing.

the hero is a man who becomes

As a young man, Obama searched for clues to his own identity by very purposefully reading his way through WEB Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Malcolm X. He has also mentioned texts by Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, Martin Delany and a range of novelists – in particular, Toni Morrison. In fact, reading as a way of becoming is a feature of African-American autobiography, as it is of so many outsider-memoirists of any ethnicity: Malcolm X, for one, provides an extended account of his self-education.

Extract from David Remnick's biography of Obama, The Bridge, in today's Guardian

Aloha no!

TAR ART RAT talks back to our next Prez. (Luckily I was not on this mailing list.)

any fan of Dr Seuss...

Kevin Drum wonders why Clinton and Obama supporters get so worked up at each other. Any fan of Dr. Seuss will know that policy similarity hardly matters. The two candidates represent two diametrically opposed portraits of the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Should we expect beauty, grace and universality, or should we derive our feel-good sentiments about politics from righteousness, confrontation, and sheer dogged persistence and feelings of ultimate desert? Given his desire for partisan confrontation, Paul Krugman is quite consistent in his skepticism about Barack Obama. The far more conservative but also far more aestheticized Andrew Sullivan is quite consistent in liking and indeed at times almost loving Obama. There really is a lot at stake in the Democratic primary; it's our current sense of the aesthetic, and of desert, that drives what our substantive policy views will be twenty or thirty years from now. Given the high turnout (never an accident), in an odd way there may be more at stake in the Democratic primary than there would be in a Clinton vs. McCain general election.



Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution on you know what.