Cruel nature fated Mark Penn to resemble the tree-dwelling toad that the little girl in Pan's Labyrinth blew up. But shilling for Hillary made him invoke Barack Obama's teenage cocaine use while saying that the Clinton campaign does not intend to exploit it cynically. (See the YouTube below in which Joe Trippi, John Edward's adviser, calls Penn on this oleaginous tactic.) That's a fine example of trying to turn the Adlai Stevenson of the new millennium into a corrupting and untrustworthy nose hose.
But Bob Kerrey's mention of Obama's middle name — Hussein — hardly registers as a wink-and-nudge ploy to suggest the family dog gassed the Kurds at Halabja:
"I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim," Kerrey is quoted as saying. "There's a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal."
Obama supporters see this in the same light that they see Clinton strategist Mark Penn's remarks on MSNBC's Hardball (LINK) — that, as far as former Clinton campaign co-chair Billy Shaheen's remarks about Obama's youthful drug use, "the issue related to cocaine use is not something that the campaign was in any way raising."
Is it not self-evident, without going into Kerry's explanation, that his remark is only guilty of what Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi and every other wonderstruck reporter has been guilty of with respect to Obamamania: Selling the candidate on his mere genome?
Ah, but Kerrey has openly endorsed Hillary, so it's more complicated, right? Fortunately, Jake Tapper picked up the phone and asked the former senator what he meant:
Kerrey said he's spoken to Obama and his staffers and told them to "lead with it as a strength. There's this nonsense out there about him being a Muslim Manchurian candidate. He should do a commercial, look the camera straight in the eye, and say, 'My wife Michelle and I are Christians, but my father was a Muslim and my paternal grandfather was a Muslim, and that fact and my name means I can speak to a billion people around the world" who need to hear from the United States.
And everyone from Chicago's just a little Jewish, too.
Whatever I think of the sickly cultural condescension that distracts from Obama's policies and his intellectual honesty, there's no question that Kerrey was trying to be generous here without being backhanded. And if Obama's middle name is a liability, then why didn't he change it? Should he hide from it the rest of his life? Apart from being identified in the American popular consciousness with a genocidal dictator, in other parts of the world it's the appellation of the founding martyr of Shia Islam. Surely this adds a new dimension to Obama's "golden boy" aura.