What is up with Irish pundits and Barack Obama?

Since Super Tuesday we’ve had more than a few appearances on Irish radio and TV from Niall O’Dowd, the Irish-born publisher of the NY-based Irish Voice, explaining - quite bluntly - that a black man simply can’t win an American presidential election.

Today’s Indo brings us two more examples of some of the less-well-thought-out critiques of the idea of an Obama presidency.

Kevin Myers, on the facing page, in a column that may do for his reputation on race what the “bastards” column did for him with single mums, decides he’s got standing to deny Obama’s identity as a black man: “it would be nice to see a coloured man in the White House — though whatever he is, he’s not black: he is actually what used to be called ‘mulatto’.”

Myers does try the patience of any reader of goodwill with these sort of childish forays into race-baiting, particularly considering how gratuitous the racial parsing was in context of the rest of the piece. Why would any Irish pundit feel the need to go there?

Inasmuch as a senior executive of an Irish publication, objecting to my insistence on a point of fact, once sneered that he wasn’t “some black from Alabama” who could be spoken to in that way, I can’t help but wonder if an unhealthy proportion of Irish meeja types of a certain age feel they have some special permission to mine that particular vein of American racial history.

(You don’t. It makes you small. You ought to stop.)

But I digress. The remainder of Myers’ screed is dedicated to the proposition that an Obama presidency overseeing a withdrawal from Iraq would be a betrayal of Western Civilisation. Worse than Vietnam (leaving Vietnam, that is). Worse than leaving Europe to the Nazis. (Yup, he goes there too.) That Myers tries to hide the ugliness and mendacity of his argument behind the courage and honour of US Marines and soldiers is an abomination.

If I ever needed reassurance that I’m on the right side of this election, Myers has today given me a supply that will last through 2012 at least.

Outside of the Myers asylum is David McWilliams, who I know a little and like a lot and has the misfortune of sharing a page with Myers, locates “Obamamania” in an imagined global pendulum swing to the left: “This change, put most simply, is the swing to the left in socioeconomic policy that has already begun, and that is likely to gather speed quickly, accelerated by the worldwide downturn.”

Not just the left, but the Left. In a few paragraphs he lumps Obama in with Karl Marx and Fidel Castro, prompting the editorial cartoonist to depict Obama painting over “West” with “Left” in the title card of The West Wing.

So why is Obama drawing support from people like me? Lifelong Republicans and independents who think an Obama presidency is our best hope to make it out of the trap America finds itself in?

McWilliams, unfortunately, has got it seriously wrong - though it’s important to stress his error isn’t in the same ballpark, the same league, or even the same f*cking sport as Myers’. Nonetheless, McWilliams’ piece is a disappointment. For one thing, it’s been a pretty easy-to-find fact for some time now that the Obama domestic policy shop comes out of the faculty of that noted nest of left-wing bomb-throwers, the economics department of the University of Chicago. Austan Goolsbee, a protege of sorts of the behavioural economics guru Richard Thaler, is Obama’s guy on economics who shares an office with Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod. A schoolmate of Dublin-born foreign policy adviser Samantha Power, it turns out. Noam Scheiber at The New Republic has a great piece on the policy shop focused on Goolsbee, who himself is a fan of New York Times columnist David Brooks and is thought of highly by that other notorious leftie, George Will.

The Irish commentariat - probably because it has been drunk on the Clinton Kool-aid lo these many years - really ought to wise up on Obama. Almost to a newspaper, to a radio programme, to a pundit - the analysis, so far, has ranged from embarassing to, in Myers’ case, downright shameful.