Democratic Senator Joseph Biden started his biddin’ for the White House with a bang, by shooting himself in the foot as he put it in his mouth. On February 1, after announcing his candidacy, he dished on some of his Democratic competition, but prefaced his criticism of Barack Obama by *ahem* praising him as, “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” If one listened correctly, one could hear the sound of liberals and conservatives coming together and overcoming their differences by slapping their foreheads in incredulous unison.

The media zeroed in on the most egregious adjective, “clean,” and sent Biden into apology overdrive, and into the annals of history as having the shortest run for the presidency ever. Then the New York Times published a piece focusing on Biden’s use of the word “articulate” and how it, commonly applied to basically any African American public figure who doesn’t rap, is seen as unintentionally offensive by many blacks. That so many people feel the need to draw attention to a black person’s ability to speak coherently is, unsurprisingly, not a good thing.

We’ve certainly had well-spoken and “clean” black candidates in the past; the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton immediately come to mind (before Biden could apologize to him, Sharpton remarked that he takes a bath every day). But white guilt and candidate viability are two factors to be considered when pondering Obama’s mainstream appeal. For all their virtues, Jackson and Sharpton’s civil rights activism lends them to association with racial guilt trips. Jackson’s conferring with and forgiving Michael Richards for his meltdown was all well and good (even that was too much for some folks, and why do entire ethnic groups need spokespeople?), but what are we to make of his insistence that the Seinfeld Season 7 DVD be boycotted because of it? The reverends ran for president before any of that went down, but even then they were marginal figures who, let’s be serious, had about as much chance of garnering the Democratic presidential nomination as, er, Joe Biden. But Biden wasn’t speaking of Obama in a vacuum. He referred to him as the “first mainstream African American” (note the absence of the word ‘candidate’) who, besides being clean and articulate, is also bright and “a nice-looking guy.” If viewed through the New York Times’ lens, the entire quote is rife with unintended condescension.

Time magazine did a piece on Obama that compares him with Oprah, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods, other African Americans who “seem to have an iconic power over the American imagination because they transcend racial stereotypes.” To be blunt: for every Oprah, we see considerably more Snoop Doggs, Lil’ Jons and other mainstream African Americans who are not especially known for being articulate, bright, or nice-looking guys (I assume rappers, at the risk of street cred, follow Sharpton’s lead and bathe regularly); when we see people like Michael Jordan, who don’t make their millions by nurturing an illiterate, misogynist, materialistic stereotype, we breathe a collective sigh of relief. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice get brownie points (bad pun intended) for their education and academic and political impact, but they aren’t chosen by the people; Powell did have a shot at being the second black president and Rice has a fanbase that is eager to draft her into the 2008 race. Obama isn’t the first black politician, but he is the first with so much mainstream crossover appeal.

So make no mistake, race does plays a factor in his sudden popularity. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however, and it factors in a way one would not expect. On the surface his success comes off as an African American triumph, which is only half-right: he’s half white and half black (a combination New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin would refer to as chocolate), and that latter half is Kenyan-born. Supposedly his support in the African American community is lower than in whites because he’s (hairsplitter alert!) an African African American instead of an American African American and has no family history of slavery and civil rights struggle. This is true. However, such a wide-ranging heritage can be seen as the American melting pot concept in action, and Obama’s well-earned success a vindication of the American dream that is, in his words, “the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too.”

But enough gushing. Underneath all this high-falutin’ rhetoric on setting America on the right path again and overcoming partisanship, what is left? Obama is. His stances on the issues are standard liberal fare: pro-Affirmative Action, pro-gun control, pro-choice. But he’s also voted in favor of Pentagon funding to pay for the war in Iraq (which he opposed before it started, before it became fashionable to do so), he supports civil unions and equality but not gay marriage, and he is a deeply committed Christian whose outreaches to the Evangelical community ring truer than, say, Howard Dean’s. He’s also received an A+ from the Genocide Intervention Network for trying to do something about Darfur (write your congressmen, people), and who can argue with that? Probably the most bemoaned aspect of Obama’s style is the use of rhetorical gymnastics over specific policy proposals. Well, here’s one: a gradual withdrawal of troops from Iraq, beginning in May and ending in March 2008. Maybe this is a cynical position that aims to keep the presidential candidates from having to deal with the problem during primary season and beyond, but it’s certainly no more cynical than Bush’s “surge” of 20,000 or so soldiers that is merely going to keep us there long enough for him to pass the bloody mess on to someone else.

Regardless of his policy stances however, it is noteworthy that Obama is not (or at least doesn’t come off as) an ideologue. He is thoughtful almost to the point of being excessively ponderous, and has worked with politicians from the other side of the aisle on issues like reining in wasteful earmarks (with Tom Coburn of Oklahoma) and increasing the use of alternative fuels (Richard Lugar of Indiana). A politician with his “on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-handedness” could hardly be expected to deliver a statement as blithely crass as Bush’s “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.” Obama’s Achilles heel is his relative inexperience: eight years in state legislature and what will be four years in the Senate does not much prepare one for running the most powerful nation in the world, and some, including me at one point, think/thought it would be presumptuous for a junior senator to think he could do better than his more entrenched contemporaries. This is, again, a half-truth. He doesn’t have as much experience, but he also has not accumulated barnacles of compromised values; more time in the Senate would be but entropy for Obama’s freshness of presentation and message. A vice presidential slot may suit him better for learning the ropes of the executive branch, but it’s doubtful Hillary, his biggest contender, could keep the seat warm for eight years. The learning curve for the presidency is a steep slope for anybody; governing one state is considerably different from governing fifty. The Illinois Senator would only be at a slight disadvantage, especially if he surrounds himself with good advisors. All analysis aside, Barack Obama is, quite simply, inspiring to many people, and that is hugely important. He talks a good game about leading a new generation, and he’s right: the Bush years have been poisonous for America’s international standing, as well as its domestic climate; what better antidote is there than a candidate whose most frequent criticism is that he’s too even-handed in temperament?

Finally, note that Obama’s race, while playing a role in his popularity, is not an especial liability; inexperience, and rock-solid rhetoric at the expense of solid policy proposals are. But that so-called weakness is also the irony of Biden’s gaffe: Obama’s standout feature is not that he’s “articulate” (for a black person), but that he’s more articulate than anybody else. Even Joseph Biden.