John McWhorter does some wonderful work, but I’m afraid he’s got the Van Jones affair quite wrong. We do have power here. The administration’s been pulling a Glinda for months now, which is exactly why the president’s own power is rapidly waning. “Be gone” didn’t work on the townhallers, and publicly defending Van Jones, especially with the sort of arguments trotted out by McWhorter, would have meant yet another a public-relations disaster. That much, at least, the head office understood.