Jonathan Alter a few minutes ago on Hardball set forth a theory that a friend of his believes explains Obama. Alter’s friend says that white undecided voters tuned into the debate yesterday and “they were anticipating that they might see Jesse Jackson and they saw Will Smith. We like Will Smith.”

I don’t buy it. Undecided voters aren’t necessarily undecided because they haven’t tuned it and have no idea about Barack Obama. Obama has been everywhere for the past 18 months. It’s absolutely ludicrous to think that there’s any significant segment of the electorate that was expecting Barack Obama to come across as Jesse Jackson.

And what does Alter mean by this anyway? I guarantee if I had said Obama is like Will Smith, meaning an African-American acceptable to whites, the Media Matter folks would be all over it in a second.

Matthews also seems concerned about the polling of late. He was expecting the undecideds to be undecided because they are closet racists, but what the polling is finding is that these undecideds don’t like the McCain negative attacks. You wouldn’t expect racists to care that McCain is bashing Obama around about his domestic terrorist ties, so the racist attack angle against Obama doesn’t seem to fit.