Former Bush pollster Matthew Dowd appeared solo with Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America on Monday and tried to describe Barack Obama with athletic-legend analogies. I get his point–Obama needs to be post-racial, not simply a racial pioneer–but both analogies are deeply flattering:

You take a look at Barack Obama, I actually think what he needs to do is no longer be a prism of color and how people look at him, whether black or white. To me, he needs to become the Tiger Woods of politics where people originally saw Tiger Woods as the best African-American golfer, now they consider him the best golfer and don’t look at him anymore like he’s, like he’s African-American and I think that’s what he needs to do. He needs to be less Jackie Robinson and a symbol of something and more just the dominant player on the landscape, and he can do that but I think he’s going to have to sort to begin to change how that is perception among the American public. Again, as I said, it’s much better for him to be the Tiger Woods of politics in this case and people not look at him through a prism of color.