There the conservatives go again, mocking Obama’s fans as lovestruck teenagers…

In politics as in pop, legions of little girls jumping out of their panties can’t be wrong. That’s the vital lesson so far of Election ‘08. I watched a throng of them in November 2006, teenagers in their short skirts and breathlessness, jumping and jittering, hands to cheeks, screaming for Barack Obama. White and black, they crowded to the front of a rally for Jim Webb in the onetime capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia. Jim who? One of the white girls awkwardly told me that she didn’t really know anything about the beet-faced warrior for the white working class running for the Senate, and she wasn’t really there to find out.

Jumping out of their panties? That’s just crass and mean.

It didn’t matter what he said; he smiled a thousand watts, put a little Southern sugar in his voice and mentioned his mama. Webb steamed in the wings as the girls keened, and from somewhere in the crowd grown-ups started calling out, “Obama for President.” He wasn’t yet a candidate. He was Frank Sinatra, so cool he’s hot, a centrifugal force commanding attention so ruthlessly that it appeared effortless, reducing everyone around him to a sidekick, and the girls in the front rows to jelly.

Look, a few thousand screaming fans, and suddenly Obama’s base is being characterized as fainting teenyboppers by right-wingers…

Obama recognized a different need, requiring a different lie, a pretty lie, not just “change” but “change you can believe in.” Tell me again. Yes, darling, you really are beautiful… Like someone ground down by years in a bad relationship, America needed a seduction and, then, like the starlet on the crooner’s arm, the reflected shine.

Obama as Casanova or Don Juan? It’s just like the Harold Ford cavorting-with-Playboy-bunnies ad, all over again!

If politically he now appears to be not substantively different from any other neoliberal, as a sex symbol he is the new man.

… oh, wait, it’s The Nation magazine. Nevermind.

If Bob Herbert can get up in arms about “the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Washington Monument” appearing in McCain’s ad (Neither did; the New York Times columnist may have been hallucinating live on MSNBC Monday), I wonder what he’ll think of this.