Many people have pointed out that the main reason Barack Obama changed his position on public campaign financing was because he decided that he could raise more money through private donations than he’d get from the government. That much is obvious.

But Obama’s stated rationale is interesting, too, inasmuch as it reveals his mindset. He complains that Senator McCain’s campaign will benefit from ads run by “527” groups - independent groups doing issue advocacy which will have the side effect of helping McCain. The 527’s are prohibited from explicitly endorsing a particular candidate, but their impact is clear nonetheless.

Obama, the open-minded, free-speech supporting candidate from the party of inclusiveness, doesn’t want these independent voices to be heard. He’d like to regulate them out of existence, but ‘til then he’s asking that all independent groups favoring him should fall under the umbrella of his campaign. That way, he can control the money and the message, and be free of the corrupting influence of special interest groups. And at the same time, he can attack McCain by asserting that the sinister 527’s are spreading lies & disinformation, and that McCain is somehow responsible for their actions.

This is revealing in more ways than one. First, it shows how much of a control freak Obama is. If we can believe him, he doesn’t even like independent organizations that support him. He wants all the donations they receive to go to him, so that he can be in complete control of advertising done on his behalf. To some extent, this makes sense — of course, all candidates would like to have more control over how their message reaches the people — but it’s not consistent with someone who supposedly prizes freedom of speech, and who says his campaign is run "from the bottom up."

On the contrary: Obama believes in command & control, with himself at the top, and all power flowing from there. One must wonder what a man like this will do once he has the power of the presidency at his disposal.

Second, it shows Obama’s dishonesty (and not for this first time.) Are we really expected to believe that Obama ever intended to accept public financing for his campaign if he thought he could raise more on his own? And what of his complaints about the lies supposedly being told about him? Is anyone still running ads hinting that Obama’s a Muslim? Has any Republican ever tried to use Obama’s race against him?

To the extent that that sort of smear campaign has been run against him, it was the Clinton campaign that was behind it - the same Clinton campaign that Obama is now helping raise funds to pay off its’ debts. Suggesting McCain's campaign will use racist tactics, and blaming him for the sins of Hillary Clinton is just about the lowest sort of politics there is.

Unfortunately, Barack Obama’s campaign seems to be built entirely upon sleazy tricks like this. He won the Democratic nomination by hinting that his critics — Joe Biden, Bill & Hillary Clinton, Geraldine Ferraro, etc. — were racists. (Ironically, he left much of the dirty work to surrogates, leaving the impression that he was above the fray.) If he can use these same tactics to win the White House, even many of his supporters may feel left out in the cold, because for Obama, this campaign's all about him.

Old media narratives die hard. Once people latch onto something they believe in, it can be very difficult to change their minds, especially if there's an emotional attachment involved.

See, for example, the "George W. Bush is an idiot" narrative. People who dislike the president will believe this myth 'til the day they die. Reminding these people that Bush has an MBA from Harvard University and that his grades at Yale were better than the supposedly brilliant John Kerry won't do any good. There's always a way to explain away inconvenient truths — in this case, we're told Bush's success in the Ivy League is due entirely to his father's meddling on his behalf.

And speaking of John Kerry, how about that how Swift Boat story? There, the media narrative is that Kerry was unfairly smeared by politically-motivated pawns of Karl Rove. "Swift Boating" has become a synonym for any kind of unfair attack on someone's character. But when Kerry was challenged to actually disprove the allegations made against him by his fellow veterans, and offered $1 million to do so, he couldn't do it. Well, of course he couldn't, because the Swift Boat story, as it exists in the popular consciousness, is a lie, and you can't prove lies are the truth.

But if all you're trying to do is win an election, you don't need to prove that the fables you tell are the Gospel. All you need to do is keep lying & spinning.

That's the position Barack Obama is in right now. His remarks in San Francisco, deriding Pennsylvanians as gun-toting, Bible-thumping rednecks, were actually nothing new. Liberals say this kind of thing about midwesterners all the time. For example, Charlie Rangel asked recently why anyone would want to live in a dump like Mississippi. The only real difference between his comment and Obama's is that Rangel wasn't running a campaign in Ole Miss.

Still, if Jeremiah Wright's hate-filled diatribes weren't enough to sink Obama, there's no reason to believe this controversy will. All he's got to do is spin — explain to all the rubes out there that he didn't really mean to call 'em rubes. And it'll work, because the media narrative about Obama is that he's a genuinely nice guy. A uniter, not a divider. And so if he utters remarks that seem elitist or disdainful, it's not he who is wrong, it's you who are wrong for not understanding what he really meant.

It'll take much more than insulting rural gun nuts to get the media (who largely agree with Obama anyway), to change their narrative on "Mr. Nice Guy."

Barack Obama has proven himself to be utterly incapable of assuaging America's racial problems, and the recent controversies involving his wife and his pastor are the proof that he's either earnest but inept, or he's just another sleazy race-hustler.

My take on Obama's inability to solve our racial problems is available exclusively at the Associated Content website.