Today's LOL

This is the sort of mind-numbingly banal observation that passes for political analysis these days. Tut-tutting over the timing of Barack Obama's family vacation, Cokie Roberts yesterday on ABC's This Week added that Hawaii was not an appropriate destination: too foreign and too exotic. "I know Hawaii is a state, but ..." Roberts declared, while insisting Obama vacation in some place like Myrtle Beach, S.C.:

This is the sort of mind-numbingly banal observation that passes for political analysis these days. Tut-tutting over the timing of Barack Obama's family vacation, Cokie Roberts yesterday on ABC's This Week added that Hawaii was not an appropriate destination: too foreign and too exotic. "I know Hawaii is a state, but ..." Roberts declared, while insisting Obama vacation in some place like Myrtle Beach, S.C.:






She picked the theme up again this morning in her regular Morning Edition appearance on NPR:

RENEE MONTAGNE: Now Obama is spending the week on vacation in Hawaii, he's taking a vacation, he says, because it's good for his family, but is it a good point in the presidential campaign?

COKIE ROBERTS: It's a little rough to be doing it at this point, although I think he's feeling somewhat secure, but Hawaii is also a somewhat odd place to be doing it. I know that he is from Hawaii, he grew up there, his grandmother lives there, but he has made such a point about how he is from Kansas, you know, the boy from Kansas and Kenya, and it makes him seem a little bit more exotic than perhaps he would want to come across as at this stage in the presidential campaign.

I drove all the way across Kansas and back last week, and Cokie is right: It's anything but exotic. But Hawaii as too foreign? Seriously?

It got us to thinking. What is the most white-bread place for a black presidential candidate to vacation, since that's apparently the new standard? Surely we can do better than Myrtle Beach. The best we've come up with so far is Branson, Missouri -- so long as he avoids the Shoji Tabuchi Theatre, which is way too exotic.

--David Kurtz