I am slightly behind the curve with this blog post, but I’ve been distracted with work and have been slow to read through the recent story in “The New Yorker” about Sen. Barack Obama. My immediate impression from the article: Obama is simply brilliant.

Please don’t misunderstand this last statement. I am not going to wax poetic about what part of my body Obama makes tingle, a la Chris Matthews. However, I will admit that Obama has run a nearly perfect campaign, a fact that is illustrated by his most recent reaction to the “New Yorker” piece.

As you may recall, the controversial magazine issue had a cover cartoon depicting Obama and his wife dressed as black, Islamist militants. Although anyone with a half a brain could recognize that the cover art was meant to be satirical, the Obama campaign issued a strong statement condemning the cover art as distasteful and offensive. Herein lays the brilliance of Obama. The press release successfully shifted the media’s focus from the content of the story onto the apparent racism of the cover.

Why would Obama want to shift the focus away from a story that, given the leftward leanings of “The New Yorker,” would logically be yet another glowing endorsement of his candidacy? Probably because the article was anything but what it “should” have been.

Ryan Lizza’s eighteen-page essay seeks to chronicle the early days of Obama and shed some light on the early days of his meteoric rise into the pantheon of Democratic politics. What Lizza ends up doing is debunking what he calls “the greatest misconception about Barack Obama […] that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary.” In fact, the piece paints Obama not as an agent of change, but as just another politician who has become exceedingly adept at playing the game.

The essay portrays scene after scene of Obama’s strategic positioning, from building a network of the “right” people to know in Chicago politics to sitting down with a consultant to map out the customized Illinois State Senate district that would put him one step closer to a seat in the U.S. Senate. In the end, the reader realizes that they are not witnessing the transformation of American politics so much as they are just getting more of the same just with pretty, new wrapping.

Again, I say that Obama –or at least his team of strategists- is brilliant. With a single press release, he was able to mobilize his army of followers to rush to defend his character while simultaneously shifting the focus away from the real story – the public’s misconception of his true colors. The one thing that disappoints me the most, but which shouldn’t come as any surprise, is that no one in the media seemed to have the sense to look behind the curtain to see what was really taking place.