Obama is looking better and better

Right now my support is wide open between Barack Obama and Bill Richardson, with John Edwards having been taken down a few notches because of his gutless capitulation to the likes of William Donohue.

But today Obama has the edge.

Right on the heels of his decisive puncturing of the "Obama is really a Muslim terrorist" story perpetrated by the Moonie magazine Insight comes a smackdown of the homophobic loser Harold Ford South Carolina State Sen. Robert Ford. Ford said earlier in the week that Hillary Clinton is the only Democrat who can win the presidency, and that a ticket headed by Barack Obama would doom the party at all levels "because he's black and he's at the top of the ticket."

Now, I'm a huge believer in the "It's OK to knock your own team" rule, but there's something disheartening when a black man writes off the first (OK, I'll say it) viable black candidate for the presidency with this kind of defeatist language.

Obama's savvy enough to realize this, and as John Dickerson reports in Slate, he came roaring right back:

"I've been reading the papers in South Carolina," Obama said before using a preacher's cadence to paraphrase Ford's remarks. "Can't have a black man at the top of the ticket." The crowd booed. "But I know this: that when folks were saying, We're going to march for our freedom, they said, You can't do that." The audience roared. "When somebody said, You can't sit at the lunch counter. … You can't do that. We did. And when somebody said, Women belong in the kitchen not in the board room. You can't do that. Yes we can." (At this point I can't reconstruct the remarks from my tape recorder because the screaming was too loud.) The crowd responded by chanting: "Yes, we can."

Obama is going to gain more from Ford's endorsement than Hillary Clinton is. It would have been too audacious, even for Obama, to so overtly link himself to America's civil rights struggles, but Ford's remarks invited him to. Obama will no doubt use that new portion of his stump speech again, and outside of South Carolina. The audience, well represented with African-Americans, loved it. "I got chills," said Constance Eikins, an African-American stay-at-home mom. "It's very overwhelming. I am happy at the thought of it. We have come a long way."

Mr. Obama has certainly come a long way in a short time. More of this, please.

(Hat tip: Mark Kleiman)