Mark Casey Online

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Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, it was clear long before May 6 that Barack Obama’s campaign has to take a hard look at itself. And at its candidate.

While it’s still almost certain that he will be the Democratic nominee, the problems of perception that plagued his campaign in the weeks leading up to the May 6 primaries will linger long into the general election, unless they change the way they send their messages.

There is no question that Obama’s controversial former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, played the largest role in the deflation of Obama’s polling numbers these past two weeks, but what seemed to cause more of a problem was his general reaction to criticism.

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Now that Oscar season has come and gone, it’s hard to believe that we’re still talking about some of the same issues in the 2008 presidential election as we were before the winning films were even released.

Of course, it’s probably a good thing that we spend far more time deciding who will lead our country for the next four years than we do deciding what the year’s best movie is. Even so, in a process during which everything from Rudy Giulianni’s love life to Barack Obama’s middle name has been endlessly discussed, it becomes apparent that a little brevity can sometimes add a lot of clarity.

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On Aug. 14, 1956, Brian Sullivan was born to two loving parents in New Jersey. When he was 18 months old, at the advice of Brian’s doctor, his parents packed up and moved to a new town, where they renamed him Bonnie Sullivan and raised him as a girl.

Years later, Bonnie found out that just before the move, her gender had been surgically assigned by her parents. At her birth, it was unclear whether Bonnie was a boy or a girl.

Around the same time, in 1966, 18-year-old Erika Schinegger was the reigning world champion in female downhill skiing. Then, the International Olympic Committee discovered through medical testing that Erika had male chromosomes (XY). The committee’s surprise was shared by Erika, who was disqualified.

Bonnie and Erika were born with a condition known as sexual ambiguity or “intersexuality” — an umbrella term for a wide variety of conditions where physical or chromosomal traits, which typically define a person as a male or female, are unclear at birth.

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By now, there aren’t many people who haven’t heard of Mike Huckabee’s swift (and possibly temporary) rise to the top of this year’s Republican candidates. And similarly, there aren’t many who haven’t heard of Oprah’s recent stint campaigning with Democratic hopeful Barack Obama.

What you may not know, however, is that Obama’s endorsement from the iconic Oprah Winfrey pretty much fizzled, without any increase in public support, even as Huckabee’s success was immediately preceded by a high-profile celebrity endorsement of his own.

So why such a difference between the campaign strategies? Two words: Chuck Norris.

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Within 24 hours of officially announcing his candidacy for president of the United States, support groups for comedian Stephen Colbert had sprung up on popular social networking groups like MySpace and Facebook, the latter of which grew to over one million members in less than a week — it is now one of the largest groups on the website.

News of the funnyman’s budding campaign had rocketed across the internet and blogosphere (Colbert’s established domain), and he abruptly took the next week off from doing his nightly talk show, The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, to appear on various hard news programs, including Tim Russert’s “Meet The Press.”

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Picture a seemingly endless line of children, all dressed in the same clothes, the same muted tones — shuffling silently toward a single cashier as dollops of food are plopped in segments on their identical gray plastic trays.

Now, as they reach the cash register, they scan their fingerprint across a keypad, one child filing after the next, and then exit without a word as the “cashier” watches.

Some pessimistic vision of a children’s prison in a dreary futuristic novel? Hardly. It’s a scene that plays out daily at elementary schools across the country, as children barely old enough to comprehend the process they’re going through are filed and categorized through a system increasingly designed for standardization.

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Picture a muggy summer day in New York City. A man known only as “Bill” sends emails and cellular phone text-messages to around a hundred people. State-of-the-art technology is utilized as his message races through fiber optics wires and invisibly through the air, allowing all of the contacts to receive his message mere seconds after he has sent it.

The message? Synchronized instructions to meet at a highly populated public place in order to commit a major act.

Starting to sound like the next big terrorist attack? Maybe. But it’s definitely not what it seems. That day two months ago was the first recorded occurrence of a social phenomenon known as flash mobbing. Their public act? To gather in Macy’s, admire a $10,000 Oriental rug, and explain to the baffled salesman that they belonged to a commune and were seeking a “Love Rug.”

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