Damn preppy popular kids!

Just when you think you've left behind all those kids in high school and junior high who hated popular kids and everything they liked just because they were popular, you start talking to people who mock Obama supporters for having a popular candidate, and who refuse to even look at his voting record or read his speeches simply because nothing popular can possibly be good.

So instead, like the goth kids smoking during lunch, they find a group willing to be noncomformists in the same comfortable ways they are. They've moved beyond dressing alike, standing alike, and smoking alike. We're adults now. Now all we have to do to be different for its own sake is say the same things because we all hate the same guy for the same reason.

Because they like him. Lots of people like Obama, and rather than disappear into a crowd of people who surely must be drinking the poisoned Kool-Aid of celebrity worship, we'll band together and drink a different flavor of Kool-Aid secure in the knowledge that at least there are fewer of us. And that makes us better.

I don't think that all the automatic and thoughtless dismissal of Obama is because of race. I don't. I don't think everyone who decided to vote against him and thought of excuses why only after the fact is doing it because they can't stand supporting a black guy. I think a great many of them still can't stand supporting something popular.