Well, I haven't read every line written everywhere, but this was the first pundit line that made me LOL in a long time
In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Rich talks about why so many of the pundits have been so wrong about the presidential race this year
Once Obama wrested the nomination from Clinton by surpassing her in organization, cash and black votes, he was still often seen as too wimpy to take on the Republicans. This prognosis was codified by Karl Rove, whose punditry for The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek has been second only to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as a reliable source of laughs this year. Rove called Obama "lazy," and over the summer he predicted that his fund-raising had peaked in February and that he’d have a "serious problem" winning over Hispanics.
Emmphasis mine
Ultimately, what Rich says is that Obama is where he is because he is a smart, tough politician.
Obama was a pol from Chicago. Up until then it rarely occurred to anyone that he had to be a ruthless competitor, not merely a sweet-talking orator, to reach the top of a political machine even rougher than the Clinton machine he had brought down. Whether that makes him more black or more white remains unresolved.
Rich spends most of the article showing how far we have come on race. He points out that as late as 1967, interracial marriage was illegal in 16 states, and that
L.B.J.’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, offered his resignation when his daughter, a Stanford student, announced her engagement to a black Georgetown grad working at NASA. (Johnson didn’t accept it.)
While we have come a long way, we are not post-race. Nobody watching this race, especially watching the nastiness at Palin rallies could assume that.
Still, the bottom line is
But we are a people as practical as we are dreamy. We’ll soon remember that the country is in a deep ditch, and that we turned to the black guy not only because we hoped he would lift us up but because he looked like the strongest leader to dig us out.