I've been reading Maureen Dowd for years, and I generally find myself irritated by her. But when she's good, she's good, and in her latest column, she's at her best. (Have to admit, I savored every word.)

While it's obvious she favors Obama, she nonetheless doesn't spare him. Nor (to my delight) does she spare Hillary:

It is a tribute to Hillary Clinton that even though, rationally, political soothsayers think she can no longer win, irrationally, they wonder how she will pull it off.

It's impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up. Unless every circuit is out, she'll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama's wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams.

"It's like one of those movies where you think you know the end, but then you watch with your fingers over your eyes," said one leading Democrat.

Hillary got a boost from the wackadoodle Jeremiah Wright. As a top pol noted, the Reverend turned Obama -- in the minds of some working-class and crossover white voters -- from "a Harvard law graduate into a South Side Black Panther."

Obama blunted the ugliness of Wright's YouTube "greatest hits" with his elegant and bold speech on race. But how will he get the genie back into the bottle?

Pressed about race on a Philly radio sports show, where he wanted to talk basketball, he called his grandmother "a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, well there's a reaction that's in our experiences that won't go away and can sometimes come out in the wrong way."

Obama might be right, but he should stay away from the phrase "typical white person" because typically white people don't like to be reminded of their prejudices. It also undermines Obama's feel-good appeal in which whites are allowed to transcend race because the candidate himself has transcended race.

But I think he can still atone for his racially insensitive remarks, and display a little solidarity with the people he stereotyped.

All he needs to do is put on one of these T-shirts.

That way, everybody will know he has a sense of humor.

Hey, why not?

I think it's because there are still certain things you can't joke about, that's why not.

And choosing to be black is not one of them.

(I'm citing these two "Barack Like Me" * posts not for support, but to underscore the complexities.)

So he can't, put on one of these either, even in humor:

I keep seeing this as tragedy. In Barack Obama's case, being black -- and I mean in the cultural sense as opposed to the genetic sense -- was a choice. Not only that, it was a choice he had to make deliberately. Genetically, he was half African and half white, and he could have remained half African and half white. Culturally, though, Barack Obama was biracial, in the sense that he could have gone either way.

This is not to compare race and sexuality, and normally we don't. Nor is it an indictment of Obama; it is an indictment of identity politics, which forces people to be their group. But a bisexual is one of those rare birds who can go either way in terms of groups, and Barack Obama is biracial the way some people are bisexual. (The fact is, a number of bisexuals simply opt to go with one of their two possible sides.)

He stuffed his whiteness in the closet. And why not?

Isn't whiteness the stuff closets are made of?

What? Does every closet have to be typical?

MORE: Bill Bradley thinks that Obama made a choice too (via Glenn Reynolds):

For Obama made a choice. He was born and in large measure raised in Hawaii, America's polyglot paradise in the Pacific, a place where questions of racial background can become so complex as to be irrelevant. But after a glittering Ivy League debut, he decided to enter into politics, not as a multi-racial, post-racial figure in Hawaii or California -- where he spent two years attending Occidental College -- but in a 76% black state senate district in Chicago.

Why he decided to embrace his blackness as a very young man may be a matter more for the psychologically inclined than the politically inclined. In any event, it is what he did.

Obama sought what he did not have in his life as a biracial boy. A black family. The black church in Chicago became a stand-in for that. And Wright, a complex man who, by most accounts, has done some serious good in Chicago to balance his now well-publicized ranting, became in Obama's own recent words, an "uncle."

* "Barack Like Me" is a take-off on the title of the book Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin.