I see the digs at Cindy McCain and her "home-made" recipes as part of an early, preemptive pushback by the Obama campaign against the traditional media's announced determination to judge Obama & McCain on "autheticity." What exactly does "authenticity" mean? Well, whatever the gol-durn bloody heck the speaker WANTS it to mean! It's one of those "elastic" terms that can be stretched and shaped into whatever shape the speaker desires. By challenging Cindy McCain's "authenticity" right off the bat ("Does she bake her own brownies?"), Obama makes it much tougher for the traditional media to direct the course of the campaign.

As to the last point, I think getting a picture of Obama speaking with two people in Muslim garb behind him was a picture that the right-wing media from Fox News to the blogs was absolutely salivating for. It would have "proved" that Obama was a Muslim and that he was in league with America's enemies. Sorry, but with Bush and many conservatives before him (Notably Ronald Reagan) having carefully stage-managed every single solitary appearance of theirs, I have very little outrage left over for lefties paying attention to their public "visuals."