It looks like you're using "inexperience" to mean two different things: why you think Obama is inexperienced, versus why other people do. Yet you don't show how you know there's a difference -- aside from the fact that they're not voting for him, and [you imply] you are.

You might have settled for a different (equally fallible, but more relevant-sounding) breakdown in the way you see inexperience with respect to Obama:

• allegations of inexperience whose causes you can't precisely account for, versus allegations whose causes you can;
  
• inexperience as a datum, a thing seen and attested to, versus "inexperience" as a synonym for "QED," i.e. appearing after a list of "experiences" whose relevance to presidency the paper takes for granted;
  
• "subjective" versus "objective" inexperience.

This poor overlap could be a problem with my labels, but it is also could be a problem with your paper. Arguably, my labels successfully account for what you are doing half-successfully: since you support Obama, you're smart to be labeling persons who call him "inexperienced" as hopelessly subjective, in order to argue that their arguments are unaccountable, and thus vulnerable to abuse, such as being mingled with race. But, if that's your goal, you fail to recapture the authority to define Obama's experience in a way you prefer. You might tell us: why aren't you put off by Obama's lack of experience? Why do we consider what McCain? has "experience"? If Clinton has experience, and it's so different from McCain? 's, why can't Obama be experienced in a way different from McCain? 's as well? In other words, why can't we defend Obama's experience?

And that itself is a meaningful question: why is it hard to defend Obama on experience grounds to persons who criticize him on experience grounds? My theory: it's because we all get our political news from similar sources, so it's hard to explain our political disagreements in terms of other than subjective preferences.

But then, does the fact that you're voting for Obama really tell us anything about the people who aren't? Imagine again that poll of General Election voters (pro-Obama and anti-Obama) who used "inexperience" to "best describe Obama." If they'd also been asked, "What word do you think most OTHER people imagine best describes Obama?", I too suspect that a larger proportion of people, freed from political correctness, would say "Black." But I wouldn't call that racism: you and I both just did it.
-- AndrewGradman - 21 Mar 2008