So what is the lingering effect of Obama’s peekaboo speech to San Francisco fundraisers, diagnosing the denizens of flyover America as bitter, reactive, guntoting religious xenophobes, now becoming known as gaffe-gate? (No-one has taken the opportunity to give it the obvious moniker of Goldengate). Well it’s hard to tell.

The poll I quoted yesterday was, as noted, performed across the weekend that the speech came to light, and dubbed itself an outlier in any case – giving Hills a twenty point lead. Others today have Obama holding Hillary to a close gap, the latter holding a five point lead in both Pennsylvania and Indiana, which would make it a virtual draw delegate-wise, and a loss propaganda-wise for Camp Clinton.

So it looks like this thing is going to blow over, and we can get back to the pressing problems of economic decline, including forecasts of mass retail closures, a possible global food crisis, Iraq’s respectful bombing-in-reply to the Petraeus report, and of course Obama’s father’s support for African socialism.

Say what? Yes here we go. Someone’s dug up and scanned in an article Obama senior wrote when he was a phD student at Harvard for what the Politico site calls the “obscure East Africa Journal“, though the publication was probably less so in … erm … East Africa. Entitled “Problems of African Socialism”, the article is a not too focused reflection on the crooked path of the the sort of third way socialism that was seen as the inevitable path for the third world.

Hoo-boy. Will it play as an issue? Are you kidding? Even if it’s pitched as a meta-issue –  a Fox news debate on whether it should matter that Barack’s Dad was, if not a commie, then a pinko, or given the idea of a distinctly African socialism, a browno, or a pinko-browno, which sounds more like an 80s colour scheme. That’ll run and run on all networks.

Mind you, explaining third world socialism to the American public would be like teaching Spanish to lungfish. Obama Sr’s article is a communication from a vanished age, like an earnest Early Church debate about whether the Father or Holy Spirit is uppermost in the Trinity. From the 40s to the 70s, there was the notion that third world liberation was necessarily bound up with devising a form of socialism that took the region out of the global system, and was consonant with the social form based around the village.

Crazy stuff. We threw all that overboard and the region rushed headlong into the global market, junking all that mad stuff about the market creating global food shortages. Imagine!

It’s so easy to get irritated with the more paranoid theories of media control that one can forget from time to time how explicitly large sections of the US media – and not just Fox, CNN and the New York Times too – consciously work to shape the idea that there is really no alternative. Without wanting to defend the increasingly erratic regime of el Hugo in Venezuela, the NY Times coverage of it has to be read to be believed for its duplicitous mendacity.

The recent border incursion by Colombia into Ecuador to pursue some FARC guerrillas was a case in point. When Venezuela quite reasonably moved troops to its border to forestall any similar exuberance by the US’s last friend in South America, this was almost universally treated as a bit of Chavismo sabre-rattling. Bloody mad, but not untypical.

Anyway the result is that far more than in say the UK or Europe, the notion of any other path to modernity, any attempt at an alternative plays less as difference than as simple inexplicability or criminality.

Which is why one suspects that this ancient sheet now scanned in to the global intertubes will play, if it plays at all, as further evidence that Obama is fundamentally other, different, strange. McCain’s father and his father etc were admirals all the way back, and his ghostwritten family memoir was a Lifetime channel movie-of-the-week, whereas Obama’s family history reads like the outline of the next Wes Anderson movie.

It’s what made Obama who he is, whoever he is, but I have a suspicion that for all the fuss over him, enough of a tranche of voters have just never had any intention of voting for this bloke, and his support will collapse as soon as the campaign proper starts. Or not as the case may be.

And still ten or so primaries to go. And Goldengate still has days to run…