He's bashing Obama with his religion for his religion and he's bashing the popularity of Obama to the extent that it's merely race based. That's no straw-man argument. It's a feel-good narrative lots of people are getting behind. Is he over-stating it? Maybe. That would be a good argument with which to counter his. What I see instead in this forum and others like it are imputations of motive. Hitchens doesn't honestly think this is a problem: it's an excuse to bring religion back into the debate through the back door. And yet when has Hitchens hesitated to bring in the front? Perhaps he's concerned equally by the roles that race and religion play in politics and that in the case of Obama they converge. Are these not reasonable concerns? How differently should they be raised? I'm not sure, given the nature of such debates, that anyone could possibly voice such concerns without the label of bigot, and I think that's revealing of a far more pernicious brand of bigotry entirely. There are a lot of different Hitchens being argued against here, all with easily dismissable motives, and most of them are straw men.