The new black

ITEM: CNN political analyst Jeff Greenfield compares Barack Obama with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad because both men have been known to wear a jacket without a tie. (Video here.)

Greenfield is respected as a sophisticated, serious analyst (just ask him), so I figured I should try my hand at some Greenfield-style analysis:

Here's a picture of the president and the first lady at a recent Washington event, sporting what we could call the classic Bush look.

It's a look the president seems to favor. And why not? Black is elegant — stylish yet still conservative.

But the president may be walking around with a sartorial time bomb.

Ask yourself, is there any other group that dresses the way the first family does? Why, yes. It is the Mahdi Army who, unlike most of their radical Shiite predecessors, seem to have skipped through enough copies of GQ to find the all-black look agreeable.

And maybe that's not the comparison an American president really wants to evoke.