John McCain’s “Bio Tour” ( and the incidents Abe refers to) got me thinking about all the candidates’ backgrounds and personalities. And it struck me: what do we really know about Barack Obama? I don’t mean that in the creepy, suggestive way that the Clinton team does, seeming to imply some jumbo skeleton in his closet. I mean in the sense of knowing him and his personality the way we do with McCain or Hillary Clinton.
With both Clinton and McCain you could reel off a list of personal characteristics and be able to hazard a guess as to how they would react in a variety of settings, political or otherwise. For Clinton we have a sense of her basic personality – the negative (dishonest, self-righteous, controlling) and the positive (tenacious . . . ok, I’m stuck, but there are others). Similarly with McCain, who has taken to joking about his best known negative quality (temper), we think we “get” who he is. Part of this is a function of their longevity in the public eye and part is that they actually talk about themselves.
Obama’s cool reserve and verbal acuity have benefited him in many ways ( keeping him above the fray in the debates, for example), but also prevented voters from getting to know him. Is he an “A” or “B” personality? Is he gregarious or a loner? Is he quick to anger or does he hold a grudge? We don’t know any of that and he seems disinclined, as we saw in the Wright episode, to talk about himself. (He’d rather tell us all about us.) So we try to get glimpses of him from his wife’s comments (is he arrogant and self-centered too?), from his choice of associates and mentors, or from an incident on the campaign trail( is he not a “people person”?) to put together a picture of who he is. We still don’t know. And that’s remarkable for someone who’s been running for President for over a year.
But, as he said in his own book, he’s a “blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” Telling us who he really is might muddy the mass exercise in self-projection and thus dim his allure. And if the Newsweek cover story got it right, he might not have a very fixed sense of his own identity. So it may be awhile, if ever, before we learn who he really is. Whatever your political preferences, that’s a bit unnerving.
Why WWII Matters
Matthew Yglesias asks “Do we really need a Richard Cohen column about how World War II was, in fact, a good war? Surely there’s some more pressing topic that the precious Washington Post op-ed page real estate could be devoted to.”
It would indeed be nice if, over half a century later, we did not require Washington Post columnists to remind us that “World War II was, in fact, a good war.” But recently a major American novelist undertook a history of World War II aimed at convincing us, in the words of the New York Sun’s Adam Kirsch,
Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke (which Yglesias does not bother to mention in attacking the decision to publish Cohen’s piece) was not published by the sort of press that puts out tracts by Lyndon LaRouche or Lew Rockwell, but by Simon and Schuster. The book has received favorable notices in both the Los Angeles Times and New York magazine. It enjoyed, in other words, the blessing of American literary culture. Yglesias has an award for political non-conformism named after him. You’d think he’d be more skeptical of thinkers like Baker and the political sophism they practice, whatever sympathies he may share with them.
David Pryce-Jones’s review of Human Smoke, published in COMMENTARY last month, shows why Baker, with his outrageous moral equivalency, is what George Orwell would call “objectively pro-fascist.”Pryce-Jones writes:
Leon Wieseltier’s review of Baker’s 2004 novel Checkpoint (about assassinating President Bush), memorably began “This scummy little book . . .” Judgments about Baker’s latest effort should be no more charitable, and should find their way into even Yglesias’s discussions of the Second World War.