Another Country

(fm the BC thread "Obama at the GOP retreat")

Tcobb,
Sadly, he is the supposed leader of my country.

My 1:40 AM guess is that Obama thinks of himself as the leader of, or at least a product of, not your country but Another Country. Not the country of Indonesia but that of James Baldwin's novel with bohemians in Greenwich Village exploring racial, sexual and artistic boundaries.

Obama sees himself as the heir of these outsiders. He possibly thinks he has a special spiritual wisdom, that makes him sympathetic to Satomayor's sense of justification as a "wise latina." He deals with the squares with studied civility that seems to be stretched over a deep reservoir of contempt.

There is nothing wrong with the child of that mother and that father who grew up in those surroundings with those influences that is all that hard to understand. Whether it can be cured is another problem.