This morning I heard Obama on NPR going to a barbecue and saying, "It's not a barbecue unless there's barbecue. If there's no barbecue, it's a cookout." That's my kind of guy: an egghead who offers theoretical definitions, doesn't get into the event.
All the talk on MSNBC about portraying Obama as a real person to Americans strikes me as deceptive. He's a real person, a cerebral person, a thoughtful man who has never made time to bro' down the way salt-of -the-earth Joe Biden has.
Obama's a lot smarter than Biden, and that's why I like him. My father-in-law is voting for Obama because he believes that Obama comprehends the huge energy problems the country faces and will show imagination and intelligence; when McCain mocked Obama's tire-air-pressure recommendation, it justly angered my father-in-law because McCain was being stupid about something really important. Last week I had dinner with a leading prof of international relations and when I said, "Do you think anything we're saying about Israel/Palestine would come as a surprise to Obama?" he said, "No way." And he knows folks who know Obama. Folks. Sorry!–I meant intellectuals. Obama likes ideas. That's why I like him; we need a whipsmart man who understands the tremendously-challenging issues before us. Right now on MSNBC there was an ad about the climate crisis. Who can doubt that word, crisis. McCain lacks the intellectual scope to deal with such questions.
All the efforts by the media to make Obama into a down-to-earth guy who can connect with the ordinary person's travails are bogus. He will care about ordinary people, as FDR did, as Reagan did. But he isn't going to really feel their pain, it's not in his skill set. I insist that Obama is a great man, that he has the potential to be a leader like Lincoln or FDR or Reagan, all of whom were aloof. Great men don't act like us at a barbecue.
