From the New York Times, "Where's the Landslide?" by David Brooks
In this provocative yet oddly silly column, Brooks purports to diagnose why Barack Obama hasn't run away with the election. He's a sojourner!
The root of it is probably this: Obama has been a sojourner. He opened his book "Dreams From My Father" with a quotation from Chronicles: "For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers."
There is a sense that because of his unique background and temperament, Obama lives apart. He put one foot in the institutions he rose through on his journey but never fully engaged. As a result, voters have trouble placing him in his context, understanding the roots and values in which he is ineluctably embedded.
Last week Jodi Kantor of The Times described Obama's 12 years at the University of Chicago Law School. "The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count," Kantor wrote.
He was a popular and charismatic professor (sic), but he rarely took part in faculty conversations or discussions about the future of the institution. He had a supple grasp of legal ideas, but he never committed those ideas to paper by publishing a piece of scholarship.
He was in the law school, but not of it… Voters seem to be slow to trust a sojourner they cannot place.
Try this as a thought experiment: Mitt Romney served as governor of Massachusetts for about five months longer than Barack Obama has been a United States Senator. And yet if Romney becomes McCain's running mate, not a single media wag will say he lacks the experience for the office. How could this be when his political experience is comparable to Obama's? We know it certainly won't be because the media is crazy about Mitt. The obvious answer is that Mitt Romney is a man of unquestioned accomplishments. When he ran for senator in 1994 as a 46 year-old, the same age Obama was until his birthday yesterday, Romney had to put up with every attack you could imagine. Still, even the Kennedy adoring Boston media never suggested Romney wasn't qualified for the office.
"Sojourner" is one word for what Obama is; there are others. Personally, I prefer "dilettante" and "underachiever." Granting that He's a man of many talents, where are the corresponding accomplishments? Until he joined the U.S. Senate in 2005, He engaged in many endeavors, most of them concurrently. He was a state legislator, a law school lecturer (not a professor - his career at the University of Chicago peaked with the title "Senior Lecturer"), an employee at a law firm and, most famously, a community organizer. But this is no highly accomplished polymath. At all of these tasks, Obama had few (if any) tangible accomplishments. That's why he's running on his judgment - he can't run on his track record. John F. Kennedy was a younger man than Obama is now when he sought the presidency in 1960, but Kennedy had a biography he didn't have to hide from and that suggested he represented the best of his generation.
My beef with Brooks' column and why I call it silly is over the way it pulls its punches. A "sojourner?" That sounds almost romantic. The column also misrepresents Obama's career arc:
If Obama is fully a member of any club - and perhaps he isn't - it is the club of smart post-boomer meritocrats. We now have a cohort of rising leaders, Obama's age and younger, who climbed quickly through elite schools and now ascend from job to job.
Ascend? Barack Obama? Not quite. Between 1991 and 2004, His life was stuck in neutral and his accomplishments difficult to discern.
