Maybe this is so obvious nobody has said it, but reading Karl
Rove's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal made me think of it once
again.
Obama is not making "gaffes." He's been a myth-maker from the
first. Isn't that the message of his books? He is basically
nothing, with a mother who's a total flake and a father who's as
absent as a father can be, no real other family to depend on. So
he uses his brains (he has some), and he turns to literature of
various kinds to assemble an identity.
In a big part of that identity construction, as John Derbyshire
has written, Obama gets "hung up on his negritude." And for all
the rest, it's a Chinese menu, with two from Column A and one from
Column B.
He's Gatsby, he's the King (or the Duke) from Huckleberry Finn,
he's Philip Roth's carefully constructed professor from The Human
Stain. He is, in short, a creature of American literature, not
really an organically developed person at all. He is an exemplar
to the max of identity politics, or all politics is persona.
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