I’ve done hardly any reading of political books over the past month — long story — but I’m glad I made an exception this evening, in cracking the covers of David Remnick’s new biography of President Obama. (A notice, which should be unnecessary for most Corner readers but which I nonetheless provide out of a paternal concern for their health: This is a pro-Obama book.) One thing I admire about the book is the rather old-fashioned style of patriotism — undeniably sentimental, but not cloying — that comes through in Remnick’s New Yorker-profile prose. One chapter late in the book begins at the Arlington Cemetery funeral, in October 2000, of a 22-year-old Navy signalman, Cherone Gunn, who had died in the Islamist terror attack on the USS Cole. “Cherone’s father Louge, a career Navy officer, and his mother, Mona, an elementary-school principal, wept as Anton [Gunn, Cherone’s brother] knelt over [the] flag-draped coffin and spoke softly to it, as if to someone half asleep. ‘I told him that I loved him,’ he said later, ‘and that I was going to miss him.’”

One page — and some seven years — later, Anton Gunn is the Obama primary campaign’s political director (and first employee) in South Carolina; nine pages after that, Obama wins a thumping victory over Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in that crucial southern primary.

What became of Obama thereafter is somewhat well known. As for Anton Gunn, he did okay too: He is now a state representative in South Carolina. I may not agree with all of his political views, but I can be confident that his late brother would be proud of him. The terrorists can occasionally wreak devastating damage on innocents and their families, but, in the end, they will not — cannot — win.

UPDATE: It occurs to me it would help if I provided an example of the book’s political bias. Here’s one: “A Republican of slender gifts named Scott Brown. . .” Okay, let’s be candid: Do people who oppose Scott Brown know enough about him at this point to assert confidently that he is a man of “slender gifts”? I don’t think so; I suspect what we have here is an example of a mere assumption, one grounded in political outlook.