A reader, a brilliant and sensitive lawyer in New York, who, like me, is within a couple of years of Obama, age-wise, writes the following:
…the question keeps on being asked whether the Wright affair is a sign of Obama’s insincerity or his lack of judgment. I think it’s both, and I think it’s all part of a bigger problem with Obama: He’s not yet a full adult. What I mean by this is that he’s still working out, in full view of all of us, his issues with his family (including that poor grandmother), his race, his religion, etc. (less so, alas, his far-left politics). It’s all very interesting, I guess, if you have any affinity with him to begin with (count me out), but it’s all so undergraduate. He conveys the notion of still being that bright college kid (although not as bright as advertised), asking all those big questions and making all those big speeches at the dinner table. Moreover, as a corollary, he’s a youngish overachiever who, like many of them as they age, doesn’t handle very well the issue of what to do when his precociousness isn’t sufficient to recommend him for further advancement. His wife, of course, seems to be permanently stuck between the pages of her undergraduate thesis, written while she was black at Princeton, on the subject of being black at Princeton.
The contrast between this young lightweight and McCain will continue to be evident to all the adults voting in November. I think this completely defuses, and flips back, the McCain age issue.
A lady from Texas farm country writes, similarly:
I speak with the same people at various stores and such every day, probably about one half of them black. When this all started we eyed one another carefully. I’m determined to overcome this silliness one by one in my world, brought about by a naïve, young man who still doesn’t know who he is, and a crazy, old, angry coot!
Personally, I think this hits the nail on the head. Barack Obama doesn’t quite know who he is. Faced with radical divisiveness, he offers all that talk about “being about bridging the gaps.” We don’t need a bridge. We need a leader. And a leader of so large and powerful an entity as the United States must know himself well. When you are buffeted by circumstances, it is crucial to have a solid core. Obama, as the lawyer notes above, is still working it out. Always better to do that in private.