I’m reading Jerome Corsi’s The Obama Nation, and as a connoisseur of Obama criticism, I’m finding it an alternately enjoyable and maddening read. Seventy-some pages in, Corsi delves deep into Obama’s background and family history.

I’ll have a fuller review when I’m finished, but it is somewhat refreshing to see someone go over Dreams From My Father with a fine-toothed comb and cataloging where it verifiably deviates from the historical record. Having said that, Corsi can get deep in the weeds, spending paragraphs at a time discussing Obama’s mother’s high school teachers or the inability to determine exactly where Obama lived in Jakarta. Obama’s defenders will instinctively dismiss Corsi, one of the co-authors of Unfit for Command, and insist that this is dirt-digging where there is none. And when you’re knee-deep in a lengthy passage on Kenyan tribal politics in the 1950s, it’s easy to find oneself asking, “What’s the point? What is this going to tell me about Obama, the senator, here today, who wants to be the next president?”

On the other hand, Obama isn’t running on a sterling record of legislative accomplishment. He’s running on his identity, who he is, the half-black, half-white, embodiment of hope who represents a new generation who can change Washington because he’s so different from everyone else in the political world. Republicans feared John McCain was going to run on his biography and hope that heroic wartime service was sufficient to win Americans’ votes. In fact, it is Obama who keeps repeating his life story – in his Philadelphia race speech, in his Berlin speech, in his campaign ads…

There are some stories today looking at Obama’s background, and the aspects and figures he chose to underplay in discussing his past. It’s interesting, if not race-changing, to learn that the elderly “Frank” who serves as an informal, embittered mentor to a teenage Obama was Frank Marshall Davis, a poet who was a member of the Communist Party. But I find it more interesting that Obama chose not to specifically identify “Frank” in his book, long before Obama had anything resembling a political career. In Dreams From My Father, Frank comes across as bitter, burned-out man, but one who is perhaps more willing to expose young Obama to the harsh realities of life than his loving but naive grandparents. (In fact, Frank seems like a typical Morgan Freeman character, and hopefully he’ll make a full recovery from his recent car accident, and play Davis in any inevitable biopic.)

David Brooks pointed out that a possible factor keeping Americans from fully embracing Obama is that with such a transient life, he’s touched a lot of places and institutions but not remained closely tied to many of them — a childhood in Hawaii, Indonesia, and back to Hawaii; educated in California, New York, and Cambridge; a young adulthood in New York and Chicago before settling in the Windy City, in but not “of” the state legislature, a private practice, Trinity United, the University of Chicago Law School, the U.S. Senate…

I and other right-of-center types had characterized this as a pattern of constantly moving on to the next higher position, before accumulating many great successes or failures in any one position. But there may be something beyond that, a kind of psychological restlessness. Throughout his book, Obama talks about wanting to find his place, his sense of belonging. But in nearly 50 years on this earth, he continues a certain nomadic style, never quite putting down deep roots and inseparable attachments. (He disowned the man he swore he never could, sought an office he insisted he wouldn’t, fought hard and rough to win his state legislative seat but was ready to move on within four years, etc.) What, exactly, is he looking for?

Besides 270 electoral votes, I mean.

UPDATE: A couple readers ask, “what’s wrong with moving around a lot?” Nothing. But if you haven’t read Brooks’ column yet, do so. It’s not the moving around that’s the centerpiece. It’s the fact that Obama breezes through institutions without leaving much of a mark. People liked him, but rarely say that he made an impact before moving on — was editor of Harvard Law Review but never wrote for it; was a well-meaning community activist who had one or two modestly successful projects in three years; taught at UofC Law but nobody remembers him doing much; was in the state legislature but got bored and ran for the House after four years, is liked by other U.S. Senators but obviously hasn’t done much since taking office in January 2005.

It’s not where you do it, it’s what you do in each place while you’re there…