So, unless you’ve paid no attention to the race so far, you’ve probably heard that Barack Obama could have made more money in the past by taking different jobs, but chose other ones.

From his strategist:

“This is a central part of his life and story,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s chief campaign strategist. “He could have written his ticket at any law firm in the country. . . . He decided instead that he wanted to be a civil rights attorney, and he signed up with a small firm that had a reputation for doing this kind of work.”

From his wife:

Michelle Obama: “Barack, yeah, went back to law school. So did I. But he didn’t go into corporate America and make a lot of money. He could have. What did he do? He became a civil rights attorney in a small firm in Chicago, and a Constitutional law scholar. Why? Because to whom much is given, much is expected. And when you’re given the gift of advocacy, you don’t sell it to the highest bidder, according to Barack. So Barack spent years in the shadows when no one was looking, working on issues of justice and fairness, housing discrimination, employment discrimination, voting rights.”
Also: “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she told a group of women at a day-care center. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.”

In his ads:

Obama’s law professor Laurence Tribe: “What was most remarkable about him was that even though he could have written his ticket with any Wall Street law firm and had offers for clerkships on circuit courts with a virtual pathway to a Supreme Court clerkship, he didn’t. He chose instead to go back to the South Side of Chicago and work with the community, registering voters, doing civil rights work. He was really just doing good things with his legal education. It was an inspiration to watch.”

And apparently it’s been a longtime theme of Obama’s campaigns. In David Mendell’s biography of the Illinois senator, Obama: From Promise To Power, he writes: “By most accounts, in the Rush contest [the 2000 Democratic House primary] Obama was too fond of reciting his impressive resume, too often mentioned that he had forsaken a high-priced law firm for public office and too often spoke in the high-minded prose of a constitutional law lecturer, all of which could make him appear condescending to his audience.”

Obama could have taken jobs that would have paid a lot more. We get it.

Clearly, this is something that Obama and those around him see as one of his key character strengths. He invokes this moral trump card almost as often as John Kerry told us he served in Vietnam.

(If Michelle Obama indeed believes the key criteria for picking the next president is the kinds of “choices he made while no one was looking,” fine. I’m leaning towards the candidate who turned down early release from torturous imprisonment because he knew the purpose of his captors’ offer was to break the will of the other prisoners.)

In a way, this is just an updated way of the candidate emphasizing humble roots, the 2008 version of “I was born in a log cabin.” (I know, I know, judging by his press coverage, Obama was born in a manger.)

But even if the electorate buys into the ‘taking a low-paying job reveals moral strength; taking a high-paying job reveals moral weakness’ argument, John McCain has been playing this card longer and more effectively. Mind you, when he says it, fans of Mitt Romney grind their teeth at the insinuation that successful entrepreneurship is somehow sinister or ignoble. McCain’s military family wasn’t poor, obviously, but you don’t join the armed forces to get wealthy. And McCain beat the “I led for patriotism, not for profit” drum throughout the primaries.

The expected reaction to this I-could-have-made-millions-but-chose-otherwise is for the public to beam and salute Obama’s appetite to make a difference instead of a fortune. (He and Michelle have actually accumulated a small fortune, thanks to his book sales and her dramatic post-2004 salary increases.)

But the more this note is repeated, I’m reminded of someone else. That guy in your office. You know, that guy who’s always, sometimes subtly and not so subtly reminding you how lucky you are that he works here. How he could be making more money elsewhere. How he knows he’s overqualified, but he isn’t interested in material things, and he feels the best way to demonstrate that modesty is to constantly remind you of it.