As Obama begins the story of his parents and grandparents, the prose is flowing better; I may not have to struggle through endless vignettes of an old man who never thanks Obama for carrying his groceries up the stairs to his apartment and trying to figure out who he’s supposed to be a metaphor for.

Anyone who’s watched Obama’s stump speech knows that he, time after time, gets a pretty good laugh from the joke that he found out that he’s a distant relative of Dick Cheney. The joke usually goes, “Usually when they do that, you hope you’re related to somebody cool… Willie Mays or something. But not Dick Cheney. He’s the black sheep in our family.”

I was gobsmacked to learn that Barack Obama is apparently a (very) distant relative of another American who was elected to a presidency of several American states…

While one of my great-great-grandfathers, Christopher Columbus Clark, had been a decorated Union soldier, his wife’s mother was rumored to have been a second cousin of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.

Obama writes about his maternal grandfather with a great fondness, and assembles a portrait that is neither overly glowing nor critical, but there’s a description of his generation – what we call today the Greatest Generation – and it hits some unusual notes:

“He would always be like that, my grandfather, always searching for that new start, always running away from the familiar. By the time the family arrived in Hawaii, his character would have been fully formed, I think – the generosity and eagerness to please, the awkward mix of sophistication and provincialism, the rawness of emotion that could make him at once tactless and easily bruised. His was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.”

It’s tough to sum up a generation in a paragraph; obviously volumes have been filled trying to analyze those who came to adulthood in the Great Depression and World War Two. Obama’s initial description of embracing the open road seems apt – once you’ve survived great economic and wartime hardships, a postwar boom probably seems like paradise, with great developments around every corner. But then he offers McCarthyism’s “cowardice” as the other side of the coin of the valor of fighting Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito… and I just don’t see what Obama’s trying to get at. Were these two efforts driven by the same “enthusiasms,” and were they just as easily one as the other?

The subject of McCarthy obviously fills volumes. But was the flaw of the phenomenon “cowardice”? Aren’t we always being told that it was paranoia and persecution? (I’m going to presume that no one can convince Obama that there actually were communists within the United States government seeking to influence policy.) Aren’t those on the left telling us that McCarthy and his allies were reckless, never hesitating, too driven, too certain of their suspicions? Didn’t the left wish that McCarthy had less courage? How does McCarthyism become an enthusiasm of cowardice?

I suppose Obama is saying this generation cowardly went along with McCarthyism, but even then, I’m not quite sure how this reflects their “fundamental innocence.” (And if this is his assertion, it’s a pretty sweeping claim that the generation as a whole supported McCarthy’s efforts.) Is there such a thing as innocent paranoia?

Every once in a while in this book, you run across paragraphs like that, sentences of emotion-laden words strung together in a manner that sound great to the ear… but that don’t make much sense once you think about them.