About six years ago, Stephen King published a very smart novel called From a Buick Eight. A guy shows up in a car, and nobody knows where he's from. He leaves the car behind, and the car turns out to be this alien machine that eats everybody.
I like the book because it shows King's perfect instinct for what scares people. Place is character, and if you're from noplace, well, you could be a monster from out there who sucks people into man-eating cars.
John McCain isn't scary at all. We know where he comes from. He's a soldier, born into a military family (okay, in Panama, but never mind), with a soldier's story. That's fine. Abe Lincoln was from Illinois, and he split rails. Teddy Roosevelt was a rough-riding cowboy from somewhere in the West who charged up San Juan Hill and whipped Spain. George W. Bush is a Texas rancher who is always clearing brush, right?
And then there's Barack Obama, born in Hawaii to a Kenyan father and a white teenaged mother, raised by his mother in Kansas, went to Columbia, became editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review, a law professor, a Chicago politician, Illinois Senator, and self-proclaimed citizen of the world.
Okay, but where in hell is he from?
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Unfortunately, Barack Obama is too good and honest a person to have considered making stuff up about where he's from and who he is. Everyone else has done it. Abe Lincoln may have started off a farm boy but he became a crafty, lethally gifted trial lawyer who made scads of dough representing big railroad companies. T.R. was no westerner, but a rich Manhattanite who wrote books on ornithology, and while it's true he was a successful cattle rancher, and really was the baddest motherfucker in the west, the other cowboys still ragged on him about his glasses and he eventually went home to New York. And George W. Bush's roots aren't anywhere near Texas. The Bushes are deep-dyed Great Gatsby rich people from Connecticut. The ranch and the whole Texas thing, including the accent, was for show. It worked, too.
Where is Barack Obama's ranch? What's his stomping ground? Did he come up from the neighborhood in Chicago? Is he the True Face of the Kansas Plains? If he's from Hawaii, did he ever eat a pineapple or wear a lei or eat poi? Here is what his own website says about where he is from:
It has been the rich and varied experiences of Barack Obama's life - growing up in different places with people who had differing ideas - that have animated his political journey.
Now, as a Democrat who really, really wants to see the man elected president, I have to say that this won't do. Barack Obama has to pick his ranch, whatever it may be. He's an Illinois Senator. Let him campaign from Illinois backgrounds, Illinois towns, from Chicago. Let people see him in Illinois, visualize him there. That's where he lives. Let him show it. Because until he does, until people can visualize him in a physical place, he will continue to be the man from nowhere.
McCain's new advisers know that perfectly well. Like Stephen King, they make their living scaring people, only in a bad way--not for fun, but for political power. If Barack Obama continues to have no physical home that people associate with him, then the McCain people will keep up the scary alien story they know is lurking deep in the cellar-door lockup of the public mind. They will keep showing the parked car there in the driveway, and they will make insinuating remarks about it, and they will keep asking you if you are really serious about getting into that thing.
And it could work. The man from nowhere is a story that always gets everyone's attention, and the hero is always a man who is from someplace. Or who says he is.