Looks like you can disown your family

National Review, June 30, 2008

Looks like you can disown your family. When the nation first took note of Barack Obama's crackpot racist church, he made a great fuss about how it was woven into his life, the good and the not-so-good together, just like kin. But after the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a rancid white Catholic priest, took the pulpit to mock Hillary Clinton, Obama had had enough and left the congregation.

Obama's life story, especially his search for fathers, mentors, and an identity, is compelling. He has written about it rather well, and a great writer could find in it the materials for art. The question that will dog him, from now to November, and perhaps beyond, is, do we want to entrust the presidency to an earnest, ambitious, still-unformed man who, on the eve of his 47th birthday, knows where he wants to go, but not yet who he is, and where he has been? The presidency is not an internship, and it should not be a novel.