A President From Nowhere
After Barack Obama or John McCain leaves the White House, where will future generations go to tour the boyhood home that shaped a president? Hawaii? Indonesia? The Panama Canal Zone?
For a long time, I lived near Hyde Park, where FDR was born and spent his years before moving into the White House. “All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River,” he said as he was making history, and American generations can still visit, see and touch the reality that formed him and told him who he was and could be.
For the candidates in this election there is, as Gertrude Stein said, no there there. “Obama and McCain,” Peggy Noonan writes, “are not from a place, but from an experience” and the “lack of placeness with both candidates contributes to a sense of their disjointedness, their floatingness.”
This 21st century identity gap started with George W. Bush, who was born in Connecticut, grew up in Texas and spent most of his life before politics trying to figure out who he was and where he belonged. No matter how often we see him cutting brush, our sense of who he is and where he came from remains hazy.
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4 Responses to “A President From Nowhere”
This moving around might be slightly unusual for their generations, but I think it's become quite routine for children today to spend their years in different homes, cities, and states.
I want to see both Barack Obama's and John McCain's birth certificates.
I think they've vetted McCain as “american” since he was born on a US military base outside the States.
But somewhere I read that Obama still hasn't produced a legitmate birth certificate and that when pressed, he finally submitted a photoshopped one on the internet for viewing.
Read this excerpt: Source: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs…
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“As a real forensic computer investigator (board certified, investigated thousands of cases, access to a full forensic computer lab, yadda yadda…) I decided to jump into the fray over the fake vs real discussion a week ago when a friend of mine challenged me to see what I could find (since according to him, the document was clearly a real one). He is what one would call a slightly rabid Obama supporter – he even has the tattoo to prove it.
First things first…I used the latest online KOS version (downloaded 6/29/2008) as it was supposedly the first released digital copy and the Decosta certificate from Israel Insider's blog (also downloaded 6/29/2008) as an exemplar of a real certificate.
Of forensic interest on the KOS version is the EXIF metadata (encoded in the digital image data) showing that the KOS certificate was modified or created with “Adobe Photoshop CS3 Macintosh” on “2008:06:12 08:42:36″. Assuming the EXIF data was added after the document was scanned (assuming it is real) and the document modified only by placing a black-out section over the Certificate Number or if it was converted and saved for web use this would not be too unusual. The Daily KOS released the story on “2008:06:12 08:44:37” which would be 2 minutes after the graphic's EXIF stamp was created. “
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If I tried to run for President, I guarantee they'd make me show my birth certificate and prove my country of origin. Heck, if I tried to visit Canada on vacation they'd make me do that.
Let's just see the certificate so I can rest assured we're going to nominate an american native to lose this Fall..
We need to determine if Obama can legally run for President. I assume at least he's over 35, but place of birth can disqualify him too…
Sillyette, get real.
LOL, AtlasShrugs Pam Geller as a source…