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.