Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Obama: Cool Customer

I'm going to take this op-ed one step farther, and posit that Obama's calm, cool demeanor might not be totally inborn, but rather it could very well be a product of his maturing as a black man trying to make it in the white establishment's eyes.  (Harvard being a pretty good example.)  You don't make it very far among privileged whites talking like a wild-eyed preacher.  You do it talking like a lawyer, like a professor, and that's what Obama is -- or rather, that's what he's made of himself, in the white man's world.  John McCain, on the other hand, had to go thru most of his adult life before people -- his colleagues in the Senate, particularly -- started taking him to task publicly for his temper, instead of indulging his tirades as they did in the U.S. military.  Obama learned the importance of temperament in his 20s, a lesson it has taken McCain a whole lifetime to absorb, partly.


One Cool Customer
By Paul Waldman
October 20, 2008  |  Prospect.org

http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=one_cool_customer

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