Michiko Kakutani all but canonizes first term Senator Barack Obama, in her New York Times review of his second book, The Audacity of Hope. This particular passage really sticks in my craw.

Reporters and politicians continually use the word authenticity to describe Mr. Obama, pointing to his ability to come across to voters as a regular person, not a prepackaged pol. And in these pages he often speaks to the reader as if he were an old friend from back in the day, salting policy recommendations with colorful asides about the absurdities of political life.

Authenticity is, of course, the new all—important virtue for the narcissists of the left.

Obama's recent Roots trip to Kenya, to which his father departed after abandoning him to be raised by his Caucasian mother, his chosen identity as a black figure, and his frequent invocation of the image of an African goat herder as his father do not ring authentic to me, though of course the man can choose any identity he likes. He postures as a moderate, though his leftist views may be more extreme than he acknowledges, does not strike me as authentic. And his wife's tripling of income at her hospital job after his election does not strike me as authentic, either.

In fact, he strikes me as highly packaged. But then, I do not write from the lofty perch of a book reviewer at the Times. Pinch would never have me.

Hat tip: Ed Lasky 

Thomas Lifson   10 17 06