TWO OBAMAS IN ONE:

Consider a commencement address by newly elected senator Barack Obama at Knox College in 2005. “So let’s dream,” said our future president. Make sure that college is “affordable for everyone who wants to go,” among other things, and “that old Maytag plant could re-open its doors as an Ethanol refinery that turned corn into fuel. Down the street, a biotechnology research lab could open up on the cusp of discovering a cure for cancer.” How did we reach the point where a politician could, as Kesler writes, “dangle before the citizens of Galesburg, Illinois, home of Knox College, the prospect not merely of a biotech research lab opening up down the street, but one that is on the verge of curing cancer”?

— From “Escape From Utopia” in the October 15th issue of National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru’s review of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism, by Charles R. Kesler.

“We need additional federal public transportation dollars flowing to the highest need communities. We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs,” where, the implication is, the rich white people live. Instead, Obama says, federal money should flow to “our neighborhoods”: “We should be investing in minority-owned businesses, in our neighborhoods, so people don’t have to travel from miles away.”

— From the Daily Caller’s article last night on Obama’s 2007 speech to Hampton University in Virginia.

Of course, Obama has long had an ambivalent relationship with suburbia — which he has professed bores him, and which houses those bitter, clinging commuters “going through the motions” — that is, earning an honest wage in private industry for their work, the prospect of which he finds “scary.”

Hey, nobody said being Anthropologist In Chief was easy.