With the campaign artifice gone and the need to desperately see yourself reflected in Barack Obama a bit less urgent, we can examine the man we've elected. Recent news updates on his church-going and his kids school-going are troubling to those on the left and right who painted the candidate into an ideological corner. What if Barack Obama's not actually a secret rabid campus radical Marxist? Maybe he's not an aggrieved radical! Maybe Bill Ayers was just some guy from the neighborhood! What if Barack Obama is actually a mild-mannered upwardly mobile college professor from an upper-middle class neighborhood with fairly standard-issue yuppie family values? Then no one's happy! Let's examine the crucial flip-flops! Church! Obama more or less admitted in his book that his selection of the Trinity Church was done more out of a conscious, intellectual desire to commit to a community and a religious philosophy than it was some sort of profound religious awakening—he'd always been "a Christian," but he had to select a particular church to join a community of Christians. You know, he goes for the spirituality and community, not because he's one of those Jesus Freaks. When he was then forced to leave the church, he seems to have taken it in stride, switching his routine to more gym workouts instead of worship. Now Obama is being courted by churches in DC. The last couple presidents had to make big shows of attending church the first couple weeks they spent in office, though of course the Clintons and both Bush's had scarcely been church folk before or since taking office. Obama, on the other hand, actually regularly attended church, with his family, for years! Because they led a normal life in a community of people who attended church! And the traditionally black church they attended was actually affiliated with the incredibly mainstream United Church of Christ! Security concerns do tend to preclude weekly church attendance by a president, but we imagine they'll occasionally attend services at some boring mainstream Protestant church near the White House. School! Barack Obama opposes school voucher programs because, obviously, he believes we should work on fixing our public schools instead of encouraging gifted children to abandon the public schools in even greater numbers. But, you know, he's a well-off guy with two young girls who is moving to Washington, DC, a miserable and impoverished city with some of the worst schools in the country, so his daughters will be attending Chelsea Clinton's alma mater, Sidwell Friends. Sidwell is the most prestigious of all the famous Washington private schools, of course—and it beat out the more liberal hippy-dippy Georgetown Day, the first integrated school in Washington, with a curriculum "wrapped around issues of diversity and justice." Yes, but Sidwell is a little more academically rigorous, and elite. They're not like the Carters, sending their poor kid to a public school to make some kind of political point. Jeez! Politics! Barack Obama reversed himself to varying degrees on FISA, Don't Ask Don't Tell, and the Bush tax cuts. Some of his appointees, like new Attorney General Eric Holder and, hey, Hillary Clinton, are further to the right than he claimed to be on controversial issues (the drug war and Iraq, respectively). But those things pale in comparison to the lifestyle-y authenticity self-identification bullshit that politics is really based on. Barack Obama—he's just like us, if you're a constitutional law professor married to a lawyer.
