A Writer for President?

I've caved to the publicity radiating from the election campaign and today bought Obama's autobiographical Dreams From My Father, this being the first time I've ever read a book written by a candidate for president and it's so weird to be learning all these personal details about this image on the TV screen, Obama either a gifted writer, or a writer with a gifted editor, or both, cf. p. 42: "She [his Mother] wasn't prepared for the loneliness. It was constant, like a shortness of breath," and there's an earlier reference to the "trembling plane of the Pacific" touching the time he lived in Hawaii. A gifted writer in the White House? there's a new wrinkle, though I know Teddy Roosevelt wrote a number of books, none of which I've read, the only work by a president I've ever looked at having been a paperback by JFK on US foreign policy that I found at the Central Square subway stop and read perhaps five pages of; of course no matter who wins the election, History's major problem--class warfare--will continue to unfold, but this doesn't necessarily mean it's pointless to vote for someone who appears to have a genuine interest in social justice--who knows, perhaps History will pivot on him, a vote for McCain clearly representing mindless continuation of the status quo. I've finished the first draft of Screenplay No. 2 and started rewriting it tonight.

Dreams From My Father, New York: Three Rivers, 1995.