As I Was Saying Earlier...

It's the Hero that the rapt fan is interested in, not the MacGuffin.

The left is just interested in the character, the Hero.

Take it away, New York Times:

WHITE HOUSE MEMO

In Obama’s Book List, Glimpses of His Journey

President Obama, with his daughter Malia, buying books last weekend at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington.

By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — President Obama has never visited the rugged mountains of Chechnya, but if he digs into one of the novels he bought last weekend, “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,” he will be transported to a land of unremitting violence and tragedy, where the innocent are caught up in war as often as the guilty.

Perhaps Mr. Obama is seeking a deeper understanding of the roots of the ethnic bloodletting after Chechnya vaulted back to the front pages this year with the Boston Marathon bombings. Or perhaps he is thinking about his troubled relationship with Russia.

Either way, the novel would give the president a more visceral feel for one of the world’s most brutal conflicts than the graphic intelligence papers that cross his desk.

“I imagine someone in his position gets a lot of facts and figures,” Anthony Marra, the author of the book, mused the other day. “But the novel is really about the experience, about the psyche and the soul.”

A reading list offers a rare window into the presidential mind, a peek at what a commander in chief may be thinking about beyond theprosaic and repetitive briefings that dominate his days.

Yes who cares about those repetitive boring briefings. I mean, there's nothing interesting going on, certainly, apart from the intense drama of his signature policy initiative going up in flames.

The writer claims the reading list is a "rare glimpse" into the president's mind. Just as Howard Fineman said last night that Obama's talking about his own Journey was a "rare" glimpse into a president's mind.

Obama seems to talk about this a lot, and the media seems to write about it with great intensity and interest.

I'm not sure if we can call a several-times-per-week occurrence rare.

In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the concern for Obama's actual record that's rare. The intense interest in Obama the Personality is the common thing.

The right has repeatedly belittled Obama as a "Celebrity." And indeed that is what he is. His fans are primarily interested in Barack the Man, Barack the Personality.

And not so much as Barack Obama, the executor of federal law.

...

Many of the nearly two dozen volumes Mr. Obama picked up at Washington’s Politics and Prose bookstore will be gifts, and certainly children’s tales like “Harold and the Purple Crayon” offer few lessons for dealing with Tea Party congressmen.

But even if they are given away, some of the books reflect what Mr. Obama has already read or would like to read. They are volumes about identity and reinvention, about what it means to be American, and about family, love, betrayal and redemption.

Yup-- movie themes. Book themes. Story themes.

Unlike many of his predecessors, who devoured American history and biographies, Mr. Obama’s tastes lean toward the literary, in keeping with a man whose first memoir deeply explored issues of race and self.

The media's almost as interested in this Funny Little Muddle called Barack Obama as Barack Obama himself.

And here's the straight-up admission of a big Obama fan that she identifies with Obama, as fans identify with a movie's main character.

...

“I think President Obama has really searched his soul in the way that writers do,” Ms. Strayed said. “I certainly, like many people, identify with Obama’s journey."

The New York Times, like Chris Matthews, is not interested in policy. It is solely interested in the travails and triumphs of their Hero, Barack Obama.

posted by Ace at 06:09 PM

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