Obama is a GlowWorm

I don't agree with everything Peggy Noonan writes but I always love her writing because she's a great observer. This story helped me understand why others don't see what I see in Obama. I guess you could call it an aha moment. She's such a grownup writer, none of the usual anti-Obama rhetoric that is getting tedious. 

WSJ: Two weeks ago a journalist, a moderate liberal, spoke to me of what he called Mr. Obama's arrogance. I said I didn't think it was arrogance but high self-regard. He said there's no difference. I said no, arrogance has an air about it of pushing people around, insisting on your way. Mr. Obama doesn't seem like that. He took down a machine without raising his voice. Extremely high self-regard, though, can itself be a problem.

"What's wrong with that?" my friend said. "You want a self-confident president."

I said yes, but it brings up the Churchill question. Churchill had been scored by an acquaintance for his own very high self-regard, and responded with what was for him a certain sheepishness. "We're all worms," he said, "but I do believe I am a glowworm." He believed he was great, and he was. Is Mr. Obama a glowworm? Does he have real greatness in him? Or is he, say, a product of the self-esteem campaign, that movement within the schools and homes of our country the past 25 years that says the way to get a winner is to tell the kid he's a winner every day? You can get some true people of achievement that way, because some people need a lot of reinforcement to rise. But you can also get, not to put too fine a point of it, empty suits that take on a normal shape only because they're so puffed up with ego.

Is Mr. Obama's self-conception in line with his gifts, depth, wisdom and character? That's the big question, I suspect, on a number of minds.

It's strategy not vanity, she says.

What Mr. Obama has been doing, and this started before the European trip and continued throughout, is making people see him as president. He's doing this when he ambles back to the back of the plane and leans over the reporters, in his shirtsleeves, speaking affably into their held-up mics and recorders, at the end of the victorious tour. That's what presidents do. He speaks to rapturous crowds in foreign capitals. That's what presidents do.

He isn't doing this to show he's inevitable and invincible. He's doing it to give voters the impression that they've already seen President Obama. That he's kind of already been president, he's done and can do all the things presidents do, to the point that by the middle of October a certain portion of the country is going to think he already is president.

And he needs to give them this impression because he's a young black man from nowhere who's been well-known for less than a year. And he knows one of his biggest problems with older white voters is they just can't imagine a young black man from nowhere as president. He's helping them imagine.

It's not vanity, it's strategy.

I imagined President Obama long ago and I think he's a glowworm. I see his gifts, depth, wisdom and character. I've also done my homework. But I guess for others, it's not so easy. Older people are resistant to change and are more interested in security and familiarity, and as we've heard from McCain, he's been around for a long time. He's older than dirt. Obama is new to the scene and he is untested to a degree. 

But why can't pundits and journalists just argue those points without resorting to personal, hateful attacks on Obama, as if his purpose is to cast a shadow over the Earth. Why do they have to demonize him? Why does the election for the highest office in the nation have to be like a chicken fight?