John Kass told a couple of stories about Barack Obama this past week that will change the way you think of him. The president was visiting the General Assembly in Springfield, where he got his start in politics, and Kass knew he must speak. “These are true stories,” Kass wrote. “And now is the time to tell them.”
End of story.
I get it. In 1969 I happened to spend an hour or two with an elderly Austrian man named Kurt von Schuschnigg. In 1938 he was the chancellor who surrendered Austria to Hitler in the Anschluss. When we met, he talked not of Hitler but of the clam chowder he enjoyed so much when he taught political science in Saint Louis after the war. Yet, surely, embedded in his sentimentality there must be profound insights about the origins of World War II! It’s simply a matter of teasing them out.
