The pre-campaign memoirs of B. Hussein Obama and John Sidney McCain, like their presidential candidacies, couldn’t be more different, despite similiar titles: Obama’s Dreams from My Father and McCain’s Faith of My Fathers.
Mac’s book, published in 2000, is the spirited yet self-deprecating narrative of two fighting admirals, Mac’s father and grandfather, and his use of their examples about duty and honor to survive five years of torture and abuse as a prisoner of war with his self-respect intact.
Obama’s tale, published three years earlier, is of his search for identity, and for the black father who abandoned him and then died in an accident. Barry had little faith or much of anything else to fall back on, except for the sacrifices of his mother’s white, working-class family. Yet race, rather than the example of the white grandmother who raised him, became his guiding conception. In the end, as Victor Davis Hanson puts it, I just couldn’t take his "idealization and myth-making about a polygamist, alcoholic and absentee Marxist father."
Not many people will bother to read both books, I’m sure, but if they do, they’ll have no trouble figuring out who’d make the best president of the United States.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 