My Scene colleague Jim Manzi objects to Obama’s Wesleyan commencement address, and finds particularly risible Obama’s habit of referring the theme of the address (which is the boilerplate appeal to public service and “giving back”) back to his own biography.  I take his point, and one might extend the same criticism to almost every major address Obama has given that is not specifically policy-oriented (the subtext of which might be, “I am the change History has been waiting for”), but why is it any more or less annoying in principle when Obama does this?  John McCain endlessly refers back to his military service, as he has every right to do, and certainly no one (certainly no one sane) is going to attempt to make McCain’s time in the Navy and his years as a tortured POW and Obama’s lean years on the South Side into equivalent experiences of hardship, since they are not remotely equivalent.  McCain prominently placed his military service at the center of his heavy-handed, “An American President Americans have been waiting for” ad, whose official title was McCain’s serial number, for goodness’ sake!  In many of his public remarks, he defines his campaign, as he did eight years ago, in terms of inspiring a new generation to dedicate themselves to a “cause greater than themselves.”  If there is one constant mantra of McCainism, such as it is, it is this.  He implicitly and explicitly refers to his own service as a model for public service all the time. 

The reason why so many have been objecting to Obama’s commencement address is not that Obama has held himself up as a role model, but that Manzi and others are not terribly interested in taking Obama as an “exemplar of the well-lived life.”  Fair enough, but what does Manzi expect from most politicians, especially those who have traveled the conventional path of post-graduate school, activism and politics?  Are they going to denigrate what they consider to be important forms of public service, even if they seem obviously narrow, constrained and unimaginative to the rest of us?  Are government employees really going to dwell at length on the virtues of entrepreneurship and for-profit work?  Someone who worked as an activist and then went into politics is going to frame his appeal to public service in terms of his own experience.  Also, it is probably easier for a college student audience to relate to this sort of boilerplate call to “give back” if the speaker can provide some concrete examples from his own life. 

Many people have noticed that Obama did not mention military service in his speech, which viewed as a strictly political matter seems like the sort of glaring oversight that should be caught by one of his advisors or noticed by the candidate himself, since it has now become common to assume in (incorrect and) Barone-like fashion that he never says anything about honouring those in the military.  Then again, it might have seemed out of place to him for a couple of reasons: first of all, he knows that the vast majority of his audience is not going to go into military service, and second he might have assumed that he would not have been able to make an appeal to that kind of service with enough credibility to make it worth doing.  What his critics probably assume is a snub to those in the service or a built-in bias against military service may have been an attempt to focus the theme of his speech and make the appeal to public service–as he understands that service–in the most effective way given the audience he was addressing. 

Manzi concludes, “Unfortunately, Obama’s guidance pretty much boils down to: Greenpeace good; Goldman, Sachs bad; U.S. Army not worth mentioning.”  Looked at yet another way: what would you expect a left-liberal Democratic presidential candidate to say that doesn’t in some way boil down to something very much like this?  We might boil down some John McCain speeches to their most simple elements, and it would come out sounding fairly absurd and probably more dangerous.

As for the charge of solipsism, one could more easily make the case that most of the Obama campaign has been an exercise in this.

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