Who's the real Obama?

David Brooks suggests that the reason Barack Obama is not doing better in the polls, despite a big Democratic surge nationwide, is because people don't know who the real Barack Obama is. Excerpt:

When we're judging candidates (or friends), we don't just judge the individuals but the milieus that produced them. We judge them by the connections that exist beyond choice and the ground where they will go home to be laid to rest. Andrew Jackson was a backwoodsman. John Kennedy had his clan. Ronald Reagan was forever associated with the small-town virtues of Dixon and Jimmy Carter with Plains.

It is hard to plant Obama. Both he and his opponent have written coming-of-age tales about their fathers, but they are different in important ways. McCain's "Faith of My Fathers" is a story of a prodigal son. It is about an immature boy who suffers and discovers his place in the long line of warriors that produced him. Obama's "Dreams From My Father" is a journey forward, about a man who took the disparate parts of his past and constructed an identity of his own.

So who is the real Obama? For a conservative, Stanley Kurtz's must-read examination of the writing by and about Obama in the neighborhood and black press while Obama was in the Illinois legislature has to be really unsettling. Excerpt:

What they portray is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the Obama campaign. As details of Obama's early political career emerge into the light, his associations with such radical figures as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Reverend James Meeks, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn look less like peculiar instances of personal misjudgment and more like intentional political partnerships. At his core, in other words, the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan. Elected president, this man would presumably shift the country sharply to the left on all the key issues of the day-culture-war issues included. It's no wonder Obama has passed over his Springfield years in relative silence.

This lengthy, well-documented piece really does pull the rug out from under the idea of Obama as anything but a hard-core left-liberal on fiscal and cultural matters. It is all but impossible to reconcile the Obama that emerges from this period with the Obama we're presented with today. It suggests one of two things: either today's Obama is a fraud, an ultraliberal masquerading as a moderate, or he is a man of no fixed convictions, a Zelig-like chameleon able to be whatever he wants to be for the sake of advancing his own political career.

Again: who's the real Obama? With McCain, you may not much like what you get (I don't), but at least you know what you're getting. With Obama? He's a mystery. Brooks is right: a number of people can't commit to him because they aren't sure what they're committing to. The Kurtz piece dragged me closer to McCain, despite much kicking and screaming, because the thought of a president as radical as Obama in the White House with a Democratic Congress at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue is frankly unnerving.