“Obama says that one of his tasks for the convention is to help people understand who he is and where he came from. That’s his challenge because voters — some innocently, some not so innocently — wonder whether he shares their values. It is the weakness Hillary Clinton’s strategist Mark Penn tried to exploit, explaining in one of his strategy memos that voters would find that Obama was ‘not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values.’ What’s striking about the political distance Obama has traveled since 2004 is that the idea that he was emblematic of the American dream was not something he had to prove four years ago. It was self-evident. It was one of the reasons he was speaking in the first place.” (08/27/08)