Whatever BHO Senior did might be interesting but hardly ascribable to Barack Obama Jr. You can’t choose your relatives. But you can choose your friends, and policies and personal behavior. So in this particular case maybe its better to focus on what the candidate did (or didn’t do) than on the shennanigans of his dad.

Part, but by no means all of BHO’s appeal is the attraction of the exotic. In an earlier post I recounted an incident in 1910 when Virginia Woolf boarded the HMS Dreadnought posing as interpreter for the entourage of “Sultan of Zanzibar” who pretended to inspect the ship with a bunch of British actors in theatrical costume. There is nothing a certain audience wants better than the stage version of the real thing, not knowing what the real thing is anyway. The British Accent Guy, the Irishman with the vest, potato nose and leprechaun boots. I am constantly amazed at how disappointed people at hearing me speak English. I think I would be much further ahead in life if I styled myself as an exotic. Fabio always does better than Larry. So I’m not sure that emphasizing the strangeness of BHO’s dad will do anything but attract a certain section of public who derive a frisson from proximity with the novel.