Department of Roots

I meant to blog about this earlier, but Toby Harnden’s Telegraph magazine piece on Obama in Hawaii is well worth reading. There is, for example, this:

In late January, on his campaign plane as we flew from Kansas after the El Dorado visit, I asked the senator about the wanderlust in his family that he had chosen to reject. ‘Part of me settling in Chicago and marrying Michelle was a conscious decision to root myself,’ he told me. ‘There’s a glamour, there’s a romance to that kind of life and there’s a part of that still in me. But there’s a curse to it as well. You need a frame for the canvas, because too much freedom’s not freedom.’ He laughed and added, ‘I’m waxing too poetic here.’

In this one way the two candidates are rather similar.