The heart of Obama’s appeal: symbolism

As Jason Zengerle says, this sort of thing trumps anything the “Wife of a Man from Hope” can produce. Even cynics and Kennedy-haters are permitted to smile at this. Speaking at Ted Kennedy’s endorsement palooza yesterday Obama told this story:

It’s about whether we’re going to seize this moment to write the next great American story. So someday we can tell our children that this was the time when we healed our nation. This was the time when we repaired our world. And this was the time when we renewed the America that has led generations of weary travelers from all over the world to find opportunity, and liberty, and hope on our doorstep. One of these travelers was my father. I barely knew him, but when, after his death, I finally took my first trip to his tiny village in Kenya and asked my grandmother if there was anything left from him, she opened a trunk and took out a stack of letters, which she handed to me.There