[eyeroll]. Plane tickets cost money; BO Sr. would have been dependent on his sponsors for the funds and Ann Dunham her family, which would have meant in 1961 her father’s salary and commissions from selling furniture. Note, in 1961, the number of passenger trips on commercial airlines was such in a given year that an ordinary person could expect to board a flight once every 15 or 20 years. I spent my young years in a handsome suburb of a then-prosperous city. The only kids I knew who had traveled abroad were (1) a couple of faculty brats who had done so on the foundation dime and (2) one girl whose family trip to the Canary Islands led her to being subject to ridicule for a year afterward. It was only when Freddie Laker’s business took off in 1978 that you began to see foreign travel among roughly ordinary people with families.

While we’re at it, the leftoid youths you’re thinking of were fancy bourgeois university students ca. 1970, not the furniture salesman’s daughter a decade earlier.

“Obama’s attitudes are perfectly banal among professional-managerial employees, especially those employed in the educational apparat. There’s never been anyone in the White House with those attitudes. Clinton is the sum of his appetites; he looks down on others only in the way a con man looks down on his marks. Jimmy Carter went from the Navy to the family agribusiness to facing down the local political boss in Sumter County, Ga. I don’t think he’s a man without a chest; there is something of the capon about him.”

Credit where due. You’ve nailed them all. The Carter bit is masterful.

[laughter]

Yep. The deputy dean of students.

Obama’s attitudes are perfectly banal among professional-managerial employees, especially those employed in the educational apparat. There’s never been anyone in the White House with those attitudes. Clinton is the sum of his appetites; he looks down on others only in the way a con man looks down on his marks. Jimmy Carter went from the Navy to the family agribusiness to facing down the local political boss in Sumter County, Ga. I don’t think he’s a man without a chest; there is something of the capon about him.

Um, no.
(Well….make that, “Perhaps; but only if one glorifies in misprision, which—it is true—can be creative, refreshing, original and thought-provoking…but alas not always is….” True, who could fail to be impressed, even dazzled, by those creased pants I ask you?…)

Anyway, here’s something that that “ordinary, white liberal”‘s rambunctious and irrepressible pals in Teheran have been up to…
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/308837

Maybe even before the book was ghost-written.

Rudy Giuliani has done and said some dumb things over the past few years, but I was struck by his saying a while back that Obama does not really love this country, “not like we do”, or something like that. It was a harsh thing to say and of course the “we” part is susceptible to the charge of racism, but I think it was correct, and gets to the fundamental problem with Obama. I take the “we” to be more or less ordinary Americans with a more or less ordinary affection for the country, who do not see it as a lump of highly suspect clay which one *might* be able to fundamentally transform.