Henry V - President-Elect Hal

Appetite-wetters,

In a Washington Post opinion piece last October, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote the following:

"Obama has shown that he is a man of limited experience, questionable convictions, deeply troubling associations (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko) and an alarming lack of self-definition -- do you really know who he is and what he believes? Nonetheless, he's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president."

I'm amused by how often our politics and politicians seem to evoke Shakespeare's. Regardless of whatever it is that Krauthammer believes about Obama's intellect, what strikes me is his concern (echoed by others) that we don't know the "real" Obama and that he's hung out with the wrong sort of people, although I'd take Falstaff, Bardolph, and Poins over Wright, Ayers, and Rezko any day.

Perhaps, if we dig up an old Obama Facebook page, on it we'll find him writing at the outset of his lengthy campaign: "Yet herein I will imitate the sun who doth permit the base contagious clouds to smother up his beauty from the world, that, when he please again to be himself, being wanted, he may be more wondered at by breaking through the foul and ugly mists of vapors that did seem to strangle him."

For 67 million voters, it sure worked out that way. So, as you read, does Obama fit the Henry V comparison?

Randall