The sum wisdom of the political pundits I have seen, heard and read over the last week reacting to Obama’s trip to Europe and the Middle East seems to be that it was a wash. Yeah, he got to look presidential in front of all kinds of adoring Germans (though leave it Charles Krauthammer to make a Hitler comparison) and those pictures of him with Olmert, al-Maliki, Sarkozy and the fighting men and women he played basketball with will make for nice photos in a campaign montage come September. But meanwhile, back in the states, people were still freaking out about the economy and McCain was mocking his every move. It’s like coming back from a long vacation, only to have your resentful coworkers dump everything they can on your desk. 

John Kerry could be the first to tell him that people don’t care what they think of you in France. (The fact that Kerry was fluent in French was something some voters actually held against him, and I noted with interest Obama’s admission that he doesn’t speak any foreign language.) And that Brother from Another Planet routine that some people (like me) find so compelling may be too cool for school. One of the reasons I was drawn to the candidate was because he is cool under pressure; he makes me think of Joe Montana or Michael Jordan, great athletes who kept their heads while all about them were headed for the exits. I want a president who’s cool under pressure, and so should you; but voters also want one with a pulse. I suspect his resting heart rate is better than Lance Armstrong’s.

The danger of playing the wise extraterrestrial is that voters may confuse him with Mr. Spock. By remaining rational and unflappable, they’ll start to think he’s…different than them, with all the code implied by that adjective. It doesn’t concern me when polls suggest that voters can’t relate to his personal history: who the hell could? But he does need to find a way to keep consistently reminding people of his common bonds with them: his faith, his family, his struggles, and his losses (his father’s disappearance, his mother’s death). Because as popular as the character was, nobody wanted Spock to run the Enterprise. They wanted Capt. Kirk: flawed, human, but right most of the time. 

Of course, if Obama’s Spock then McCain has got to be Bones: always blowing a gasket over something, imagining slights and assumptions at every turn (“Dammit, Jim, I’m a senator not an economist!”). Personally, I think Obama is missing an opportunity not appearing on stage with McCain now, before the conventions. Network news and the major newspapers seem to be giving the Arizona senator a free ride, ignoring his daily gaffes and occasional outbursts. Seeing him go off like a string of firecrackers on a national stage might make some undecided voters think twice about how hot they want their next president to be.

Maybe Obama will bury the hatchet with Bill Clinton before the race is through and get some pointers; now there’s a man who could do empathy! There was a moment in one of the ’92 presidential debates that historians point to when discussing his rise to the White House: a woman asks a question about the recession and the national debt and Bush I says something about stimulating the economy. Clinton walked to the edge of crowd and asks her, “Tell me how it’s affected you, again?” He looked like the soul of compassion next to Pappy, just as Obama still might when reaching out to some mortal while standing next to a sputtering roman candle. 

Don’t worry! Do not redirect your browser, or reach for the remote. It’s the same old site (and I mean that in the nicest way possible) filled with the same old insights and conventional wisdom I’ve been dispensing for years. Time for a redesign is all, which I pulled off with the help of Cy Culpin at Faded Halo. (The largish photo of me was taken by my friend Diane Epstein when we were in Rome over Christmas. Hence the scarf, the shades, the attitude.) There’s some new stuff on the site — check out the first chapter of my novel in Fiction, new stories in Memoir and Journalism, and the introduction to the book I did with Josh Rushing, Mission: Al Jazeera, in Books. Feel free to take things down off the shelves but remember: You break it, you own it. 

As if one Sean Elder wasn’t quite enough, I got a message on my Facebook wall from another Sean Elder, in Scotland, reminding me that I was not alone, and that Elder was a Scottish name. Point taken, Sean. The so-called Scots-Irish of the US were so called to a) avoid being lumped in with the more Catholic Irish who later swarmed these shores and b) to let all comers know that we would be happy to drink with them but not necessarily to pick up the tab. 

He’s not the only one, by the way. I have been contacted by several Sean Elder’s on the internet over the years, and heard-tell of others (including one that had a small role in American Pie). One gets email from my students and kindly forwards it to me; another explained the origins of my grandfather’s name to me. The latest just asked me to join a group called We Are Sean Elder. The membership bar was fairly low. 

I suggested we all get together some day. I mean, Keith Kelly has his Kelly Gang (which raises money each year for some worthy cause) and my old agent, Ellen Levine, once had lunch with a bunch of other women with the same name, all in NY media. I don’t know what all I have in common with the other Sean Elders of the world but it would be fun to break bread with them. When the waiter came with the check we could say, “Sean Elder is getting this one.”

The New York Times reports this morning that McCain’s people have taken to calling their opponent “The One.” And not in a nice way. After complaining about the press’s coverage of Obama’s trip abroad, McCain adviser and speechwriter Mark Salter said, “There is nothing you can do about it. ‘The One’ went to Europe and attention must be paid.”

It’s a double-bind for McCain. He was the one who kept nagging Obama about going to Iraq and Afghanistan to see “conditions on the ground,” and now that he’s gone and done that, and the prime minister of Iraq has made it clear he agrees with the Democrat’s 16-month withdrawal timetable and US troops have cheered his arrival, McCain can only sputter. There may yet be fallout from Obama’s meetings (last night the talking heads of cable news were already starting to cluck about the Dems’ presumptive nominee being presumptuously presidential in talking about his meetings with al-Maliki and other heads of state) but I find it amusing that they are trying to damn their opponent by labeling him the Messiah.

In the Matrix movies Keanu Reeves played Neo, whose name is an anagram for One, as in The One, as in the hero who would awaken from a machine-induced slumber and lead the people of the future to overthrow the robots that were using them like AA batteries. Despite its disappointing sequels (and the very notion that Keanu Reeves might be our saviour — he played the Buddha once, too, meaning Hollywood’s concept of enlightenment is literally half-baked) The Matrix worked because it drew on the universal spiritual idea of awakening and, yes, The One who can show you how it’s done. (The slo-mo bullet-dodging and Carrie-Anne Moss’s bondage outfits helped, too.)

Of course, Salter’s dig is just part of the Republican’s larger plaint: the media is smitten with Obama and ignoring their decent, honorable candidate. In an ad for an upcoming independent propaganda film entitled Hype: The Obama Effect Tucker Carlson sniffs, “The press loves Obama. I mean not just love but sort of like an early teenage crush.” (Carlson, a rapidly fading former conservative darling, should know about such crushes: his plan to become the next George Will — “I’ve got the bow tie!” — was snuffed when Jon Stewart famously bitch-slapped him on CNN’s now extinct Crossfire back in 2004. “You have a responsibility to the public discourse and you failed miserably” may have been the nicest thing the Daily Show host said to him.)

This tack, familiar to most kids with young siblings (“Stop paying attention to him! Look at me!”) didn’t work for Hillary and it won’t work for McCain. It’s like Perry Como complaining to Ed Sullivan that the Beatles get top billing because the kids think they’re so great. The press is smitten, okay — with a once-in-lifetime political story of a politician’s meteoric and seemingly unstoppable rise, and you can’t blame lifelong political reporters from covering this comet’s trajectory with some sense of wonder (if not One-der). McCain’s campaign needs a juju infusion, and quick, and putting Mitt Romney on the ticket ain’t going to do it. Maybe they’re hoping that the Tab Hunter of the GOP primaries will make McCain look more lifelike but without a messiah of their own, the Republicans are dead in November. Back to the desert, boys.

The cover story in the current Newsweek, “Finding His Faith” by Lisa Miller and Richard Wolffe, concerns Obama’s spirituality: what it is and how did he get it. The timing is good: there has been some hand-wringing on the part of some Democrats lately about his attempts to woo religious voters, and those who feel like they are losing their candidate to the land of the middle need a reality check. His religion has always been a cornerstone of his philosophy (though not the only one, unlike our current president who could only name one philosopher: Jesus H. Christ), and those voters of faith who are just now weighing their options need to know that, too.

If you’ve read his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, you know that young Obama was a seeker. This article rightly credits his openness to different religious approaches to his mother, who was something of a hippie. Aside from marrying the black guy and moving to Hawaii and Indonesia there is further proof of her hippieness in what Obama’s half-sister (she’s named Maya, for godsake!) says was Mom’s favorite spiritual text: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, a collection of interviews Bill Moyers did with the Jungian teacher. True to her code, she took her kids to Christian churches and Buddhist temples, and young Barry kept an open mind throughout.

How this aspect of the candidate’s story plays may depend on the age of the voter, with younger ones more accepting than older, but scratch most people of faith of any age and you will find a past filled with doubt and questioning, seeking and, ultimately, more tolerance for different approaches than hardcore fundamentalists might allow. (Not to say the latter represent any kind of majority: The Newsweek piece cites a Pew Research survey that shows 70 percent of Americans agreeing with the statement that “many religions can lead to eternal life.”) As important as mother Ann’s tolerance was to the senator’s own attitude, I think the absence of a father has much to do with his posture as well.

Obama’s father was an African Muslim who left when he was two years old. (That these facts alone have not prevented him from being the presumptive nominee of a major party says a lot about a more accepting America.) Mine left when I was somewhat older but I think his absence was more of an influence on my later life than his presence had been before. Not that he represented religious tenets; he had quit his Protestant faith just as my mother had abandoned Catholicism as soon as he left home. But without him around I had fewer boundaries, and one less person to ask for answers. As my brother Ethan said, “I didn’t have anyone around to show me the moon,” though sooner or later it finds the fortunate. Looking at it we see faces of our own imagining, drawn by our own longing.

John Edwards ran his presidential campaign into the ground talking about the two Americas of the rich and the poor that not enough people — certainly not enough rich people — wanted to hear about. It is part of the irony of wealth in America that most well-to-do people do not see themselves as such; their idea of a Sophie’s choice is trying to decide whether to give up the country house or the SUV. My God, we might actually have to give up both!

But there are another two Americas that exist in this great land, as made clear by the stink over this week’s New Yorker cover. You know, it depicts Obama and Michelle as a pair of Muslim jihadists and black liberation soldiers, burning flags and giving each other what a former Fox News anchor called a terrorist fist jab.

The illustration, by long time New Yorker illustrator Barry Blitt, drew immediate condemnation from Obama’s camp, John McCain, and now a slew of New York politicians have piled on as well, gathering outside Conde Nast’s offices today to demand an apology. “It was offensive to the values that New Yorkers have, it was offensive to the values that Americans have, and it is beyond just an insult,” said State Senator Bill Perkins.

All of which has left the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, puzzled. “The intention is to satirize not Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, but, in fact, to hold a pretty harsh light up to the rumors, innuendos, lies about the Obamas that have come up — that they are somehow insufficiently patriotic or soft on terrorism,” he told NPR today. His tone of bewilderment is notable; he seems to be saying, Isn’t it obvious that this is a joke? We’re the New Yorker. What, do you think anyone here is going to vote for John McCain?

This may be one of the few times that Remnick finds himself on the same side of an issue as a commentator at Fox News, who couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about either. Which brings me to my two Americas theory: The point that both Remnick and Fox seem to be making was that it was obvious, given its context, that this was supposed to be a joke. But I bet if you took that same illustration and put in on Page Six of the New York Post most of that paper’s readers would have thought: “I knew that Obama was a terrorist.”

Yes, I know that Murdoch has gushed over Obama, calling him a rock star, and the Post, his flagship US paper, has been more consistently fair to him than, say, the NY Daily News. (Fox News, which still seems to be searching for new ways to slag the candidate, is also owned by Murdoch, of course, and they must not have got the memo.) But its readers are, shall I say, less acquainted with the brand of satire and irony that the New Yorker trafficks in. And in a general election where all kinds of people who don’t actually read much of anything will decide the outcome of the race, another image — even a patently false and humorous one of Obama dressed like Osama — just adds to the ignorance pile. It’s another America than the one Remnick inhabits and they are not reading his magazine, let alone checking the fine print for the satire disclaimer.