Barack Obama seemed a bit miffed last night when he said: “I honor–we honor–the service of John McCain, and I respect his many accomplishments, even if he chooses to deny mine.” What exactly does he want McCain to do? Acknowledge that Obama was the editor of the Harvard Law Review? No one denies that becoming the Democratic party’s presidential nominee is a very big accomplishment–especially for a senator who has no real legislative accomplishments. My hunch is that what really gets to Obama is that no one appreciates his greatest sacrifice: taking a job in 1985 as a community organizer while most of his buddies were making the big bucks on Wall Street. Two Sundays ago, Obama inspired Wesleyan’s class of 2008 by recounting how he was offered “$12,000 a year plus $2,000 for an old, beat-up car.” “And I said yes. I said yes.” I think that I can appreciate Barack’s sacrifice more than most, since in inflation-adjusted dollars I made a few hundred dollars more than he did my first year out of college as a Collegiate Network fellow at THE WEEKLY STANDARD. As a mere cog in the neocon propaganda machine, I haven’t given back to the community or spoken truth to power like Obama did. But I do know what it feels like being forced to choose between sipping a Guinness or two at the bar and swilling a six-pack of Bud Light at home on the couch. And I know the indignity of paying for my own health care. Then again, it’s not clear that Obama knew poverty quite like I did. A 2007 Nation article reported that Obama made $15,000 working his community organizing gig. Yet, in Dreams from My Father, he wrote that he was offered “ten thousand dollars the first year with a two-thousand-dollar travel allowance to buy a car.” And in 2006, he told a progressive student conference that he was offered the “lordly sum of $12,000 a year, plus $1,000 to buy a car.” Facts aside, the deeper truth of Obama’s sacrifice still stands: He
ingratiated himself with the Chicago Democratic machine
