Slate to Obama: Enough about you, already

Obama acknowledges that as a young person he was unaware of politics, and thus Inouye. But then something important happened that made young Obama pay attention to the first man to be elected to Congress from Hawaii after it joined the union. When Obama was 11 years old he went on vacation with his family, and those paying their respects to Inouye got to hear a long description of this amazing trip, from Seattle to Kansas, from Disneyland to Yellowstone. They heard of the young Obama’s happiness whenever the motel had a pool or an ice machine. And finally, as the people must have been twitching in the pews wondering where this was all going, we get back to the late senator.

It turns out the Watergate hearings were taking place at that time, too, and Obama’s mother watched them in their various hotel rooms. It surprised young Obama to see that a man of Japanese descent was a senator. Little did most people know that the most important thing to come out of the Watergate hearings was that Obama, with his mixed-race background, saw in Inouye a hint of “what might be possible in my own life.” That Obama in some way may have been inspired to a political career by a man who overcame prejudice and later became Obama’s colleague is a fine point to make. But it is an incidental one to the life being celebrated.

It’s fine to relate personal stories during eulogies, but they should have the deceased as the focal point, not the eulogist.  As Yoffe notes, this is a constant theme for Obama, whose speeches contain more self-referential pronouns than any of his predecessors of recent memory.  Even the President who earned the monicker “The Big Me,” Bill Clinton, looks positively humble in comparison.

We’ll include this one in the OOTY polls next week, to be sure.

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