Let me be clear: I don't doubt for a moment that Barack Obama genuinely believes that he can calm the roils that trouble the United States in its relationship with the Muslim world and the Arab orbit within it. The problem is, alas, that he hasn't a clue. Moreover, he hasn't had the chance to learn. And maybe--just maybe--he is not inclined to learn because in his generation wisdom doesn't come from study but from ideological narrative. George W. Bush had his own favorite narrative. It was hewn in Texas and polished, if it was polished at all, just before old Yale collapsed before William Sloane Coffin, if anyone still remembers his tortured and torturing soul.

Obama's narrative is assumedly third world, maybe just by dint of his skin complexion. But, frankly, there weren't many dreams from his father in Dreams From My Father. In fact, there were at least as many from his hippie white mother. So here is a very contemporary person. The two lines, though, do connect in his chosen life as it is retold and projected into the future. Here, his prominence in the deeply left-wing "community organizing" universe meets the do-not-ask-questions rules of the Chicago Democratic machine.

So, much as George Bush did not doubt, so President Obama does not doubt. He doesn't doubt himself and he doesn't doubt what he says. I made the comment the other day in another Spine with reference to Obama: narcissism is the most dangerous of sins...because it doesn't let the sinner recognize it in himself.