Letter from Washington / Searching for Barack

‘What then is the American, this new man?’ J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
asked in his Letters to an American Farmer in 1782 before describing the distinctly
American character that was emerging on the eastern seaboard of a new world. Fast
forward 226 years, substitute ‘Barack Obama’ for ‘the American,’ and you have the
question at the heart of Election ‘08.