So the question presents itself: Is McCain—who, like W., was a rebellious youth who finished fifth from the bottom in his Annapolis class—also still trying to live up to his dead father's expectations to some degree, and to add another chapter to his family saga? It's not unreasonable to think that his decisions on Iraq, or his attitude toward other U.S. enemies, could be affected by this psychology.

Barack Obama grew up without a father he longed to know, and he was so haunted by the experience that he wrote a book about it. As a young man he was ever a stranger in a strange land restlessly searching for his true self, just as his father, Barack Obama Sr., yearned for acceptance in the West. As Obama describes it in his memoir, "Dreams From My Father," he cried for a long time over his father's grave in Kenya, understanding at last the pain his father felt in trying, and ultimately failing, to "reinvent" himself as an educated Westerner. His father went too far, Obama wrote, in repudiating his own Kenyan goat-herding background. "For all your gifts—the quick mind, the powers of concentration, the charm—you could never forge yourself into a whole man by leaving those things behind," Obama writes. "I saw that my life in America—the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago—all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away … The pain I'd felt was my father's pain."

Obama's sense of self, while unquestionably American, is also a patchwork of distant and in some cases opposing cultures; every family gathering is "like a meeting of the United Nations," he has joked. Will Obama's presidency, then, be in some way a continuation of his search for connectedness between different cultures around the world, his eagerness to empathize? And might that lead him, perhaps, to expect too much of the same desire for good relations from other leaders who don't share it? Will he try to outdo his father in bridging divides that may be unbridgeable?

We don't know, of course. All this may turn out to be mere psychobabble, which is what the Bush crowd dismissively concluded about Oliver Stone's film. But after the trauma of the last eight years, they are questions worth asking.

© 2008