With the election less than a week away, some passages from Barack Obama’s two books get picked up in a column by Bill Sammon:

“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully,” the Democratic presidential candidate wrote in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” “The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.”

Obama’s interest in leftist politics continued after he transferred to Columbia University in New York. He lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, venturing to the East Village for what he called “the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union.”

[...]

Obama has managed to cultivate the image of a political moderate in spite of his consistently liberal voting record. In 2006, he published a second memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” that leaves little doubt about his adherence to the left.

“The arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact,” Obama wrote in “Audacity.” “Much of what I absorbed from the sixties was filtered through my mother, who to the end of her life would proudly proclaim herself an unreconstructed liberal.”

National Journal magazine ranked Obama as the most liberal member of the Senate. The publication is far from conservative, employing such journalists as Linda Douglass, who resigned in May to become Obama’s traveling press secretary.

I admit I haven’t read either of Obama’s books. (The board of directors at RWB are extremely cheap; with no expense account, I even have to make my own Post-It notes using 8×11 paper, honey, and scissors.) However, the quote from “The Audacity of Hope” which I’ve found more striking than any other, and which keeps coming to my mind this week, is this one (quoted here and innumerable other places):

I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.

That “blank screen” is precisely how Obama has come across to me from the very beginning. It’s why — despite evidence of politically extreme associates and extreme left/liberal positions on his own part — it has been difficult for many who hold very different political views to develop a big head of steam against him. (Quite to the contrary, some have been utterly seduced, as we know.) Yet, his ability to make people project their own reasonableness upon him will do nothing to ultimately prevent those people from being very disappointed indeed with his actions as president — should he be elected president next week. No one will be able to say that they were not warned.

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