Candidates Lack 'Placeness': Noonan

Neither McCain or Obama has strong ties to any one location

By Matt Cantor, Newser Staff

Posted Aug 15, 2008 1:17 PM CDT

(Newser) – This year's presidential campaign gives no sense of the candidates' roots, writes Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. Clinton was clearly a Southerner, and JFK unmistakably an Irish Catholic from Massachusetts, but “Obama and McCain are not from a place, but from an experience”--Obama from “the town of Smooth in the state of Well-Educated” and McCain from the military.

As a country, “we are national now,” not local, Noonan writes. “Americans move,” as Navy brat McCain and the multicultural, multicontinental Obama did. "The lack of placeness with both candidates contributes to a sense of their disjointedness, their floatingness," Noonan laments. “I miss the old geographical vividness.”

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Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., gets on the plane in Chicago Friday, Aug. 8, 2008, for a vacation to Hawaii. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., waves prior to boarding his campaign plane Friday, July 18,2008, in Romulus, Mich. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

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Neither man has or gives a strong sense of place in the sense that American politicians almost always have, since Mr. Jefferson of Virginia, and Abe Lincoln of Illinois. - Peggy Noonan

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Candidates Lack 'Placeness': Noonan