Presidential snap

Two commentators, separated by much ocean, are focusing on how Obama is now making his own biography part of the political message he conveys. Gerard Henderson in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Now Obama and the overwhelming majority of journalists, who happen to support his administration, speak proudly of the fact that the first black American president has a Kenyan-born father who was Muslim.

Indeed ancestry was at the heart of Obama's historic speech at Egypt's Cairo University last Thursday.

And Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post:

Not being Bush was a big factor. But at least as important was being Obama - and being able to say, as the president did in Cairo, that "I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed."

Michael Crowley emphasizes the same thing:

Obama's [Cairo speech] seems to offer the potential of making millions of Muslims reconsider their view of America. There is no novel way to restate the obvious reason for this: Obama is not Bush. He speaks without a foreign invasion on his resume, and with a reputation for honesty and decency. He writes and speaks on a higher intellectual and rhetorical level than Bush... And above all, he is a black man with Muslim heritage, as he explained in the speech's emotional and symbolic highlight: "I'm a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims," Obama said. "As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and at the fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith."

And then there's this from the Economist:

Barack Obama's biggest bonus on his first presidential trip to Arab parts of the Middle East was not being George Bush.

And:

Mr Obama rightly eschews Mr Bush's crudely Manichaean simplifications of the "war on terror".

But...

But he makes it admirably plain that he is no less determined to fend off the still rising tide of Muslim jihadism, to contain the Taliban, and to beat back al-Qaeda, which most Arabs and Muslims abhor.

File that one under continuity amidst change. (Thanks: PF.)