A LITTLE JAKARTA STREET KID

When you're running for president of the United States as a Muslim-sensitive African-American whose first name rhymes with Iraq, middle name rhymes with its monstrous dictator, and last name rhymes with the world's most wanted terrorist, the best defense has to an offence. The first thing you need to do is get a good PR agency and start working on the negatives.

For instance, how is this Black Muslim Terrorist Dictator thing going to play in the South. Secondly, how are you going to convince people that everything you ever learned about internationalism, you learned before the age of 10. Nothing is impossible to package and in this case, starting with less than nothing is a good start. You need to build a story.

Born in Hawaii and abandoned by his Harvard-educated Kenyan father at the age of 2, Obama moved with his Kansan mother at age 5 to Jakarta, where he briefly attended Muslim schools. By the age of 10, he was back in Hawaii living with his maternal grandparents.

Between the ages of 6 and 10, I was living in Great Neck, Long Island, and when I wasn't peeling the asbestos off the pipes in the basement, I was over at my friend, Jimmy's house patiently building IED's out of millions of emptied cap gun caps.

I certainly never thought about my indigenous culture and the intricacies of worship in the impoverished landscape of a gentile living among the Orthodoxy of Great Neck, Long Island. I was too busy wrapping sewage pipes in dirty magazines. I'm sure they're still there.

Somehow, between kindergarten and the 4th grade, Obama became a statesman. It's a compelling story, especially for those of us who were plinking cars with pea shooters while guiding our bikes through burning leaves.

I do remember one seminal moment when Jimmy told me how babies were made, and I still can't believe it. I dismissed the preposterous notion, assuring Jimmy that God would never do it that way. But I sensed it was just weird enough to be true. God, for sure, does have peculiar ways and babies are bizarre.

However, there was no way God was going to talk my Mom and Dad into anything as nasty as what I was hearing. Anyway, He was too busy consoling them at the time: my younger brother was a baby when he died, and though I thought he looked weird--what with the big head and the little feet--my parents and older sister were clearly upset.

They dropped my sister and me off at our grandparents and to this day I remember pondering the strange way in which God forces us to make babies-- then takes them away: "What the hell was He thinking?"

Obama witnessed the Muslim call to prayer and described it as "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset." Abandoning my Christian upbringing, my appreciation for religion trended more towards the smoked whitefish and lox served at Danny Lebberfeld's house every Saturday morning.

Smoked Whitefish on an onion bagel is one of the prettiest smells on Earth at sunrise. But I never learned a thing about getting along with other cultures. Even Danny beat me up regularly--and we both shared a Judeo-Christian Great Neck background!

I was certainly not ready to run the world before the age of 10. Indeed, my 5th grade teacher wasn't sure I was ready for her area of expertise. Angry at being locked in the cloakroom over some small indiscretion, I stapled all my classmates' garments to the wall (a feat I repeated in college). Ms. McDade was not pleased, and told my father so. This was no way for a Principal's son to behave.

But according to Obama, "My experience growing up in Indonesia or having family in small villages in Africa--I think it makes me much more mindful of the importance of issues like personal security or freedom from corruption." Tell me about it. Danny's mother bribed me not to tell mother of my beatings -- with smoked fishes, capers and onions. For that brief moment my teeth broke through the fresh bagel and into the smokey flesh, Danny's throttlings were a distant memory.

This is why Obama will make a great president, and I will make a great voter. He is the sum total of all his experiences, and those experiences were rich -- not in the cream cheese sense--but in the worldly sense. Whether living in the USA, or abroad, Obama saw the world as an outsider and could appreciate its potential. I saw the world as an insider, thinking everything outside Great Neck was Port Washington.