Character, wisdom, experience, judgment, these are all issues that Barack Obama is going to have to assure the Democratic primary voters about -- and, if he manages to halt the inevitability that is Hillary Clinton -- the American public at large.

He may not survive such scrutiny if author Bruce Bawer -- who describes himself as someone who "wants to want" Obama as president -- is right about Obama's book.

I haven't read Obama's book. His publisher didn't send me a review copy, but Bawer has, and here's his take:

I’m eager, however, to understand as best I can what all the excitement is about – really I am. So when a friend lent me his copy of Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, I gave up my dream of spending my week’s vacation on the Costa Blanca blissfully unplugged from current events and took the damn thing with me. To my surprise, it turned out not to be a bad beach book at all – it was well written, richly human (i.e., not the usual politician’s pap), and genuinely moving.

But it disturbed me, too.

As the title intimates, the figure in Obama’s carpet is his father, a Kenyan exchange student who met Barack’s white, Kansas-born mother at the University of Hawaii. After marrying her and fathering Barack, Dr. Obama – as he was universally known – returned to Kenya to take up a high-ranking government position. Thereafter, he showed little or no interest in Barack, whom he met only once, when the boy was ten. Though Barack’s mother had a brief second marriage that took her and the boy to Indonesia, she raised him mostly in the Aloha State – and, by his account, was unfailingly selfless and loving, as were her parents, “Gramps” and “Toot,” who helped bring him up.

Yet on whom does Barack’s memoir focus? On his father – whom Barack, against all evidence (which suggests that Dr. Obama was colossally selfish and narcissistic), seeks to portray as heroic, sympathetic, indeed near-mythic. Obama père was a polygamist (and a lousy husband to all his wives), but Barack gives no indication that he finds this morally problematic; on the contrary, he seems determined to excuse his father’s many failings as consequences of imperialism, colonialism, and/or racism. One can, of course, well understand why a small boy – or even a young man – might idealize out of all proportion the father he never met. But Obama shows few signs in this book of recognizing that he’s doing this. Meanwhile, perversely, he treats his mother and grandparents, who by his own account raised him with extraordinary devotion, all but dismissively. At one point he even suggests that Gramps and Toot were really racists – and that all white people, in fact, are racists, and that black people have been so deformed by this racism that black individuals can hardly be held responsible for their own moral lapses. [emphasis in original]

There's more in the story -- and Obama's book -- that makes it appear that Obama is a bigot. I'd be curious to know what Obama's answer is to the question of reparations for slavery.

But what does it say about a man's heart and soul when -- at the age of 40-something -- he still idolizes an absentee father who, by his own account, comes across as a real jerk?