Acknowledgment

My blogging is likely to be quite light over the week, as I've been on a vacation at home. Among family, concerns drift inevitably to babies and dogs, brain tumors and divorce, and all the intimate private concerns of family. Of course there's the talking of politics, and if anything I'm grateful to my older brother for making the first compelling case for voting Bush that I can recall. Any such debate is, by necessity, and exercise in constant disavowal... how to justify supporting a candidate that you have no enthusiasm for? I guess I found the frank disenchantment to be a refreshing acknowledgment.

And, on the subject of acknowledgments, I have been given a small trove of books to read, one of which is On Reading the Constitution by Laurence Tribe (, the) and Michael Dorf. Haven't read it yet, but in reading the acknowledgments, prefaces, and introductions of my gifts, I found the following startling note:

We are grateful for the outstanding efforts of several very talented people. Robert Fisher and Barrack Obama have influenced our thinking on virtually every subject discussed in these pages.

I missed the Obama speech at the Democratic Convention, but I've heard it floored everyone. I have to say, if Tribe owes the man a debt of intellectual gratitude, then he must indeed be a man of uncommon talent.