…and this passage jumped out at me:

In the faces of those young veterans who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, I see my grandfather, who signed up after Pearl Harbor…In the face of that young student who sleeps just three hours before working the night shift, I think about my mom, who raised my sister and me on her own…When I listen to another worker tell me that his factory has shut down, I remember all those men and women on the South Side of Chicago who I stood by and fought for two decades ago after the local steel plant closed. And when I hear a woman talk about the difficulties of starting her own business, I think about my grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle-management…

I don’t know what kind of lives John McCain thinks that celebrities lead, but this has been mine.  These are my heroes.

This is a bizarre non sequitur. What does the fact that Obama is reminded of his hard-working mother and grandparents and out-of-work Chicagoans have to do with the observation that he acts and is treated like a celebrity? Why has he allowed this jibe of McCain’s to get under his skin and feel the need to address it in a somewhat self-pitying tone?