Identity

Daniel Drezner says that the real victim of identity among the leading presidential candidates is... John McCain:

This leads to a central irony about this campaign. I don't doubt that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have suffered a multitude of small slights in their professional and personal lives because of their gender or race. However, if you think about this as a contest to see who has suffered the greatest because of their identity, it's not even close.

The candidate who has suffered the most in his lifetime is.... John McCain. As an individual, he has paid a much higher price for his identity as an officer in the United States military than Obama or Cinton has individually paid for their race or gender. And there's simply no way to spin it otherwise.

The suffering that McCain underwent at the hands of a foreign government in the midst of a war doesn't compare very well with the way Obama/Clinton are seen by their fellow countrymen in an election campaign.

Still, it's difficult for me to see how the respective identities of any of these three candidates have hurt them politically (unlike, say, Romney's Mormonism which clearly did hurt him). It's arguable that neither McCain nor Clinton would even have a political career of any significance without their identities, and it seems like Obama's has helped him create and sell his "building up bridges" and "bringing people together" narratives which have served him so well.