Well, I thought he was Don Draper (minus the hitch in Korea); Karl Rove thought he was "the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

And now Clark S. Judge, managing director of the White House Writers Group and was former Reagan speechwriter dubs him "Barack Gatsby":

Fitzgerald writes of how James Gatz swims out to a Great Lakes yacht, casts off his past and turns himself into Jay Gatsby, a very different man from a very different place. Barack Obama is such a figure. He didn't swim out to a boat. He went to Chicago and there, it seems, he reinvented himself. Much has been written of how he has cast off parts of his past - the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the one-time Capitol and Pentagon bomber Bill Ayers. In and of itself, walking away from problematic associates is not unusual for politicians. But his handling of Wright and Ayers is part of a larger pattern. Across the entire presentation of his personal history, he has nipped here and tucked there until the man in the camera looks entirely different from the man inside.

If, despite his populist rhetoric, people have - as polls tell us they do - a discordant sense of the elite in Barack Obama, it is because, while he may not own a bunch of houses, that's how he grew up and that's what he is.