Is Obama "too European"?

Matthew Price strikes a half-note about Obama and some American voters:

It boiled down to a sense that he was just a little bit too different. He seemed to have a different outlook, something they weren't quite sure about. Something unfamiliar... For many the fact that Barack Obama is different is intoxicating. For many others it is something that leaves them unsettled... This is about the people who simply feel his policies, and his approach would not be good for this nation. This is why John McCain's focus on "Barack the Redistributor" has hit a chord with many segments of the population here.

One can understand the worries of these people. Obama may look and sound like a Martian to many older or less educated voters. But are these voters the "real America"? Is Obama really the Un-American candidate?

What I see in America is the epitome of modernity in all its aspects - the good (liberty, equality, rational pursuit of happiness) and the bad (corporatism, social dislocation, intense consumerism). Voting for Bush, however, looked like a reversal of this creed - people voted for him because he was folksy, religious and unencumbered by the complexities of modern times - he also descended from a very wealthy family, an aristocrat palling with the average Joe if you wish. In the last eight years Americans recoiled from modernity into a pristine past of us-vs.-them, cowboy-like straight talk. They voted for Bush because they thought they could have a beer with him in his ranch in Texas. Well, I think we know what the results of this retreat were.

Obama, instead, is the American candidate par excellence, because he is self-made, technology-savvy, intensely hardworking, practical and young. Due to these qualities he represents the return of the States to the values of dynamic modernity at the core of the American Dream, at least the way I understand it. But he goes beyond that. He is also intellectually sophisticated, receptive of other people's different opinions and moral codes and he is post-racial. These are qualities necessary to redefine the American Dream domestically because the States need to move beyond the divisive culture wars and the anti-intellectualism of the last decades. These qualities can also redefine the American position abroad because the US can no longer have a claim to unrivalled greatness.