Barack Obama Compared with Harry Truman

He hasn't done anything, yet he has bagged big bucks for book deals. Whatever happened to public service being an end in itself?

The historian David McCullough tells us that at 6:30 p.m. on Jan. 20, 1953, President Harry S Truman, having attended the inauguration his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, boarded a train at Washington's Union Station and came home to Missouri. He was 68 years old. He had been president for almost eight years and, before that, a senator and vice president for 10 years. But in those days, there were no generous pensions for former federal officials, no Secret Service help, no office expenses. His only government income was his $112.56 a month Army pension.

Truman had some savings in the bank, but he had taken out a loan in his last months in Washington to help meet expenses. Back home in Independence, he turned down several six-figure offers to lend his name to various enterprises. Not until Life magazine offered him $600,000 to write his memoirs did his financial worries lessen."His name was not for sale," McCullough wrote. Truman's experiences came to mind last week after reports that Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama (and U.S. senator-elect), a Chicago Democrat, had received a $1.9 million advance against royalties for three books.

One will be a children's book that he will write with the help of his wife and daughters. The daughters are 6 and 3, so they probably won't be much help. The $200,000 advance for that book will be donated to charities. Obama plans to keep the $1.7 million he's getting as an advance on two other books, one about how his values influence his personal beliefs, the other on a yet-to-be-determined subject.

By the standards of political books, Obama's royalties are relatively paltry. President Bill Clinton got $10 million for his almost unreadable book, and his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., got $7.5 million for hers. Former CIA Director George Tenet signed a $4 million book deal, and various other Bush administration officials also are enriching the world of literature for big bucks. Even so, Obama's book deal set a kind of record: fastest cashing-in for fewest achievements. What's he going to write about? Intimate recollections of former Illinois Senate President Pate Philip?

Obama's speech energized the Democratic Convention in July, and he was elected overwhelmingly to the U.S. Senate in November, and he's on the cover of the current Newsweek as a rising star, and his 1995 book about his father became a best seller. (It was reissued after Obama became a star.)

But let's face it. The man doesn't even have a key to the Senate men's room yet, and he's already cashing in.

Here's some irony: In early December, Obama was invited to address the Gridiron Club, the clubby group of Washington insiders that puts on political roasts. He slayed 'em. One of his best lines was this:"I'm so overexposed that I make Paris Hilton look like a recluse."...