Everyone who wrote an essay in kindergarten, raise your hand.

No one?

Well, Barack Obama has, but I didn’t see his hand go up because maybe he isn’t in the audience. In fact, an essay he wrote in kindergarten in which he declared his desire to become president has briefly appeared as a central issue in the Illinois Democratic senator’s presidential campaign.

The issue here, as couched by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, is just how truthful is Obama’s finely honed image as someone who never really thought of running for president until the masses demanded it?

More fascinating, though, is the idea a kindergartener—Obama or anyone else—wrote an essay when he was five or six. Especially when so many Americans today can’t write a paragraph or even a complete sentence.

An essay, for the love of mike, is defined as a literary composition, often reflecting an author’s personal view. When did kindergarteners begin having “views?” When did they start composing literally works? When I think of essayists, imagines of Samuel Johnson and Henry David Thoreau come to mind, not of tots struggling to master the art of finger painting. Didn’t a single reporter or editor even question the assertion?

Maybe it’s just media gullibility that a story could go on for so long with so few asking: how the hell does a kindergartener write an essay? There was, however, a lot of yackety-yak about whether it was a strategic mistake by raising the “issue,” and just how much it would hurt her. And how it would figure in the Iowa primaries, and if it opened a new front in candidate bashing. Who cares?

Regular reader Jim from Tinley Park put it best, wondering if Obama (borrowing from the popular 1950s “Ballad of Davy Crockett”) “kilt him a b’ar when he was only three.” Or invented the Internet.

From what is known, the kindergarten essay reference came from an Associated Press story last Jan. 25, “Obama debunks claim about Islamic school. Calls the reports ‘scurrilous’; Jakarta school open to all faiths.” Said the story: “Iis Darmawan, 63, Obama’s kindergarten teacher, remembers him as an exceptionally tall and curly haired child who quickly picked up the local language and had sharp math skills. ‘ He wrote an essay titled, ‘I Want To Become President,’ the teacher said.”

Apparently, no one thought much about the super-literate wunderkind until the Clinton campaign picked up on it over the weekend and included it in a klutzy press release designed to make Obama look like a lying sack of stuff. Said the press release:

At an event in Boston this evening, Senator Obama claimed for the second time today that he is “not running to fulfill some long held plans” to be elected President, contradicting statements his friends, family, staff and teachers have all made about him.

“Senator Obama’s relatives and friends say he has been talking about running for President for at least the last fifteen years. So who’s not telling the truth, them or him?” Clinton spokesman Phil Singer said.

As if the wound inflicted by the kindergarten disclosures weren’t enough, it blasted away with:

In third grade, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled ‘I Want To Be a President.’ His third grade teacher, Fermina Katarina Sinaga, “asked her class to write an essay titled ‘My dream: What I want to be in the future.’ Senator Obama wrote ‘I want to be a President,’ she said.” [The Los Angeles Times, 3/15/07]

Compounding the ridiculousness of it all, Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, Mark Penn, went on the air this week to say that the kindergarten reference was a “joke.” It was, he said, all so “silly;” he couldn’t believe that the media were “so spinable” and ridiculed reporters who treated it “as though it was serious.” Maybe Penn should have preceded the reference with a helpful little title for us media dolts, like “Joke of the Day.”

The Clinton campaign has made itself a joke.

But there’s something else about this entire episode that doesn’t seem to bother anyone but me. Why is it wrong to want to be president? Why shouldn’t Obama admit that he wanted to be president from an early age. What is Obama’s compulsion to pretend that he didn’t? Why maintain the pretense that he was just content to be a little old constitutional law professor/state senator/community organizer, until he caved into the overwhelming forces of public opinion demanding that he run.

“Ain’t America great, where every kid can grow up to be president?” The question is pure Americana, even though it has yet to be proven. Obama, himself, could be the one to prove it, although that’s not enough reason to vote for him. And wouldn’t it have refreshing to have heard Obama say, “Yes, from early childhood, my dream was to be president. There is no shame in aspiring to being president, to follow in the footsteps of great presidents before, in creating the world’s greatest democracy.” This truly would have heralded the new kind of honest politics that Obama keeps talking about.

Oh well, Clinton and Obama, two Illinois-rooted candidates, have fallen into an old and wearisome template. It’s based on the proposition that having the requisite talent, good intentions and ambition to want to be president is enough to disqualify one from actually becoming president. Sad.

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Dennis Byrne is a regular columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer and a member ot its editorial board.