This morning David Mark and Kenneth Vogel question whether Obama's reading of his 1995 memoir, Dreams of My Father, will come back to haunt him in the general election. Perhaps.

But take a step back for a second. Isn't there a related question worth asking: what kind of person writes a "memoir" about themselves at the age of 34? It's not as if by that time Obama had achieved any sort of status in life that typically prompts such a public sharing and/or self examination (being a superstar athlete, a movie star, or the like).

Indeed, in 1995 Obama hadn't even been elected to the Illinois State Senate. He was just a couple of years removed from law school. He was, in other words, no different from hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country who go about their lives on a daily basis - yet he felt compelled to sit down and write a book detailing his life story.

It's a decision that is totally foreign to the average person. If one of Obama's vulnerabilities in the general election is a perceived arrogance, the mere act of penning of Dreams of My Father would appear to be a textbook example of an overinflated sense of self importance.

And if the McCain campaign is trying to make this election a contrast between a candidate with "a lifetime of service in the nation's interests" versus a newcomer serving his own "personal interests," surely they will want to point out that when John McCain was 34 years old he wasn't sitting down to pen a memoir about himself, he was three years into his stay at the Hanoi Hilton.

UPDATE: A couple of people have brought it to my attention that Obama was approached about writing the book by a publisher based on his being the first African-American elected to edit the Harvard Law Review. Fair enough. That certainly provides a justification for Obama choosing to write the book and refutes the idea it "would appear to be a textbook example of an overinflated sense of self importance" - even if some may still agree with the notion the average person may find his decision to be a bit, shall we say, audacious.