Via Eric Alterman, the WSJ's Katherine Rosman has an account of meeting a young state senator at a literary party five years ago. At the time he was about to run for the U.S. Senate. He's now president-elect.

The punchline is that, back then, an author at the party mistook the future president for a waiter:

But what I will always remember is as I was leaving that party in 2003, I was approached by another guest, an established author. He asked about the man I had been talking to. Sheepishly he told me he didn’t know that Obama was a guest at the party, and had asked him to fetch him a drink.

Equally telling to me about the way the world works is the fact that Rosman, impressed with the young man, tried to pitch a story about him to a national magazine but got shot down. They weren't interested.

Obama? Apparently there was nothing to sell there.

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