The Great Sales Pitch From Obama

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I recently found this long review of Obama’s first book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. It was written a year ago by Steve Sailer and its a review of a book in which much is revealed on what makes Obama tick, and why he would be so dangerous as President of our country:

Why haven’t many grasped the book’s essence? First, Obama’s elegant, carefully wrought prose style makes Dreams a frustratingly slow read, which may explain why the book was remaindered in 1995, and why so few of the many who have purchased it following his famous keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention appear to have read much of it.

Second, the plot isn’t that interesting: his first three decades are too lacking in incident to make a page-turning story. Obama has led a fairly pleasant existence, with most of its suffering and conflict taking place within his own head as he tries to turn himself into an authentic angry black man.

Third, there is the confusing contrast between the confident, suave master politician we see on television and the tormented narrator of Dreams, who is an updated Black Pride version of the old “tragic mulatto” stereotype found in “Show Boat” and “Imitation of Life.”

Which Obama is real? Or is that a naïve question to ask of such a formidable identity artist? William Finnegan wrote in the New Yorker of Obama’s campaigning: “… it was possible to see him slipping subtly into the idiom of his interlocutor—the blushing, polysyllabic grad student, the hefty black church-pillar lady, the hip-hop autoshop guy.” Like Madonna or David Bowie, he has spent his life trying on different personalities, but while theirs are, in Camille Paglia’s phrase, sexual personae, his specialty is racial personae.

Fourth, his is “a story of race and inheritance,” two closely linked topics upon which American elites have intellectually disarmed themselves. In an era when fashionable thinkers claim that race is just a social construct, Obama’s subtitle is subversive. Although his expensive education—prep school, an Ivy League bachelor’s degree, and then a Harvard professional diploma—has not equipped him with a conceptual vocabulary adequate for articulating the meaning behind his life’s story, the details deliver a message that white intellectuals have all but forgotten: the many-faceted importance of who your relatives are.

A racial group is a large extended family, and Obama’s book is primarily about his rejection of his supportive white maternal extended family in favor of his unknown black paternal extended family.

For the few willing to read all 442 pages, he offers important testimony about the enduring glamour of anti-white anger. It’s a bitter counterweight to the sunny hopes so widely invested in his candidacy as the man whose election as president would somehow help America finally “transcend race.”

In reality, Obama provides a disturbing test of the best-case scenario of whether America can indeed move beyond race. He inherited his father’s penetrating intelligence; was raised mostly by his loving liberal white grandparents in multiracial, laid-back Hawaii, where America’s normal race rules never applied; and received a superb private school education. And yet, at least through age 33 when he wrote Dreams from My Father, he found solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against his mother’s race.

Even his celebrated acceptance of Christianity in his mid-20s turns out to be an affirmation of African-American emotional separatism. As I was reading Dreams, I assumed that his ending would be adapted from the favorite book of his youth, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which climaxes with Malcolm’s visit to Mecca and heartwarming conversion from the racism of the Black Muslims to the universalism of orthodox Islam. I expected that Obama would analogously forgive whites and ask forgiveness for his own racial antagonism as he accepts Jesus.

Instead, Obama falls under the spell of a leftist black nationalist preacher, Jeremiah A. Wright, who preaches African-American unity through antipathy toward whites.
Reverend Wright remains a major influence on the presidential candidate. (The title of Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, is borrowed from one of Wright’s sermons.) Ben Wallace-Wells notes in Rolling Stone: “This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr.”

The happy ending to Dreams is that Obama’s hard-drinking half-brother Roy—“Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage”—converts to teetotaling Islam.

Although the biracial Obama is frequently lumped with the multiracial golfer Tiger Woods as evidence of the socially healing power of interracial marriage, their attitudes are quite different. Woods turned down Nike’s suggestion that because African-American celebrities are so popular today, he should identify himself solely as black. He didn’t want to disown his mother. Woods instead calls himself black and Thai, or, at times, “Caublinasian,” in tribute to his Caucasian, black, American Indian, and Asian ancestors.

From the age of ten onward, though, Obama desperately wants to be black: “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.” Honolulu’s paucity of African-Americans means he has to learn to be black from the media: “TV, movies, the radio; those were places to start. Pop culture was color-coded, after all, an arcade of images from which you could cop a walk, a talk, a step, a style.”

He cherishes every cause for complaint he can discern against white folks. He is constantly distressed at being half-white. Obama says he “ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites,” even though he surely realizes that his media-sensation status stems from how much white people love highly accomplished blacks who speak with white accents. He wouldn’t be a serious candidate for president at age 45 if he weren’t part black.

Obama’s teenage self-consciousness is perpetually crucified by contact with stereotypes about blacks. When his grandmother wants a ride to work because the day before, while awaiting the bus, she was threatened by a black panhandler, he is outraged—at his grandparents. “And yet I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears.” In high school, he gets upset when “a white girl mentioned in the middle of conversation how much she liked Stevie Wonder; or when a woman in the supermarket asked me if I played basketball; or when the school principal told me I was cool.”

The great irony of the book is that so many of the stereotypes about African-Americans and Africans turn out, in his troubling experience, to be true—which doesn’t make Obama happy at all: “I did like Stevie Wonder, I did love basketball, and I tried my best to be cool at all times. So why did such comments always set me on edge?” (When he moves to the South Side of Chicago, he eventually discovers that, like his grandmother, he’s sometimes scared of black males on the street, too.)

This explains much. Could it be any clearer why he marginalized and ignored the white grandmother who raised and educated him from the age of 9 or 10 through high school. He decided it was to his advantage to be black, instead of white. Like the writer says, instead of embracing both of his cultures he chose one over the other and never looked back.

But now he wants to unite us? When he couldn’t even unite with his own family?

Back in Hawaii, Obama’s grandparents enrolled the fifth grader in the famous Punahou prep school (current tuition $14,725). With 3,750 students from K-12, it enrolls a high proportion of all the young elites in Hawaii. Illustrative of its financial resources, Sports Illustrated ranks it as having the fourth-best high-school sports program in America.

In Obama’s book, Punahou was a nightmare of racial insensitivity, with one of his fellow students even asking to touch his hair. What he doesn’t reveal is that Punahou was quite possibly the most racially diverse prep school in America. It officially opened its doors to all races in 1851. Sun Yat-sen, the first president of China, attended it in the 1880s.

In Obama’s eighth grade class picture, at least seven and perhaps as many as ten of the 21 students are non-white. Brian Charlton of the AP threw some cold water on Obama’s adolescent alienation fantasies: “He was known as Barry Obama, and with his dark complexion and mini-Afro, he was one of the few blacks at the privileged Hawaiian school overlooking the Pacific. Yet that hardly made him stand out. Diversity was the norm at the Punahou School, one of the state’s top private schools.” His classmates say he was a popular and cheerful figure, the opposite of the tortured personality described in Dreams, in which he rationalizes his teenage drug use as “something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind . . .”

When Barack was in high school in the later 1970s, no whites held Hawaii’s top elected jobs as U.S. senator or governor. Indeed, as his father pointed out in a 1963 newspaper interview, whites were sometimes the victims of discrimination in Hawaii. Obama also fails to note the charming local custom of calling the last day of school “Kill Haole Day.”

Like Obama, many Hawaiian residents are the products of mixed marriages: in 1956-57, interracial marriage rates ranged from 22.0 percent for professionals to 43.5 percent for farm workers. There’s not much of a one-drop-of-blood rule for defining racial membership in Hawaii that mandated that Obama call himself black and only black.

Why was Obama so insistent upon rejecting the white race?

Perhaps because we all (especially young men) want to belong to something we see as bigger and stronger than us, a winning team. And conquest, who rules whom, is the ultimate team sport.

From adolescence onward, Obama wanted a race to belong to, a team whose accomplishments would reflect well upon him. Of course, it was unthinkable in his liberal white family to take pride in the achievements of his mother’s race, so Obama gloried in being part of his absent father’s race.

Isn’t that ironic. Due to the liberal nature of his white family he ostracized that very same part of his heritage. What a endorsement for liberals.

After graduation, he moved to Chicago in 1983, finally finding a home where at least some whites reciprocated his antagonism. He worked as an ethnic activist, helping the impoverished black community wring more money and services from the government. That government money was wrecking the morals of the housing-project residents seems obvious from his book, but Obama never comes out and says it. Numerous white moderates assume that a man of Obama’s superlative intelligence must be kidding when he espouses his cast-iron liberalism on race-related policies, but they don’t understand the emotional imperative of racial loyalty to him.

Even his one triumph, mau-mauing lazy Chicago Housing Authority bureaucrats into removing asbestos from Altgeld Gardens, is tinged with irony. The timeservers at the CHA are all black, and asbestos would fall comically low on any list of problems plaguing inner city African-Americans.

After four years there, the South Side is worse than ever, with youth violence ratcheting upwards. Obama applies to Harvard Law School (and eventually becomes a discrimination lawyer). Upon acceptance, he makes his first visit to Kenya, where Dreams from My Father finally achieves a frankness worthy of its artistry.

Obama immediately appreciates the sweetness of African life in the bosom of his newfound family—“For family seemed to be everywhere … all of them fussing and fretting over Obama’s long-lost son”—but soon discovers its discontents, including how polygamy generates convoluted conflicts too intricate for even the longest-running soap opera. The rival families of his late father—who died in a drunken car crash a half decade before—are still suing each other over his meager estate.

He begins to notice that the intense family ties he’d longed for are not an unmixed blessing for Kenya since they corrupt its culture.

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In Obama’s account of race and inheritance, the continuities between Africa and African-America are clear. Kenya seems like an incipient Chicago housing project, preserved only by its inability to afford the welfare state that has ruined the inner city. His aunt’s Nairobi home is “just like the apartments in Altgeld, I realized. The same chain of mothers and daughters and children. … The same absence of men.”

Unless they can bribe their way into a prestigious office job, most of Obama’s male relatives work as little as possible, relying on their womenfolk for food and shelter. And the women are looking for what the author’s grandfather and uncle Sayid both call a “big man” to ease their burdens with funds extracted from the government. Obama’s father, it turns out, had grabbed for the brass ring but wound up a failed Big Man, undone by President Jomo Kenyatta’s discrimination against his Luo tribe and by his own alcoholism. Even when impoverished, Obama Sr. pathetically kept playing the Big Man, dispensing gifts he couldn’t afford to his relatives and hangers-on.

Now, Obama Jr. is running for the biggest job of all.

There is much more to the review and should be read in its entirety. As I finished it I couldn’t help think about how people in sales, or even us cops conduct themselves when interviewing either suspects or a potential client. We mirror the target, we get into their head and become one with them. We understand them you see…..

While the book obviously shows there has been much inner turmoil I can’t help but think this has been one of the biggest sales pitches in many many years……

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Can you ever really trust the dog that bites that hand that feeds it?

The would-be emperor truly does have no clothes!

For all his talk of unity, hope, and change, Obama’s own writings prove him to be simply the latest incarnation of the 1960’s Black Power Radical. Smoother, better spoken, and better educated to be sure; not to mention sporting far better societal camouflage, but in the end his belief system is the same. Sounds like these books are Barrack’s own personal version of “Mein Kampf,” spelling out his struggle, and his core and most honest political ideology.

In the end he’s counting on the majority of Americans to play the role of his maternal family. That in the name of white guilt, and self-flagellation that liberal and moderate Americans will vote for him to avoid being labeled “racist,” which is akin to being called a “witch” back in colonial Salem. But, from an objective point of view, if convservative and moderate Americans rightfully reject Obama, they will being doing so because they abhor HIS racist ideology, and HIS racial pandering; not due to any real raical antagonism on their part (though expect the MSM to label it such). Now, that I’ve had my say, time to prepare my corned beef and cabbage.

what a hypocrit. makes me sick. why should anyone be proud of him? he is a fake and a liar, he isn’t qualified to lick my shoes.

Nice! He has spent most of his life purposely training himself to hate most of America. Who knows, maybe his real dream is to use some of that wisdom from uncle Sayid (it’s fun to learn those typical Kenyan names) and become the big man to give some government funds to his real extended family. From trillions for reparations to billions to the UN, I can see how it’s going to work already!

he is a liar, he should be run out of the country. but because he is “black” we should worship a this feet…..please.

Obama had better have a good explanation tomorrow. One thing I find interesting, is why is Obama ashamed of his white heritage? Does that have something to do with how he was raised?

He is a great speaker and can really fire up a crowd. But there is something so very contradictory about him. He wants peace, but his pastor is a bigot and a racist. He calls himself black, but he is half white. He says he wants to unite the nation, but his policies are for division.

Maybe he’ll embrace his whiteness tomorrow during his great speech about race….A confession of how he denounced the 50% of his heritage that he seems to dislike so much.
You’re right Heather. He is so ashamed of it. He could have used his mixed heritage to his politcal advantage.
He’s toast, as they say. He has no choice but to pose as a victim of racism between now and August 24th. How he poses will determine how fractured the Democrats will be between Labor Day and Election Day. The rest of the primary starts tomorrow.