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Notes -
The Obama Factor
An interview with historian david garrow, who wrote a pulitzer prize winning biography of MLK and a biography of Obama several years ago. The central theme is how Obama created a fictional history and archetype for himself, exemplified in his own autobiography dreams from my father, which "is as much a work of dreamy literary fiction as it is an attempt to document Obama’s early life... Garrow’s biography of Obama’s early years is filled with such corrections of a historical record that Obama more or less invented himself".
Garrow draws several comparisons between MLK and Obama as two of the most publicized black leaders of the last half century. MLK lived "two separate lives" in public and private - he had problems with alcohol and womanizing, and Garrow recently came under fire for publicizing fbi transcripts that claimed that MLK had stood by while one of his friends committed rape - and he "always believed that he was not essential, that he was accidental" in history, and understood that the media's image of him was a projection outside of himself. With Obama, "There’s an extent of intertwining, there’s an absence of keeping the two selves separate".
Garrow also talked to three of Obama's exes, which of course leads to some hilarious stories:
It's emphasized repeatedly how performatively Obama behaved, with impersonal love letters and a giant pile of journals which Obama showed to Garrow to tell him that he couldn't look at them: "He wants people to believe his story. For me to conclude that dreams from my father was historical fiction—oh god, did that infuriate him... The pose of being a writer is actually one that he prefers in many ways to being a politician". While rereading Obama's memoir, the author realizes that "This is clearly a highly wrought literary work of self-fashioning by a person who is in dialogue with literary sources. Or, to put it another way: I’m watching this guy make himself up."And from when he interviewed Ben Rhodes, one of Obama's top staffers, in 2016, "One of the things that Rhodes was at pains to get across to me was that Obama wrote all of his speeches himself. There was obviously a need or an instruction that had been given that Barack Obama was always to be presented as the author of Barack Obama. And by his instruction, the only book that the speechwriters were to consult was the collected speeches of Abraham Lincoln, because he was the only other president who deserved to be on the same shelf as Obama."
The author's conclusion is that "The best way to understand Barack Obama is that he is a literary creation of Barack Obama, the writer, who authored the novel of his own life and then proceeded to live out this fictional character that he created for himself on the page." they trace this back to Obama's upbringing as someone who was separated from his parents and was shuttled between indonesia and hawaii, contrasting it with MLK who "had the most privileged life a black person could have in america in those years" and a solid understanding of his own identity: "Doc [MLK] has no choice to be black. Barack chooses to be black."
I haven't read either Garrow's book or Obama's autobiography, but these guys make out Obama to be such a fascinating personality that I'll have to give them a read.
Fabricating a history and self is a rich presidential tradition: see Washington, FDR, JFK, LBJ, Lincoln, Clinton, Bush. It helps to have a fawning liberal press that covers up all your impoprieties (attending a church preaching "God Damn America," whipping your dick out for reporters, being crippled from polio). But it's not essential (when was the last time Bush did any ranching on his ranch?).
Obama, specifically, I think, represents a modern class fantasy of the college-educated intellectual. (It's not like being a constitutional scholar made his presidency notably more constitution-respecting.) This comes with a lot of baggage about the life of the tortured intellectual. He dabbled in drugs and homosexuality. He existed in a kind of tension with a minority subculture to which he didn't quite belong, but also provided him with a network and resources he used. He hobnobbed with the Ivy set that allows one to seamlessly move from a poor background to representing the upper class, with all the neuroses typical of that set. And he has an intellectual's weakness for speachifying. (Sorry all, I don't think hes an impressive speechmaker. For me, his speeches are like watching a magician when you can actually see how his hands are moving.)
There's a lot to be said here about how the press has always given Obama an easy time, and has let him coast on his easy image. (To this day a large part of the country still can't name any Obama scandals beyond "tan suit".) And I think that actually made Obama quite lazy -- he had a bad record of meeting with Senators and Congressmen to actually get anything done, and his signature accomplishment, Obamacare, rightfully has much more to do with Nancy Pelosi. After a certain point his presidency was dominated much more by his appointees in the cabinet. (Valerie Jarrett, Loretta Lynch, Ben Rhodes who famously bragged that reporters were too stupid to understand the Iran deal and how he'd created it.) And after leaving office Obama has been content to lazily curate his spotify playlist and put his name on a few Netflix adaptations. (He's not involved in anything especially charitable like Carter. Bush has probably done more to push back against Trump than Obama has.)
I think the right appraisal of Obama is still waiting on the death of a few distinct cults of worship.
The first is a liberal intelligentsia class that admires the Obama years as everything they like about politics. (Generally they are totally captivated by media hagiography and will actually ignore any of his shortcomings as a partisan Republican trick.)
The second is a sort of black folk worship that treats Obama as a hero for representing the race. You can go to nice middle class older black homes, the kind of person who has a curio cabinet well-dusted with lace, and they'll usually have a portrait of Obama somewhere. To these people Obama is almost a symbolic figure; any shortcomings he has are almost beside the point. (I rather respect this group because it is a totally consistent position.)
The third is really a cult of hatred -- the Republicans who elevated Obama into a sort of devil single-handedly ruining the country. (Look at how much more they resisted him than Biden.) Everything bad about the Obama years is ascribed to Obama himself. Now, I'm sure his IRS prosecuted conservatives and left-wing groups, Eric Holder enshrined equity in the ethos of DOJ investigations, spying on Fox News reporters, investigating the Trump campaign -- but very few of these actions ever actually have much to do with Obama himself. (Many of the worst excesses came from Hillary or Biden, or other factions who Obama united and represented after the 2007 primary, without ever really incorporating himself.)
There's an aloofness in there too -- Obama famously ran his campaign structure and fundraising outside the DNC, which left them in a historic deficit and gap in electing down-ballot candidates below the national level. Combined with his intellectual pretensions it is something like narcissism -- which, to be fair, you get from most presidents. (But if you call Obama a narcissist this codes as calling Obama a devil, and works up the people who consider Obama a hero, and then the race card enters the conversation, which, perhaps wisely, Obama rarely used himself. On that subject, he probably did benefit from some affirmative action, and a lot of the criticism he endured was of a sort his critics supposed wasn't racist but his defenders did, and maybe both sides were right. Probably Obama's own relationship to his race has something to do with what has been called "The Ordeal of Civility.")
To me Obama really isn't that interesting. He's something of a cipher and an empty shell. Richer presidential personalities are: Nixon, Johnson, and Trump. Hillary is much more interesting than Obama, which comes out in her pores. In that sense Obama ironically is like Lincoln.
He dabbled in homosexuality? Is that in the link?
Edit: Checking I found these two references-
"Yet when it came out six years ago, Rising Star was mostly ignored; as a result, its most scandalous and perhaps revelatory passages, such as Obama’s long letter to another girlfriend about his fantasies of having sex with men, read today, to people who are more familiar with the Obama myth than the historical record, like partisan bigotry."
"With Alex [McNear, Obama’s girlfriend at Occidental College], I think she wanted to have her role known. So when Alex showed me the letters from Barack, she redacted one paragraph in one of them and just said, “It’s about homosexuality.”"
I didn't realize pretending to be hetero-queer to get college-educated pussy was such an old tradition.
All the nice girls like a sailor! 😁
"All the nice girls" is a damn lie, but the ones who give head... ;-)
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