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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.
I wouldn't be surprised by this; Obama is not the traditionally black African-American (like his wife's family) and if he's ambitious to be in politics, he's smart enough to know he needs a good Origin Story that will get people to like him and vote for him. "I was born into privilege and never really suffered any setbacks" isn't a good story there. Michelle's family, being Chicago political royalty, got him into the nuts and bolts of the political process and taught him how to be 'one of us'.
Everybody in politics does this to an extent, because you're selling a product and the product is you. Obama is genuinely smart, so he clearly realised that the kind of narrative to get him places in the Democratic Party was a particular one, and he crafted that narrative. The way we've been told by PC or Social Justice or what you will that it is insulting or degrading to say that a minority is "articulate" and the likes, but that was a large part of his appeal to the white liberals: an articulate, presentable black man with an uplifting story of how he made it and at the same time a reassuring background of 'people like us' and not the grubby inner-city.
In the words of Joe Biden, "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."
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