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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 think Obama is definitely a fascinating personality. The comparison (and contrast) with MLK is interesting, because as you say Obama isn’t really affiliated with African American identity at all until he decided to enter politics in his mid-20s, whereas MLK was born into the (at the time tiny) comfortable black middle class but nevertheless seemingly interacted through his father’s ministry with a much larger cross section of African American society.
It is unfair to claim that Obama is always very defensive about his fabricated identity, though. He’s quite open in his autobiographies about how he made and remade himself multiple times, sometimes to fit in with white or Asian peers, sometimes to
get BPD arthoe pussyattempt to make girls interested in him, sometimes to assimilate more into the black American community. His passages on his arrival in Chicago in Dreams From My Father actually often seem to drip with contempt for the young black men he encounters on ‘ghetto street corners’ whom he regards as living out a delusional fantasy of being men, unable or unwilling to improve the condition of their communities. Of course, he was a master of flowery language and nobody seemed to actually read the book (even though they bought it in great numbers), so this remains barely discussed.So Barry is absolutely a pseud who fancies himself a great intellectual and writer (and this was always the story from eg. his peers on the Harvard Law Review and so on), but he’s admitted this so many times (in fact I believe he openly calls himself a pseudo intellectual on several occasions) that it’s hard to call this substantially dishonest. I mean, this is a guy who would write his girlfriend letters like:
…the guy is clearly such a dork, it’s hard not to be a little sympathetic. His softboi letters about thinking he might be bisexual are obviously in the same vein. Is he a liar? Certainly. Did he invent a fictional life for himself and then live it all the way to the White House? Absolutely. But his messianic complex is so autistic and slightly embarrassing that one can’t help but be slightly charmed by him, I think. We’re all LARPing our lives to some degree, at least if you believe The Last Psychiatrist.
I think he’s exactly the kind of liar I think are the most annoying. Yes, pretty much everyone in politics has a sort of fictional biography. My issue with this sort of thing is that it’s absolutely fluid on every dimension of his life, and there’s no “core self” that doesn’t change just because his current audience doesn’t like that he’s like that. To blacks, he becomes black like them, at least until it becomes a liability, then those Black people become “ghetto losers” who aren’t real men because they aren’t like his vision of what an acceptable Black person should be (which is dependent on the mostly white politicians he hangs around who want blacks to be activists and democrats). When the church he was attending was outed as the “God damn America” church, he didn’t actually defend it as something he personally believed in as a message. He sort of implied that it doesn’t mean that, and went elsewhere, and was never seen in public with that preacher again. He was intellectual until it became a problem at which point he tried to pretend he’s down to earth.
I don’t agree with Trump, but one thing I loved about him apart from all that was that he wasn’t changing everything about him to pander to whoever he was talking to or wanted to appeal to. He was upfront about what he was about. He’s on tape saying “grab them by the pussy” and he didn’t walk it back or pretend it didn’t happen or recontextualize it as not meaning what it sounded like. He said a lot of guys talk like that in locker rooms. Trump never really pretends to be anything other than Trump, a rich guy who is just going to do whatever he wants. He’s been the same trashy New York rich guy he was back when he was selling Trump steaks mail order in the 1980s. He might be overstating his business acumen, but there’s at least a core part of who he is that like it or not, you can know that he’s not going to disown his past or his stated opinions.
I think Trump absolutely flip flops to cater to his audience. He did it many times in 2015/2016, and certainly has done since he left office.
One great example is Covid vaccines, which he personally endorsed, encouraged, and took (with a photo op) and was extremely proud of. Then in 2021, he gets booed multiple times at rallies, first for encouraging followers to get vaccinated and then even for saying he got the booster vaccine. And now he barely mentions it again. (I expect he might in the presidential debates v Biden, but not in the primary campaign). He actually was asked about this (iirc by Fox News) recently and he just kind of shrugs and says “well, I don’t even know if they work actually” or something. This for what he considered his greatest or one of his greatest achievements in office.
Trump is a master at telling people what they want to hear. His views on abortion, on religion, on trans issues have all changed as the base has changed. On immigration and trade he’s been consistent for a while, he does have some longstanding political beliefs, but on many other issues he moves with and caters to his audience, part of what makes him a great politician (when it comes to getting elected, at least).
I think Obama’s core political value - and David Samuels does kind of notes this in the linked article - is a generic center-left Euro style hostility to American exceptionalism. I don’t think he’s a radical, or a hardcore third-worldist or anything, and I think he rationally sees that as stupid and performative on the part of wealthy westerners. But he doesn’t believe America is a special place, or a special opportunity, the way that even many radical leftists in the American tradition did. And he thinks that it’s a little stupid, a little plebeian, to engage in that kind of rhetoric. He’s a pure elitist, in a way, but he’s not quite smart enough to be a true intellectual. He’s most similar to the archetypal /r/atheism poster back in the day, or to the annoying kid who always raises his hand in class to lecture the teacher, which is what he apparently was.
He had a quest for power and then wealth, but it wasn’t really to be remembered as a great statesman or to implement a particular political program or even to just have power, it was to be the wise man in the corner of the party surrounded by devoted adherents. That’s genuinely what motivates him, he wants to be an intellectual.
I don't think this is evidence of Trump "flip-flopping" so much as the fact that Omicron is objectively far less lethal than previous strains of Covid and that society seems to have largely moved on from Covid - bringing it up is yesterday's battle.
Exactly. The 5 people left who still care about COVID are also likely fervently blue tribe so it is completely pointless for Trump to try and appeal to them.
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