Read The Roots of Obama's Rage Online
Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
The Roots of Obama's Rage (4 page)
Clearly in Barack Obama we are dealing with a strange, complex man. Ironically we have ironed out that strangeness by making Obama the embodiment of American multiculturalism. Somehow we have taken this lonely, driven figure and turned him into an image of diversity. He is our Kumbayah man, our post-ideological president, an ultra-modern leader with a twenty-first century agenda. Obama recognizes this; he has himself commented that “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
12
As we will see, Obama is happy to accommodate these projections, which are vital to his transcendent image and political success. But whatever Obama is, he is not diverse or multicultural, at least not in his thinking or his fundamental values. Moreover, as we will soon discover, Obama is not even a twenty-first century man. He is fighting a private war that started far away and goes back to the middle of the last century, with roots that are even earlier. If we want to understand his actions in America and in the world, we have to understand Obama as he really is, not as we want him to be.
12
As we will see, Obama is happy to accommodate these projections, which are vital to his transcendent image and political success. But whatever Obama is, he is not diverse or multicultural, at least not in his thinking or his fundamental values. Moreover, as we will soon discover, Obama is not even a twenty-first century man. He is fighting a private war that started far away and goes back to the middle of the last century, with roots that are even earlier. If we want to understand his actions in America and in the world, we have to understand Obama as he really is, not as we want him to be.
CHAPTER 2
THE BLACK MAN’S BURDEN
B
arack Obama is a radiant figure on the world stage. He looks the way an American president should look, and he talks the way many in the world want the American president to talk. As a personality, he conveys dignity and calm; he seems to be what Aristotle called the great-souled man. As an orator, Obama is cerebral and yet confident, a man who is not afraid to occupy large shoes or undertake large ventures. Commenting after one of Obama’s orations,
Newsweek
writer Evan Thomas commented, “In a way Obama’s standing above the country, above the world, he’s sort of God.”
1
arack Obama is a radiant figure on the world stage. He looks the way an American president should look, and he talks the way many in the world want the American president to talk. As a personality, he conveys dignity and calm; he seems to be what Aristotle called the great-souled man. As an orator, Obama is cerebral and yet confident, a man who is not afraid to occupy large shoes or undertake large ventures. Commenting after one of Obama’s orations,
Newsweek
writer Evan Thomas commented, “In a way Obama’s standing above the country, above the world, he’s sort of God.”
1
Obama is also a consequential president. Less than two years into his first term, he has revamped the Bush administration’s foreign policy: no more invasions, no more preemptive wars, plans for withdrawals both from Iraq and Afghanistan, a new approach for punishing terrorists, and in general a very different understanding of America’s role in the world. At the same time, Obama has transformed the relationship between American citizens and their government. He has passed the most significant raft of laws since the Great Society: the bank rescue plan, the auto industry bailout, the stimulus package, sweeping regulation of Wall Street, a complete remaking of the health care system. In a way, Obama has altered the political trajectory of the past quarter century: no longer is the American economy steered by the invisible hand of the market; now it is increasingly controlled by the visible hand of the federal government.
Obama stands astride American politics like a colossus. All political movements in the country are responses to Obama in one form or another; the midterm election in November 2010 is almost entirely a referendum on him and his policies. Whatever one might think of his policies and priorities, no one since Reagan has been able to accomplish changes of such magnitude. If Obama serves two terms, he will likely leave America a very different country than it is now. This is certainly his objective; he has set himself the task, as he put it in his inauguration address, of “remaking America.”
2
2
Obama is also a complex man, a fact often lost both on his supporters and detractors, who like to portray him in simple colors. As a personality, Obama is much more fascinating than George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, or Jimmy Carter. Even Reagan, for all his accomplishments, was a much easier guy to figure out: what you saw was mostly what you got. Obama is more like Richard Nixon, a man of ambition and intellect, but at the same time an elusive man, an inward man, a surprise to see in the world of politics. He is a figure of psychological depth that carries about him an aura of mystery. Obama, like Nixon, would have interested Thucydides or Dostoyevsky.
These writers would have been struck by the dramatic contrast between the two faces of Obama. What then are these two faces? The first is the face of the healer and unifier. This is the Obama who wrote in his book
The Audacity of Hope
, “We will need to remind ourselves, despite all our differences, just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break.” Obama promised “a new kind of politics, one that can excavate and build upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans.” The same Obama spoke at the Democratic convention in 2004, in which he said, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is a United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America, a Latino America and an Asian America.... We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.” That speech resounded with conservative themes, as when Obama described “the people I meet in small towns and big cities and diners and office parks—they don’t expect government to solve all of their problems. Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and they’ll tell you that they don’t want their tax money wasted by a welfare agency or by the Pentagon. Go into any inner-city neighborhood and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn.” This is the kind of talk you normally hear at the Republican convention. And when Obama was elected he pledged, “And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn—I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too.” Let’s call the Obama who uttered these inspirational words Obama I.
3
The Audacity of Hope
, “We will need to remind ourselves, despite all our differences, just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break.” Obama promised “a new kind of politics, one that can excavate and build upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans.” The same Obama spoke at the Democratic convention in 2004, in which he said, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is a United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America, a Latino America and an Asian America.... We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.” That speech resounded with conservative themes, as when Obama described “the people I meet in small towns and big cities and diners and office parks—they don’t expect government to solve all of their problems. Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and they’ll tell you that they don’t want their tax money wasted by a welfare agency or by the Pentagon. Go into any inner-city neighborhood and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn.” This is the kind of talk you normally hear at the Republican convention. And when Obama was elected he pledged, “And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn—I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too.” Let’s call the Obama who uttered these inspirational words Obama I.
3
We haven’t seen very much of Obama I in the White House. Instead, we regularly encounter Obama II, a very different character. This is the Obama who lambasts the banks and investment houses and forces them to succumb to federal control; the Obama who gives it to the pharmaceutical and the health insurance companies, bending them to his will; the Obama who demonizes his predecessor and his opponents, portraying them as the source of all the problems that only he can solve. This Obama pushed through health care reform, essentially establishing government control over one-sixth of the U.S. economy, and he did it without a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate. Nor did it matter to Obama that a majority of the American people, in poll after poll, rejected the proposed changes. Despite Scott Brown’s stunning victory in Massachusetts, turning Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat over to the Republicans, Obama found a way to make his health care reform the law of the land. This same Obama seeks to impose expensive environmental regulations on companies in the form of cap and trade legislation; he is going to sharply hike taxes on business and the affluent; he is scaling back the military budget and has announced a withdrawal of American troops both from Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, as before, Obama can be expected to trample over his opposition to achieve his goals. This Obama has dismayed Republicans and conservatives, and an activist Tea Party movement has mobilized against him.
So which is the real Obama? For conservatives, it is Obama II and Obama I is just a mask and a camouflage. So far, conservative opposition to Obama has been shrill, focusing on several familiar themes: Obama is not an American citizen; Obama is a pawn of radical extremists; Obama is an unscrupulous power-seeker; Obama is a Muslim; and Obama is a socialist. These javelins, however, have at best grazed Obama; they have not fully found their target. Was Obama born in America? The best evidence is that he was. He was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961. His birth was mentioned in two local papers, the Honolulu
Sunday Advertiser
and the
Star Bulletin
. This makes him a “natural born” American, as the Constitution requires of a president. No evidence has been produced that Obama is anyone’s pawn. Sure, there are radical elements associated with him, but quite possibly they are his pawns. Obama is certainly ambitious, and like most presidents he seeks power, but power to do what? Power for what end?
Sunday Advertiser
and the
Star Bulletin
. This makes him a “natural born” American, as the Constitution requires of a president. No evidence has been produced that Obama is anyone’s pawn. Sure, there are radical elements associated with him, but quite possibly they are his pawns. Obama is certainly ambitious, and like most presidents he seeks power, but power to do what? Power for what end?
I certainly don’t think that Obama is a closet Muslim extremist who seeks to destroy America from within. I realize that his first name, Barack, refers to a Muslim blessing; his middle name, Hussein, is Islamic; and his last name, Obama, is eerily similar to Osama. Even so, the charge that Obama has an allegiance to Islam is unsubstantiated. His biological father Barack Sr. was born a Muslim, and so was Obama’s Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro, but neither practiced his faith. Of his dad, Obama writes, “By the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist, thinking religion to be so much superstition, like the mumbo-jumbo of witch doctors that he had witnessed in the Kenyan villages of his youth.” When Obama lived in Indonesia, he attended schools with Muslim teachers and Muslim students. Undoubtedly he was also exposed to Islam as part of the curriculum. But he also learned about Catholicism. Neither made much of an impact. In fact, Obama writes, “When it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and thirty brown children, muttering words.”
4
This is a more believable account of Obama’s religious—or non-religious—views than conjectures that he was raised as a Muslim.
4
This is a more believable account of Obama’s religious—or non-religious—views than conjectures that he was raised as a Muslim.
The charge of socialism, now furiously leveled against Obama, seems to bring us closer to the mark. Here is a president who has no business background and very few people with business experience around him; as he goes about slicing the economic pie, it is not clear that he has any idea how to make a pie. As Jonathan Alter remarks in
The Promise
, “entrepreneurship” is a word Obama rarely uses and a concept with which he seems uncomfortable.
5
More troubling, Obama is a president who spends the taxpayer’s money with shameless promiscuity. He runs up debt not in the billions, but in the trillions. Just when it seems that he has broken the bank, he proposes new spending. He has also increased federal control over major industries: the home mortgage industry, the investment banking industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the health industry, the energy industry, and so on. Never before have the tentacles of government reached so deeply into the private sector. Obama even woke up one day and decided to fire the CEO of General Motors. To his conservative critics, Obama is a kind of amnesiac. Somehow he lived through the second half of the twentieth century without witnessing the collapse of socialism, without learning the obvious lesson that socialism doesn’t work.
The Promise
, “entrepreneurship” is a word Obama rarely uses and a concept with which he seems uncomfortable.
5
More troubling, Obama is a president who spends the taxpayer’s money with shameless promiscuity. He runs up debt not in the billions, but in the trillions. Just when it seems that he has broken the bank, he proposes new spending. He has also increased federal control over major industries: the home mortgage industry, the investment banking industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the health industry, the energy industry, and so on. Never before have the tentacles of government reached so deeply into the private sector. Obama even woke up one day and decided to fire the CEO of General Motors. To his conservative critics, Obama is a kind of amnesiac. Somehow he lived through the second half of the twentieth century without witnessing the collapse of socialism, without learning the obvious lesson that socialism doesn’t work.
Yes, Obama was around during those years, but as we will discover, his mind was elsewhere. Still, the charge of socialism isn’t quite right. Even if it could account for Obama’s economic policy, it certainly could not explain his foreign policy. Moreover, socialism as a description of Obama’s domestic priorities doesn’t really work. Strictly speaking socialism means that private property is forfeited to the government, and Obama hasn’t even proposed that. He isn’t trying to take away your car or your computer. Now there are other forms of socialism—such as the kind espoused by socialist parties in Europe—but these are nothing more than welfare state capitalism: the market produces wealth, and the government takes an active role in redistributing it.
Obama is certainly closer to this European model of socialism. But even as I say this, I am struck by the fact that while Obama has massively increased government spending and regulation, he typically seeks to achieve this goal by working through the private market. During the height of the financial crisis, Obama could have nationalized the banks, but he chose not to. Instead he bailed them out with infusions of capital, in return for which the government took preferred stock. Obama’s health law didn’t nationalize the hospitals and the insurance companies; rather, it established new government rules that will require everyone to own health insurance provided for the most part by private companies. So too, Obama’s proposed cap and trade legislation involves government-imposed limitations on carbon use, but these limitations take the form of emissions permits that can be bought and sold on the free market, thus enabling the normal rules of price and scarcity to operate.
Psychologically, too, the socialist label doesn’t fit Obama. If you heard the old socialists, they became passionate when they spoke about equality and the poor. I think of the socialist stalwarts like Marx, Eugene Debs, or Norman Thomas. Even liberal Democrats like Howard Dean and John Edwards, whose views were progressive rather than strictly socialist, addressed poverty and social injustice with animated conviction. Listen to Obama talk about the poor, and he sounds like he is reading from his tax return. Even equality is not a big theme with him; on the rare occasions when he mentions the subject, he does so without passion. None of this is to suggest that the socialist allegation is flat-out wrong; rather, it is inadequate, incomplete, and needs to be integrated into a larger, fuller theory.
If the conservative reading of Obama is not entirely convincing, the liberal assessment of him is also implausible. For many of his ardent defenders, there is no Obama II. Obama I is the real Obama, and the only appropriate response to him is adulation and genuflection. I call these people the Obama Choir. A leading member of this group is Chris Matthews, host of the television show
Hardball
, who is known to respond to Obama’s speeches with exceptional gusto. On February 12, 2008, Matthews found one of Obama’s orations so titillating that, in his words, “I felt this thrill going up my leg.” Another Choir member is columnist Mark Morford of the
San Francisco Chronicle
, who is persuaded that Obama is “that rare kind of attuned being who . . . can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.... These kinds of people actually help us evolve.”
6
The issue raised by the Obama Choir is not whether Obama is worthy of unceasing hosannas, but what it is about Obama that causes normal people to lose their reason. Since the phenomenon is widespread in the mainstream media, this in itself is a condition that demands explanation.
Hardball
, who is known to respond to Obama’s speeches with exceptional gusto. On February 12, 2008, Matthews found one of Obama’s orations so titillating that, in his words, “I felt this thrill going up my leg.” Another Choir member is columnist Mark Morford of the
San Francisco Chronicle
, who is persuaded that Obama is “that rare kind of attuned being who . . . can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.... These kinds of people actually help us evolve.”
6
The issue raised by the Obama Choir is not whether Obama is worthy of unceasing hosannas, but what it is about Obama that causes normal people to lose their reason. Since the phenomenon is widespread in the mainstream media, this in itself is a condition that demands explanation.
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