A bore, a boor, and a tour de force
We probably know Hillary Clinton too well for anything about her to come as a surprise. As Barack Obama takes his run at her, however, Obama remains something of an enigma. Despite his apparent intelligence, he has yet to say anything or (much of anything) smart.
Obama is roughly as boring as any county commissioner discussing the issues of the day. He holds himself out as the sunny alternative to politics as usual, but his persona is dour. He could and should be a happy warrior, but he is neither happy nor a warrior. He seems to be carrying some unexpressed grievance. Perhaps he senses the mood of the Democratic electorate and responds to it subliminally.
Bruce Bawer is a serious observer watching the presidential race from abroad. He is the author most recently of While Europe Slept. Bawer expresses the desire to support Obama, but has read Obama's Dreams From My Father and is put off by it. In "Why I haven't caught 'Obama fever,'" Bawer writes:
As the title intimates, the figure in Obama’s carpet is his father, a Kenyan exchange student who met Barack’s white, Kansas-born mother at the University of Hawaii. After marrying her and fathering Barack, Dr. Obama – as he was universally known – returned to Kenya to take up a high-ranking government position. Thereafter, he showed little or no interest in Barack, whom he met only once, when the boy was ten. Though Barack’s mother had a brief second marriage that took her and the boy to Indonesia, she raised him mostly in the Aloha State – and, by his account, was unfailingly selfless and loving, as were her parents, “Gramps” and “Toot,” who helped bring him up.Bawer's column gets at the anger I sense in Obama, but I don't know if it fairly portrays the book. Andrew Ferguson's brilliant essay "The literary Obama" must be placed against Bawer's account of the book. Ferguson observes Obama's writerly interest in others beside himself and finds the book something of a tour de force. If Bawer's column teases out the anger implicit in Obama's public persona, Ferguson's essay explains the evolution of the gifted memoirist into the politico of grating vacuity.Yet on whom does Barack’s memoir focus? On his father – whom Barack, against all evidence (which suggests that Dr. Obama was colossally selfish and narcissistic), seeks to portray as heroic, sympathetic, indeed near-mythic. Obama père was a polygamist (and a lousy husband to all his wives), but Barack gives no indication that he finds this morally problematic; on the contrary, he seems determined to excuse his father’s many failings as consequences of imperialism, colonialism, and/or racism. One can, of course, well understand why a small boy – or even a young man – might idealize out of all proportion the father he never met. But Obama shows few signs in this book of recognizing that he’s doing this. Meanwhile, perversely, he treats his mother and grandparents, who by his own account raised him with extraordinary devotion, all but dismissively. At one point he even suggests that Gramps and Toot were really racists – and that all white people, in fact, are racists, and that black people have been so deformed by this racism that black individuals can hardly be held responsible for their own moral lapses.
