Could Lolo Soetoro have been President Barry Soetoro's dad?

No, I'm not suggesting a new paternity theory to go along with all the wacky ones we already have. Instead, I'm suggesting a thought experiment to assess the impact that being able to self-identify as black has had on our President's career.

My contention has been: "Obama is President for the same dumb reason as the last guy was President: because of who his daddy was."

This is not a respectable view on either side of the aisle. It's not even a respectable view in the more fever swampish realms of anti-Obama theories. As I pointed out in 2008, the common denominator of everything from Obamamania to birtherism is "a widespread desire among whites of all political stripes to not think about race anymore, and to imagine that Obama doesn’t either." We're all past such crude, outdated ideas as race, right? Ancestry and family ties don't mean anything to anybody anymore.

Except that we're not, which is why Obama is President, and why Obama was even considered Presidential timber.

Yet, how can we test my theory that the common denominator of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama being considered Presidential timber is who their fathers were?

Fortunately, it's easy to perform a thought experiment on the previous President. If George W. Bush had been born George W. Rush, would he have become President? You can even assume the hypothetical Rushes were as materially prosperous as the real Bushes. The only difference in our thought experiment is that George W. Rush's father wasn't President Rush and his grandfather wasn't Senator Rush.

So, would George W. Rush have become President of the United States? Would he have been considered Presidential timber?

Of course not. He might have become, say, national sales manager of some corporation. But that's about it.

Note that this is not a question of whether George W. Rush would have beaten Al Gore and John F. Kerry. Maybe, knowing the deficiencies of those candidates, George W. Rush might have. Instead, this is a question of whether George W. Rush would have, out of 300 million people, ever been imagined to be President by anybody outside his own brain? I think most would agree the answer is: no. (George W. Bush would have lost a Presidential election if the only voters were his parents and his only opponent his brother Jeb.)

What about Obama? Would he have ever been considered for the Presidency if his father hadn't been black?

The current President would seem to have a much more unique background that would make it difficult to plug him into this kind of thought experiment. Yet, Ann Dunham's propensity for marrying U. of Hawaii students from politically well-connected families with a history of anti-colonial activism in their tropical homelands, who then return to their Third World countries and get jobs with American oil companies makes our conceptual task surprisingly easier.

Would our current President have become President in an alternative universe in which he was not Barack Obama, the son of Ann Dunham's Kenyan first husband, but (permanently) Barry Soetoro, the son of her Indonesian second husband? 

After all, Lolo spent more time and money on little Barry than Barack Sr. ever did. Barack Sr.'s contribution was limited to a few letters, one visit, a basketball, his genes, and as a role model of a black political leader in Ann's (highly fictionalized) lectures to her son about her romantic first husband's ambitions for his people (in sharp contrast to her increasingly unsatisfactory second husband's ambitions to provide for her and little Barry).

The question of "What If Obama Were Half-Asian" would sound less crazy to Obama than it does to most Americans since Obama has a half-Asian half-sister, Maya Soetoro.

Assume, for the purposes of this thought experiment, that the conventional wisdom that race doesn't exist is right, and that Barry Soetoro would have turned out exactly the same in all ways being Lolo's genetic son as Barack Obama Jr. did being Bararck Sr.'s genetic son, except that he wouldn't have had any justification to self-identify as black, which is, as we all know, purely a cultural construct.

Alternatively, assume that Lolo and Ann had never mentioned to Barry that Lolo wasn't his genetic father and, because race doesn't exist, therefore nobody else noticed either.

Minus the racial angle, that's roughly the story of Gerald Ford's upbringing -- he only spent 15 minutes in his life talking to his biological father. Likewise, nobody is all that sure who Bill Clinton's biological father really was.

If Ford and Clinton had self-identified with different fathers, would that have permanently banished them from ever being even considered as Presidential timber? Maybe, but maybe not. In their quite different ways -- Ford was an All-American athlete, a male model before he went bald, and a Yale Law School grad, while Clinton was a political ball of fire and a Yale Law School grad -- they were early on recognized as guys with a lot of political potential. Their unusual yet mundane family backgrounds didn't seem to play a huge role in their careers, one way or another.

So, is Obama more like George W. Bush or like Ford and Clinton? Assume everything else about his upbringing through age 18 was the same, except that instead of Barack Obama then going through life as a Potential First Black President, Barry Soetoro then went through life as, theoretically, a Potential First Half-Asian President. 

How far would an equally talented, equally ambitious half-Asian half-white Barry Soetoro have gotten in American life?

Being half-black, Barack Obama was the one we were waiting for.

But, as far as I can tell, not many Americans are particularly waiting around for the First Half-Asian Whatever. Would Barry Soetoro have gotten a six-figure advance to write the autobiography of the first half-Asian editor of the Harvard Law Review? Would Barry Soetoro have been elected editor of the Harvard Law Review? Would Barry Soetoro even have been been admitted to Harvard Law? (Barack Obama said, while he was at Harvard, that he had been the beneficiary of affirmative action, so it's certainly legitimate to wonder.) Would the U. of Chicago Law School have offered Barry Soetoro tenure despite publishing no legal articles?

Would Barry Soetoro have even been able to get Barack Obama's community organizer job?

No. Byron York reported:

So [Jerry] Kellman set out to find a black organizer. He ran an ad in some trade publications, and Obama responded. But at first Kellman wasn’t sure Obama was right for the job. “My wife was Japanese-American,” Kellman recalled. “I showed her the résumé, with the background in Hawaii. The name’s Obama, so I asked, ‘Could this be Japanese?’ She said, ‘Sure, it could be.’” It was only when Kellman talked to Obama on the phone, and Obama “expressed interest in something African-American culturally,” that a relieved Kellman offered Obama the job.

Overall, how far would Barry Soetoro have gotten?

Head of the admissions office at Occidental? Chief newsletter editor at Business International? Head of the New York chapter of Ralph Nader's Public Interest Research Group? State Senator from Evanston, IL? Magna cum laude graduate of the U. of Hawaii law school?

Everything I know about the man suggests that, all else being equal, if he weren't able to self-identify as black, he would have carved out for himself a comfortable, respectable, and worthy life and made a positive social contribution. He would certainly have ranked among the top several million people in America.

But, President Barry Soetoro?

Really?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

What's Obama hiding?

Famed landlord Donald Trump has been asking some questions about President Obama's background, such as what were his college records at Occidental and Columbia?

The basic impetus behind questions about Obama is the perfectly reasonable feeling: "Who is this guy?"

For example, I lived in Chicago from 1982 until the late summer of 2000. I read local newspapers, I watched local news. I've got a pretty good memory. When Barack Obama became a media superstar in 2004 and an heir apparent to the Presidency, I said to myself, "Oh, yeah, him! I remember him from my Chicago days from ... stuff. Well, I'm pretty sure I've been hearing his name for years, going back to the early 1970s when his radical Black Power plays were so controversial. Oh, wait a minute, I'm thinking of playwright Amiri Baraka, not Barack Obama. Well ..."

My best guess is that when Barack Obama's name surfaced in the news in 2004, it wasn't new to me, but I might just be kidding myself. 

Now, if I'd been paying close attention to local Democratic black politics on the South Side, I would have remembered him as the guy who got crushed by Bobby Rush (whom I was quite familiar with) in early 2000 in the House primary. If I was a player in Democratic rich white politics on the Gold Coast, I would no doubt have heard about how he leaves wealthy white liberals with fainting spells about how he should be President. 

But to a white Republican yuppie on the North Side with a job, he just wasn't on the radar. And why should he have been? What was he accomplishing that marked him out as Presidential timber?

Four years later, he's elected President, eight years after losing badly a House primary.

That's not the most amazing eight year rise in American Presidential history. For example, in 1860, Ulysses S. Grant was a counter clerk in his dad's shop in Galena, IL. Eight years later he was elected President. 

Of course, in the meantime, Grant had conquered Vicksburg and Richmond and defeated Robert E. Lee. 

In contrast, over eight years, Obama had ... uh ... well, mainly he had given up his lifelong ambition of rising to power on the back of black voters and switched to a strategy of rising to power on the back of white voters. 

Back in 2008 in VDARE, I considered various popular theories about Obama"

That he was really born in Kenya and thus isn’t eligible to be President.

That he isn’t black because his father was 7/8ths Arab.

That he is a practicing Muslim.

That his real father was a Communist poet, Frank Marshall Davis.

That Bill Ayers ghostwrote his 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father.

For example, obviously Obama wasn't born in Kenya. The cost and discomfort for a pregnant lady to travel from Hawaii to Kenya in 1961 would be prohibitive. And why would Barack Sr. have taken Ann to Kenya? To meet her co-wife?

I encourage you to reread my 2008 article for a sensible take on various controversies.

So, what is Obama covering up?

Well, one thing that he's not particularly trying hard to cover up, but almost nobody has noticed, is the dubiousness of his parents' marriage:

"In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I’ve never quite had the courage to explore. There’s no record of a real wedding, a cake, a ring, a giving away of the bride. No families were in attendance; it’s not even clear that people back in Kansas were fully informed. Just a small civil ceremony, a justice of the peace. The whole thing seems so fragile... "

He doesn't spell it out, but as a lawyer and a politician, the whole thing would strike him as trouble: Barack Sr. was already married back in Kenya with a wife and a couple of kids, so getting married in Hawaii would be the crime of bigamy. (This situation was anticipated uncannily in John Updike's 1978 bestseller The Coup, in which an African student in an American college in 1959 keeps trying to tell his white American girlfriend that he has a wife back home in Africa.) Or, you could argue that Barack Sr.'s marriage in Kenya according to the customs of his tribe wasn't a "real" marriage, but that sounds pretty racist. And the whole thing raises the topic of polygamy, which isn't really on-message in American political campaigns.

Obama introduced himself to America at the 2004 Democratic convention with a famous speech that began with 390 words about his ancestry, especially his parent's marriage. It's always been a big selling point for Obama that he unites through his parents' marriage the black and the white, just as Henry VIII united the white and the red roses of the War of the Roses. And, it's been a selling point that his parents' black-white marriage was illegal in many states in 1961 (although not, of course, Hawaii, where a huge fraction of marriages by then were interracial, a subject that Obama supporters don't like to talk about). This is a big part of the self-congratulation that helped get Obama to the White House: look how enlightened we are on race today!

But what's the political utility of the truth about his parents' marriage: that it was illegal because polygamy is illegal in America? The federal government fought a small civil war with the Mormons over polygamy in the 1850s. There's no way, no how to positively spin the fact that Obama's parents marriage was illegally bigamous, so let's not talk about it.

But, Obama has been reasonably forthcoming about his parents' illegal marriage. He's never mentioned that his parents marriage was bigamous, but he's laid out enough facts in Dreams from My Father that you can easily figure it out if you read the President's autobiography closely, but who's bothered to do that? (I have.)

So, what is Obama still hiding?

One theory that makes more sense out of his career's ups and downs -- graduating in the top 16% supposedly at Harvard Law School, where he made a big impression on everybody, alongside periods where he seemed down and withdrawn -- is that he's mildly bipolar. Lots of people are. Famous people often are famous because their up phases coincided with periods of opportunity in their lives. By his own accounts, he appears to have suffered major depressive episodes in New York in the 1980s and after his rejection by black voters as not black enough in 2000.

Another theory that I'm increasingly drawn to is that Obama got a little help along the way from CIA/NSA types, but that's completely off everybody else's radar because it doesn't fit ideological categories. His father was a protege of the CIA's main man in Kenya, Tom Mboya, and was chief witness of his assassination. His mother worked in the U.S. embassy in Indonesia, a main front in the Cold War, soon after the 1965 coup, and then went on to a long career with U.S. government-affiliated organizations in the Third World. Barack Jr.'s one private industry job was as a copy editor at a firm, Business International, whose owner had previously admitted the firm served as a front for four CIA agents.

But that likely wouldn't be that big of a deal: say that his parents and stepfather got some people they knew at Langley or NSA or the Ford Foundation or some oil companies to pull some strings to get young Barry transferred from Oxy to Columbia to study international relations. And then, somebody directed him to a job at a CIA-connected firm for a year after college There might be an interesting story here, but perhaps the more interesting one is how he rebelled against this path laid out for him in international affairs and came up with the idea of becoming mayor of Chicago, a very insular, anti-international ambition, a rebellion against his parents' internationalism.

Overall, though, I think the basic situation is that Obama wakes up every morning in the White House and says to himself, "Holy crap, those poor dumb saps really did elect a black lefty affirmative action baby to be President. I'd better act like a complete tool of Wall Street and the neocons, or the saps might finally figure it out. Fortunately, the Republicans are even bigger tools of Wall Street and the neocons, and white Democrats are complete idiots about race, so Democrats will never grasp why I have to sell them out: because I can't let anybody notice I'm a black lefty affirmative action baby! It's so ironic that if white liberals started to think about it, their heads would explode like that computer on Star Trek."

But, mostly, Obama's big dark secret is that he just didn't do much in his life other than self-promote himself as the guy who should be the first black President. The embarrassing secret is that Obama is President for the same dumb reason as the last guy was President: because of who his daddy was.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Mama Obama

The NYT Magazine has an excerpt from a new book by Janny Scott about Barack Obama's mother in Indonesia. It's pretty similar to the equivalent chapter in my book on Obama. It mentions that Ann Dunham was only 17 when she was impregnated, which is very rare in the press. But the excerpt doesn't mention that her subsequent marriage was polygamous. I guess there's only so much that respectable readers can be expected to put up with.

I had pointed out that Obama had been exposed to racism in Indonesia, which he completely failed to mention in his memoir (while exaggerating the anti-black behavior he'd been exposed to at his prep school in Hawaii). But this new book makes clear the relentlessness of the anti-black racism and even violence little Barry had to put up with in Jakarta:

After lunch, the group took a walk, with Barry running ahead. A flock of Indonesian children began lobbing rocks in his direction. They ducked behind a wall and shouted racial epithets. He seemed unfazed, dancing around as though playing dodge ball “with unseen players,” Bryant said. Ann did not react. Assuming she must not have understood the words, Bryant offered to intervene. “No, he’s O.K.,” Ann said. “He’s used to it.” 

“We were floored that she’d bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks,” Bryant said. ... 

Occasionally, she took Barry to work. Joseph Sigit, an Indonesian who worked as the office manager at the time, told me, “Our staff here sometimes made a joke of him because he looked different — the color of his skin.” 

Joked with him — or about him? I asked. 

“With and about him,” Sigit said, with no evident embarrassment.

As I pointed out in my book, the missing piece of the puzzle in Dreams from My Father is Asians. Compared to the average American, Obama had vastly more contact growing up with Asians -- in Indonesia, Hawaii, California, New York, and even in Kenya on his visit, where his half-sister resentfully calls his attention to the Indian dominance of commerce in Nairobi. But, his book is just about the usual black and white stuff that his white readers would expect. He never, ever reports learning anything about blacks or whites from the existence of Asians. 

Without thinking about a third group, it's hard to think intelligently about blacks and whites. This is what I call the midget-giant epistemological problem. In 2003, I wrote in VDARE:

One day in 1981, I was standing in front of UCLA's Royce Hall, when I noticed two young men walking toward me across the huge open quad. "Hey!" I said to myself. "There's something you don't see very often at UCLA. That tiny fellow talking to the normal-sized guy is a genuine midget." Then, another young man walked up to the pair. "Wow! Now there are two midgets with that regular guy," I thought. "What are the odds of that?" 

Highly unlikely, I suddenly realized, as I underwent one of those gestalt snaps, like where the vase in the picture suddenly becomes two faces in profile. Now that there were three people, it became clear to me that the two "midgets" were six-footers and the "normal-sized guy" was 7'-3" 290-pound Bruin basketball center Mark Eaton (who later became a league-leading shot blocker for the Utah Jazz). 

When I think about race, I'm frequently reminded of that lesson I learned in the difficulty of accurately comparing X to Y without a Z to provide perspective.

The elegant but intellectually vacuous Dreams panders to American X/Y thinking, despite all of Obama's experiences with perspective-granting Zs.

I did, however, like the President's gracious tribute in the article to his maternal grandmother, whom he had so coldly slandered -- while she was still alive -- for reasons of political expedience in his famous race speech to ward off questions about his relationship with Rev. Wright:

“She was a very strong person in her own way,” Obama said, when I asked about Ann’s limitations as a mother. “Resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, persistent — the fact that she ended up finishing her dissertation. But despite all those strengths, she was not a well-organized person. And that disorganization, you know, spilled over. Had it not been for my grandparents, I think, providing some sort of safety net financially, being able to take me and my sister on at certain spots, I think my mother would have had to make some different decisions. And I think that sometimes she took for granted that, ‘Well, it’ll all work out, and it’ll be fine.’ But the fact is, it might not always have been fine, had it not been for my grandmother. . . . Had she not been there to provide that floor, I think our young lives could have been much more chaotic than they were.”

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Kaus goes there

Mickey Kaus writes:

Jay Cost: “Obama is just plain bad at politics” I think Cost’s on to something, though a) there are worse things than being bad at politics, even in a president; b) it doesn’t mean Obama won’t be reelected (or that I won’t vote for him); c) Cost’s examples aren’t wildly compelling. (Every president says a few dumb things, And let’s see if Obamacare gets repealed, now that Paul Ryan has said its basic structure is OK for seniors.) 

Well, you don't have to be all that great at politics in an absolute sense, you just have to be better than the opposition, especially when the opposition keeps getting disqualified. Obama has contested seven elections in his career, from the election for Harvard Law Review supremo onward, one of which he lost badly (to Bobby Rush in 2000). In three of them, his chief opponents were driven off the ballot by, once, Obama contesting the opponents' signatures, and, twice, by seamy divorce records being opened. So, maybe that's proof of his political genius.

Cost would have been on stronger ground if he’d waited to hear Obama’s waste of a deficit speech; d) Cost doesn’t go into why Obama managed to get to the top of politics without being all that good at it. The answer is distressingly obvious: Obama’s the biggest affirmative action baby in history.  When other pols are trying, failing, learning, while climbing up the middle rungs of the ladder, he got a pass; e) He’s the second president in a row to get a pass–George W. Bush, after all, didn’t exactly have to fight his way through a 64-team bracket. He was a legacy exception. And, come to think of it, he wasn’t that good at politics either. …

People should read the hagiographic The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, and count the number of powerful people who told Remnick that the first time they met Obama, their reaction was: He should be President! Then compare this to Obama's actual record of accomplishment, as reported in The Bridge, such as all the brilliant legal articles he wrote that led to him being offered tenure by the U. of Chicago Law School, all the landmark cases he won as a discrimination lawyer, all the public school students whose test scores rose due to the $100,000,000 he handed out as Chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, all the jobs he helped people get as a community organizer, and so forth. (Remnick does devote pp. 164-169 to the asbestos Obama helped get partially removed.)

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama at Harvard Law School

President Obama's decision to plunge America into a war with virtually no prior public debate raises inevitable questions about his ability to foresee the future. For several years, we've been reassured about Obama's brilliance, mostly stemming from his record at Harvard. For example, in David Brooks' quasi-novel The Social Animal, the Obamaish character tells the David Brooks-like main character:

"I'm going to be a great president. I have the gifts. I know more about more policy areas than anybody else in the country. ... My attitude is going to be, 'I've got game. Give me the ball.'"

Buried deep in the comments to an earlier post, TangoMan points to a 1999 LA Times article that sheds some light on the mystery of how the President ranked in the top ten percent at Harvard Law School without much intellectually distinguishing himself during most other periods of his life. Most likely, he didn't rank in the top 10% at HLS, as has so often been assumed based on his magna cum laude honors. Only since 1999 has magna cum laude at HLS been restricted to the top 10 percent. 

Honors Grow Scarcer for Harvard Law Grads 

June 10, 1999|Reuters 

When members of Harvard Law School's class of 1999 receive their prestigious degrees Thursday, 36% fewer graduates than last year will be awarded with honors, the school said Wednesday. ... Under a system implemented three years ago that first took effect with this year's class, Harvard Law said it will limit magna cum laude degrees to the top 10% of the class. The next 30% will receive cum laude degrees. Under the old system, 76% of Harvard Law grads earned honors, the school said.

So, more likely, Obama finished in, say, the top 30% or 40% at HLS in grades. 

And, you want to know something? That's really good. He's a very smart guy. He's plenty smart enough to be President.

On the other hand, Obama has been told that he's a genius so many times that he apparently is starting to believe it. Peter Baker reported in the NY Times Magazine last year:

One prominent Democratic lawmaker told me Obama’s problem is that he is not insecure — he always believes he is the smartest person in any room and never feels the sense of panic that makes a good politician run scared all the time, frenetically wooing lawmakers, power brokers, adversaries and voters as if the next election were a week away. 

Emphasis mine.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A classmate's view of Obama

Much of what we know about Obama comes from people he sucked up to (David Remnick's biography The Bridge, for example, is unconsciously hilarious as various personages Obama has kissed up to go on and on about they told all their friends the first time they met him that he should be President). The more interesting perspectives have come from those people who observed him without being in a position to forward his glorious career, such as his Harvard Law School classmate who had been the bass player for The Runaways.

From the comments, here's another plausible sounding perspective on Obama at HLS:

I went there [Harvard Law School] one year behind Obama, had one class together. I graduated cum laude, and my measured IQ last time was 156, and I got perfect score on LSAT. But I am also a little bit ADHD-ish, and I don't think I studied as diligently as most of my peers. I mention this because (besides being defensive about not doing better) while the HLS population is quite smart, they are even more different from average in discipline and diligence, and while Obama was not the smartest guy there, he was f****** amazing in terms of discipline. Over all, I think his package of mental gifts are well superior to mine.

First of all, not all classes were blind graded. On many there were signed papers. And in my class, Obama sat in the front row every day and gazed at the professor with an adoration that Nancy Reagan would have been embarrassed to beam at Ron. He worked them incredibly assiduously. And very successfully. That helped his scores. That isn't LSAT intelligence, but it requires an interpersonal skill that is way beyond mine, and I hazard, way beyond anyone reading this. That is very demanding, and he had that ON TOP OF very respectable raw IQ.

I know that because there are a lot of classes that are blind graded, not easily gamed, and you can't be a dope in them and get magna. Even without his brilliant suck-up skills, he would make the top half of the Harvard distribution.

Steve is right to focus on his ability to paraphrase opponents' arguments to disarm them. Someone of glaringly average intelligence -- like say, Amanda Marcotte -- is a complete failure at that.

As far as his hesitation to make decisions, I don't ascribe that to lack of intelligence. It is part conscious strategy. He never gave a substantive opinion in class -- he just paraphrased others. People loved it, and thought he was brilliant. Those of us who thought that made him a pussy were few and far between. And he kept to that strategy with iron discipline. You might think of it as like the post-modern philosophy in chess: never commit until after the other guy does, and then you have the chance to decide what to do when you have learned more. I agree there are a lot of problems with that strategy for being president, but it sure does seem to work like gang-busters for getting to be president.

Though I think it is more than strategy, cause he does it even when it is stupid. I think that was his survival skill for being the only black kid in Hawaii and Indonesia. I mean think about it, that has to be terrifying, and living in that kind of fear for so long has to leave a mark. Clinton learned from his abusive alcoholic parents to lie lie lie, and do whatever feels good. Obama learned from his disinterested, abandoning parents to never let yourself be vulnerable by committing to anything.

Anyway, my main point is: I don't want this guy to be president, and I don't share his beliefs, and I think he is more than half a crook (see e.g. Michelle's bag collecting disguised as a phony baloney job at U of C hospital). But anyone is a fool who takes his talents lightly.

One thing that's fascinating about Obama is that he had such a hard time understanding that he had a Rev. Wright problem. He donated large amounts of money to Wright's church in 2005, 2006, and 2007, which appears on his publicly released tax records. He named his 2006 bestseller The Audacity of Hope after a Wright sermon. Wright was going to give the invocation at Obama's presidential kickoff rally in Springfield in February 2007 up until somebody convinced Obama to disinvite Wright the night before.

Wright understood all this better than Obama. As Wright told the NYT in 2007 about why he was disinvited, when people find out I went to Libya with Farrakhan and met with Gadaffi ...

And yet, as David Plouffe has admitted, the Obama campaign staff was blindsided by Wright videos finally appearing in the MSM on Feb. 13, 2008. They were just lucky Wright was on a cruise at the moment. When he got back and went on his media tour six weeks later, he made Obama's famous race speech look like a pack of lies.

Ultimately, Wright supposedly spent the fall campaign in email hell in Africa, which sounds like smart planning on the part of the Obama braintrust ... finally.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Once again, how smart is Obama?

A novelist requests help from iSteve readers:

Exactly how smart is Obama? He is represented, by self and media lickers-and-kissers as "the smartest guy in the room." Yet as far as I can see, there's absolutely no documentation for this claim. 

Virtually everything he's been given has been donated willingly on the basis of what he is--pan racial, seemingly articulate and forthright exotic who wears clothes brilliantly and is highly charismatic--than what he's done. No grades, no scores, no actual accomplishments. So how smart is he? Is he really smart? He's articulate but he uses his charm in any circumstance where he's out-IQed, and if his charm fails, so does his confidence, and he lurches in gibberish, well documented. 

Has he ever thought anything through in a conscientious way?  Does he look under, through or behind the bromides that he so glibly produces on cue? There's no evidence of any of this.  He takes his time on making decisions, but to me that's more a sign of fear, even panic, as he knows he must commit and defend, as opposed to simply being Obama, and that scares him silly. He's not stupid; he's certainly well above average, but at the same time far below distinguished. He's smart enough to see nuances but he's not disciplined enough to discriminate between them, ignore the inappropriate ones, and lead on, as Bush (also no genius) was willing to do, and take the heat, as the heat quite clearly bothers him. (As well it should; he's never felt it before; he's always been beloved.)

Anyway, for me, this calculates out to about a 115. What do you think/ Love to see your ruminations on this one, and your reader's responses.

There is a remarkable paucity of publicly available analytical writing that's clearly by Obama rather than the product of a committee process. His first memoir is only modestly analytical (for example, in his decision to reject Louis Farrakhan's black nationalist capitalism because there is no money in it -- but most of the rest is devoted to establishing quandaries for himself rather than in solving them). His more analytic second memoir was read over by 28 insiders before going to the publisher, so who knows what we can say about what that book says about him.

To my mind, the place to start is with the eight lengthy final exam essay questions (and two answer memos) from Obama's "Racism and the Law" course at the  U. of Chicago Law School (for links to them see the bottom of Jodi Kantor's long 2008 blog post. 

I'm presuming that Obama mostly wrote them himself, that he didn't have a TA write them for him, and that he didn't crib them from some other professor in another city. I was living in Chicago reading the same newspapers as Obama at the same time, and his questions are clearly ripped from the Chicago headlines of the day.

They are nicely done. They don't represent original thought, but they do testify to Obama's nimble ability to understand and replicate various sides of fairly complex arguments. So, I'd say he's, oh, two standard deviations above the national average in verbal ability and verbal logic. Unfortunately, I don't know of much evidence at all relating to his quantitative ability.

They don't testify much, however, to Obama's ability to solve complex problems, which remains opaque. As I pointed out years ago, much of his appeal comes from his ability to project back to interlocutors: "I have understood you."

The ability to summarize your opponent's side of an argument at least as well as its partisans could do for themselves is, in terms of brainpower, nothing to be sneezed at. On the other hand, there isn't all that much evidence from Obama's writings of Obama coming to his own conclusions, other than, say, that Farrakhanism is an economic losing strategy and that he should thus stick to the left side of the mainstream (pp. 199-202 in Dreams). You don't have to be Richard Feynman to figure that out!

Alternatively, he may have figured out a lot of big things, but he's not telling anybody because he doesn't want them to know what conclusions he has reached.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama's War

Two weeks ago, Barack Obama started America's war with Libya. I can recall my amazement as I typed the title for my blog post: Are we at war with Libya?

As with so much about the President, his big picture reasons for starting Obama's War remain opaque.

Did he do it to flex the muscle of American power in front of a quaking world?

Or, did he do it to tie down the Gulliver of American power by setting the precedent that the terrifying Pentagon is now the errand boy of the United Nations in general and the enlightened Europeans in particular?

Or did he just not know he was sending America to war? Perhaps he has actually believed all the nonsense he has talked about how this isn't a war and, if you don't believe that, well, this isn't America's war?

And thus we come again to the question of who Obama really is: bleeding heart or cold-blooded power-seeker? And what attitude toward American power has Obama inherited (I mean, besides that he should be in charge of American power)?

When George W. Bush decided to finish his father's unfinished business with Saddam Hussein, well, it wasn't very good idea, but at least, from an commonplace understanding of the psychological dynamics of the Bush dynasty, you could see where he was coming from. The younger Bush's view was that his imposing father had wimped out and lost re-election by not taking out Saddam Hussein. 

But on the larger question of the goodness and usefulness of American power, it's clear the two Bonesmen were in agreement (although the elder held a more nuanced view of its limits). The Bushes are from the old hereditary ruling caste, The Good Shepherd good blood, good bone elite.

But, Obama's mother, father, and stepfather were part of such an exotic caste -- the CIA-affiliated international left -- that it's hard for anybody to get a handle on him. And the subjects that fascinate Obama most -- his race and inheritance -- are exactly those that most stultify thinking among almost everybody else.

That a man figured out how to exploit the softheadedness of America's reigning civic religion by making himself "a blank screen" for our fantasies, that he managed to make himself the most powerful man in the world, the man who can start a war on a whim without anybody else having much of an idea what his whims are, remains among the oddest and most under-reported stories of this century.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

NYT: Obama needs to share more

Matt Bai in the New York Times worries that poor President Obama isn't successfully bypassing the traditional media:

For Obama, Getting Message Out Online is a Challenge
Truly taking the presidency online would not only enable Mr. Obama to get his message to some voters without passing through the traditional news media.

Because the establishment media has always been so skeptical and unfriendly toward Obama that he needs to go around them to connect directly with the average voter.

Mr. Obama is probably the most talented writer to occupy the office in the television age; his political career was made possible, in large part, by the candid memoir he wrote as a younger man. 

"Candid" is about the last word that comes to mind for "Dreams from My Father." The book sold 11,000 copies in the nine years up until he became a superstar at the 2004 Democratic convention. It's sold millions of copies since then, although I doubt that millions of people have finished it. I doubt if his memoir was a net benefit to his political career at all. It didn't hurt much because it was written in such an opaque style as to be unquotable, but it didn't help much other than to reconfirm the "What a fine young gentleman" feelings that many people already felt for him after seeing him on TV.

So it is hard to understand why the president hasn’t tried to use that talent the way Mr. Kennedy capitalized on his personal charm. You can easily imagine Mr. Obama sitting in front of a keyboard at the end of a long day, briefly reflecting on the oddity of a personal encounter or on the meaning of some overlooked event, or perhaps describing what it is like to stand in the well of Congress and deliver the State of the Union address. It could be that in order to expand the reach and persuasiveness of the modern presidency, Mr. Obama simply needs to be his online self — not so much a blogger as a memoirist-in-chief, walking us through history in real time. 

Yeah, but that would cut into the vital time the President devotes to having a cig, watching ESPN SportsCenter, getting in a quick 18 holes, stepping out for a Lucky Strike, shooting hoops, taking a mental health break for a smoke, daydreaming, etc etc.

The idea that Obama wants to share his thoughts unfiltered and unvetted with the American public is ridiculously naive. It took him four years to get Dreams from My Father finished. He, in effect, stole part of a large advance by not delivering it to the original publisher. The manuscript for his second book was vetted by 28 experts before being sent to the publisher. Do you really think he wants to have to have more Beer Summits every time he accidentally reveals his inner feelings?

What he is good at is the occasional set piece oration that he's rigorously prepared for, like tonight's speech, where he gets to tap into all the good will in America toward eloquent black men. That, and being tongue-bathed by the press. In contrast, the more we see of him on a mundane basis, the more we notice that there's not all that much there.

Nigeria’s leader, Goodluck Jonathan, has been called the “Facebook president” for posting his own frequent meditations for a country of 44 million Internet users. 

Yeah, my spambox is already full of emails from Lea Abiba Mangou, Mbebe  John, Thompsons Ngowa, Hassim Uhuru, and Barack Obama, all asking for my help. I think Obama should definitely step up his online efforts. Like the Mineshaft Gap in Dr. Strangelove, Mr. President, you cannot afford to allow a Nigerian Spam Gap to emerge.

C'mon, the Real Obama didn't get elected President in 2008, that was the Fake Obama, a collective delusion. The Real Obama has no intention of running in 2012 as the Real Obama, either.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

What I really want WikiLeaks to leak

The WikiLeaks' State Dept. cables revealed so far have been mildly entertaining. For example, American diplomats reported on President Sarkozy of France (according to the NYT):

But the cables also convey a nuanced assessment of the French leader as a somewhat erratic figure with authoritarian tendencies and a penchant for deciding policy on the fly. ... By January 2010, American diplomats wrote of a high-maintenance ally sometimes too impatient to consult with crucial partners before carrying out initiatives, one who favors summit meetings and direct contacts over traditional diplomacy.

... Mr. Sarkozy was criticized by European diplomats referred to in a cable for an “increasingly erratic” last half of his 2008 European Union presidency.

“Combined, these stories have bolstered the impression that Sarkozy is operating in a zone of monarch-like impunity,” said an Oct. 21, 2009, cable. 

In December 2009, Mr. Rivkin told Mrs. Clinton: “Sarkozy’s own advisers likewise demonstrate little independence and appear to have little effect on curbing the hyperactive president, even when he is at his most mercurial.” He added: “After two years in office, many seasoned key Élysée staff are leaving for prestigious onward assignments as a reward for their hard work, raising questions as to whether new faces will be any more willing to point out when the emperor is less than fully dressed.”

Nothing terribly surprising here, but gossip is fun. I especially look forward to (hopefully) forthcoming cables about Berlusconi.

What I'd really like WikiLeaks to leak, however, is the exact counterpart of this: what French diplomats are telling Sarkozy about Obama. It would probably be a lot more interesting than what the American press has told the American public about Obama.

For example, if Sarkozy tends toward mania, the obvious question is: does Obama tend toward depression? 

Obama's own memoirs suggests that the President suffered through significant depressive episodes in roughly 1981-1983 (a period when his sister asked his mother during a visit, “Barry’s okay, isn’t he? I mean, I hope he doesn’t lose his cool and become one of those freaks you see on the streets around here”) and 2000-2001 (of the 18 months following his crushing defeat by Bobby Rush, Obama wrote, "Denial, anger, bargaining, despair -- I'm not sure I went through all the stages prescribed by the experts. At some point, though, I arrived at acceptance -- of my limits, and, in a way, my mortality.")

But some Googling on "Obama" and "depressive" brings up mostly an Onion piece and me.

Is Obama entering a third depressive phase?

I don't know, but it would seem both interesting and important. Of course, the American press hardly noticed Obama's references to his first two depressive phases, so we can hardly count on them to be on top of this question. 

On the other hand, I would suspect the energetic Sarkozy has been pestering his diplomats in Washington to keep him apprised of the Most Important Man in the World's mood swings. Maybe some day we'll be able to read what they've found out.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Set-Aside Boondoggle

Heather Mac Donald explains in NRO in The Set-Aside Boondoggle another detriment on the economy. 

Allow me to reiterate that the one comparative political advantage that Obama personally would possess in improving the economy is his ability as a black President to set in motion -- so should he choose -- the reform of the huge number of distortions in economic life due to the Civil Rights Era of the last half century.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

More unsolicited advice for President Obama

In VDARE this week, I offer the President another policy suggestion that he won't hear from anybody else that would be politically feasible and good for himself, good for the Democrats, and good for the country.

You're welcome, Mr. President.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"American Narcissus: The Vanity of Barack Obama"

Jonathan V.  Last had a good article a few weeks ago in The Weekly Standard demonstrating the size of the President's ego.

For example, he highlights this quote from a 2008 Ryan Lizza profile of Obama:

Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” 

If true, Obama should have hired better speechwriters, policy directors, and political directors ASAP.

Two points:

Does Obama have a sense of humor about his egomania? For example, 

Just a few weeks ago, Obama was giving a speech when the actual presidential seal fell from the rostrum. “That’s all right,” he quipped. “All of you know who I am.” 

Now, that's not a bad ad-lib. I'm sometimes surprised by Obama's wit because Dreams from My Father is so self-serious. Still, I'm left wondering about whether Obama makes many second order jokes about his ego? (I don't watch TV news so I can't say.) Or does he take himself that seriously? You can't expect a President to be humble, but you can hope he'll be self-aware about his ego. Some of Obama's more egregious lines in Last's compendium could be taken as Obama mocking his own ego, but I haven't noticed that he does that. But I could be wrong.

The second point is that Obama's Smartest-Guy-in-the-Room syndrome is directly related to his being constantly seen by his admirers (including his Admirer-in-Chief, the President) as the Living Refutation of The Bell Curve. It's not a coincidence that just about the only exercise in national journalism Obama indulged in during the 1990s was to deliver on NPR in 1994 a commentary on The Bell Curve. 

Much of David Remnick's hagiography The Bridge, for instance, consists of smart Jewish people raving about how smart Obama is. He was the one they'd been waiting for to hold up as an example of a smart black guy, which, in turn, in the "He who says A must say B, C, and D" reasoning that dominates American intellectual life today, could be read to also imply the really important lesson of all this: that Jews aren't naturally smarter on average (so put away those pitchforks). 

I know this web of subliminal logic seems ridiculous when exposed to the light of day, but that's how a lot of important people feel.

The problem with all this investment in Obama's smartness as more than just a personal characteristic is that for any of minions to say to him, "No, Mr. President, you don't understand" or "Let me try to explain that more simply" is not just a personal and political insult, but is also a racial insult.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama's view of Asians

With the President visiting his old home, Indonesia, it's worth noting that one of the funnier themes in Dreams from My Father (granted, I'm using "funny" pretty relativistically here) is how little attention Obama pays to Asians in his book's black-white conceptual framework, despite having lived amidst many Asians in Hawaii, Indonesia, Hawaii, Occidental and Columbia. If they're Muslim Asians, like his friends in college, he's for them, but otherwise, he barely notices them. In Dreams, Obama's attitude toward people who aren't black or white is much like the Rev. Lovejoy's attitude on The Simpsons towards people who aren't Christian or Jewish:

Rev. Lovejoy: No, Homer, God didn't burn your house down, but he was working in the hearts of your friends, be they [points to Ned Flanders] Christian, [points to Krusty the Klown] Jew, or [glances at Apu with lack of interest] ... miscellaneous.

Apu: Hindu. There are seven hundred million of us.

Rev. Lovejoy: Aww, that's super. 

In Dreams, Obama's feelings toward non-Muslim Asians are like those of a New York Yankees-obsessed Boston Red Sox fan regarding the Milwaukee Brewers: "Which league are they in these days?"

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

How Barack Obama is like Joan Jett

The following is from a Huffington Post blog from 2008, but it's still pretty interesting. The author is entertainment industry lawyer Jackie Fuchs. After graduating summa cum laude from UCLA, she went to Harvard Law School at the same time as Barack Obama. Previously, however, as a teenager under the name Jackie Fox, she had been the bass player in the notorious all girl rock group The Runaways. The most memorable thing about The Runaways when I saw them in 1977 was rhythm guitarist Joan Jett. As a non-singing rhythm guitarist, she was kind of a fifth wheel in the band, but she radiated so much I-Love-Rock-N-Roll charisma that she upstaged the lead singer and lead guitarist. I wasn't surprised that Joan became a stadium rock star in the 1980s and even outacted Michael J. Fox and Gena Rowlands in the 1987 movie Light of Day. 

Jackie Fuchs/Fox writes:

... Barack Obama reminds me of Joan Jett. They are the only two people I've ever known who have affirmatively chosen to give themselves a larger-than-life persona and then grew to fill it. I saw this a little better with Joan, given that she was a younger age when I knew her than Barack was when I knew him.

Joan in late 1975 was a perfectly ordinary Valley girl. You would never have looked at her and thought you were seeing a future rock star. If you'd even noticed her at all you probably would have thought she was a bit of a mouse. She had brown hair cut in a competent, if unremarkable, shag and she had that slouched-over bad posture that seems to be the working uniform of the shy. In the early days of the band Kim Fowley was always yelling at her to stand up straight.

When I saw the Runaways play as a three-piece band at the Whiskey, I thought they weren't terribly interesting. Both Joan and Sue Thomas (the future Michael Steele of the Bangles) were ordinary and unassuming. The only member of the band that really stood out was Sandy, and she was stuck behind her drum kit. The response to the band was a bit lackluster and it's no surprise to me that Kim decided that the band needed more of a visual standout up front.

By the time I auditioned for the band they had added Cherie and Lita, both of whom grabbed your attention immediately. Joan kind of faded into the mix, and I doubt that the addition of a fifth band member, especially one who was tall, smiled and wore skirts, helped on that front. Cherie was blonde and beautiful in a sulky, fragile way, and Lita had enough personality for ten girls, not to mention lots and lots of curves. Plus they were the lead singer and lead guitarist, respectively, the two instruments that soloed on every song. Who was going to notice a shy, brown-haired rhythm guitarist with bad posture?

I don't remember which came first, the persona or the black hair, but they pretty much went hand-in-hand. One day Joan just decided to become a bad-ass rock star. She dyed her hair black, bought a leather jacket, and started scowling. She turned her slouch from that of a shy person to that of a rocker who wears her guitar slung just a bit too low. She started standing at the front of the stage and doing the most talking in interviews. It was a noticeable and calculated transformation and if it seemed a bit silly and over-the-top at first, it has served her well over time. Act like a rock star long enough, do it unfailingly and well enough, and you become one. ...

I do have to wonder sometimes if that's the Joan that was always there hiding under the shyness and brown hair, like the butterfly hidden inside the caterpillar, or whether she had to give up a significant part of Joan Larkin in order to become Joan Jett. And if so, was it worth it or does transforming yourself like that make it impossible for a question like that even to make sense?

When I met Barack Obama, in our first year of law school, he had already put on his big-time politician act. He just didn't quite have it polished, and he hadn't figured out that he needed charm and humor to round out the confidence and intelligence. One of our classmates once famously noted that you could judge just how pretentious someone's remarks in class were by how high they ranked on the "Obamanometer," a term that lasted far longer than our time at law school. Obama didn't just share in class - he pontificated. He knew better than everyone else in the room, including the teachers. Or maybe even he knew he didn't know, but knew that the leader of the free world had to be able to convince others that he did. Looking back now I can see that he had already decided that he was a future president, and he was working hard at filling that suit.

I wonder -- was there a moment in his life when he did the presidential equivalent of dying his hair black and putting on a leather jacket? I'm betting there was, but he'd already done it by the time I met him. I'm sure Barack as a child was perfectly ordinary, just like Joan was. Until the moment he decided that he was a star. The Barack with whom I went to school wasn't the Barack that debuted on the national stage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, but the president suit was already on, even if it was still too big for him.

In law school the only thing I would have voted for Obama to do would have been to shut up. When he made that speech [2004 Democratic Convention keynote address] almost exactly four years ago, I wanted to vote for him. For something, for anything. Now, as his vision of himself becomes a real possibility, though, I find that he may have filled out that suit all too well. It's hard to see the humanity underneath. Even the humor feels calculated now. And again, just like with Joan, I have to wonder - is he so focused on the goal that he has to live that persona every moment of every day?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Hints of Obama's Personality

Peter Baker writes in The Education of the President in the NYT Magazine:

Insulation is a curse of every president, but more than any president since Jimmy Carter, Obama comes across as an introvert, someone who finds extended contact with groups of people outside his immediate circle to be draining. He can rouse a stadium of 80,000 people, but that audience is an impersonal monolith; smaller group settings can be harder for him. Aides have learned that it can be good if he has a few moments after a big East Room event so he can gather his energy again. 

I'm like that. I get worn down by human contact, too. But, then, I haven't wanted to be President of the United States since I was nine years old.

Unlike Clinton, who never met a rope line he did not want to work, Obama does not relish glad-handing. That’s what he has Vice President Joe Biden for. 

I knew Biden had to be good for something.

When Obama addressed the Business Roundtable this year, he left after his speech without much meet-and-greet, leaving his aides frustrated that he had done himself more harm than good. 

Obama is not a large man. Most people aren't. But, still ...

If you can divide people up into Morning People and Night People and High Energy and (relatively) Low Energy (all celebrities are above average in energy), then Obama is a Low Energy Night Person. That seems kind of odd in a President. Clinton was a High Energy Night Person, Bush II a Low Energy Morning Person. I would guess that most CEO's tend to High Energy Morning People.

The President's great-uncle was the deputy head librarian at the University of Chicago's giant library: a worthy career, and one that Obama seems roughly cut out for.

On the other hand, Obama seems to like meeting people who tell him he's great:

But as Obama gets back on the campaign trail, aides have noticed his old spirit again. He particularly enjoys the so-called backyard sessions on the lawns of supporters. “That’s the happiest I’ve seen him in a long time,” an aide said.

He sounds a little depressed. If the economy turns around, though, he could come back strong in 2012. 

Late in the article there's a doozy of a clause inside a sentence:

One prominent Democratic lawmaker told me Obama’s problem is that he is not insecure — he always believes he is the smartest person in any room and never feels the sense of panic that makes a good politician run scared all the time, frenetically wooing lawmakers, power brokers, adversaries and voters as if the next election were a week away. 

Wait a minute? Did that just say "he always believes he is the smartest person in any room?"

Obama is a smart enough guy to be President -- he's good at explaining both sides of a problem -- but I can't recall any anecdotes about him ever  thinking up the solution to any problem. Are there any?

If Reagan or FDR or Washington ever caught themselves thinking "I'm the smartest guy in this room" their immediate reaction would have been: "Uh-oh, I'd better get some smarter guys in here, pronto!"

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Is "The President Is Losing It" fiction?

You may have seen the anonymous interview floating around that begins

"A longtime Washington D.C. insider, and former advisor to the Obama election campaign and transition team, speaks out on an administration in crisis, and a president increasingly withdrawn from the job of President."

Most of the copies tend to be on obscure websites with a huge amount of advertising, so here's a link to it on Israpundit, which has mostly text.

Is this for real? 

Probably not. It's very easy to make stuff up and post it on the Internet.

But, if it were real, who is your guess who it would actually be?

I'll put my guess in the comments.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Dreams from My Aunt: A Story of Race and Immigration"

As suggested by a commenter, here's Jonathan Elias of WBZTV.com in Boston:

Aunt Zeituni: 'The System Took Advantage Of Me'
President Obama's Aunt Speaks Exclusively With WBZ-TV

"If I come as an immigrant, you have the obligation to make me a citizen." Those are the words from 58-year-old Zeituni Onyango of Kenya in a recent exclusive interview with WBZ-TV.

Onyango is the aunt of President Barack Obama. She lived in the United States illegally for years, receiving public assistance in Boston.

Onyango is the aunt of President Barack Obama. She lived in the United States illegally for years, receiving public assistance in Boston.....

In 2004 a judge ordered Zeituni Onyango out of the country, but she never left. She stayed, hiding in plain sight. In 2005 she attended her nephew's swearing in as the junior Senator of Illinois. In 2008 she was invited to, and traveled to D.C. for President Obama's inauguration.

However her nephew, she says, never pulled any strings for her.

"Listen. Obama did not know my whereabouts."

Onyango hired a top immigration lawyer from Cleveland to help fight her case. We asked how she afforded that lawyer, when she claimed poverty.

"When you believe in Jesus Christ and almighty God, my help comes from heaven," she responded.

When asked about cutting in line ahead of those who have paid into the system she answered plainly, "I don't mind. You can take that house. I will be on the street with the homeless."

"To me America's dream became America's worst nightmare," she said adamantly. "I have been treated like public enemy number one."

She is still living in South Boston public housing, unemployed, and collecting about $700 a month in disability, she says. And now, Zeituni Onlyango is in this country legally.

In May 2010, Onyango's case went back before the same judge who ordered her out of the country in 2004. This time she was granted asylum in the United States. The ruling said a return to Kenya might put Onyango in danger. 

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Roots of D'Souza's Ransom

From my VDARE.com column on Dinesh D'Souza's infinitely denounced upcoming book:

The Roots of Obama’s Rage is a silly title for a book about a man whose emotional tonality ranges from gracious condescension to wounded amour propre. More accurate, yet equally alliterative, would have been The Roots of Obama’s Resentment.

D’Souza churns out books frequently. (This is his 12th). And in his haste, he’s developed a bit of a reputation for sometimes …  neglecting to give full credit to his inspirations.

D’Souza’s most substantial book, 1995’s The End of Racism, owes much to Jared Taylor’s groundbreaking 1992 book Paved with Good Intentions—as Peter Brimelow politely pointed out in National Review (He Flinched, November  27, 1995).

But D’Souza was not merely unforthcoming about how intellectually indebted he was to Taylor—he even smeared Taylor in The End of Racism as a bad guy, the kind of dangerous white extremist from whom D’Souza’s moderate realism would protect everyone. (Just so his readers would know how to think about Taylor, D’Souza helpfully described him as "gaunt," even though Taylor may well be the most conventionally handsome of all American public intellectuals.)

In his latest book, D’Souza hasn’t actually attacked his most important sources. He’s just avoided mentioning them. 

Most notably, the central piece of evidence in The Roots of Obama’s Rage for D’Souza’s theory about Obama Sr.’s influence is the elder Obama's 1965 article, Problems Facing Our Socialism. This essay criticized the influential Sessional Paper No. 10 by Tom Mboya, a Kenayn labor leader who was financed by the anticommunist AFL-CIO (which, in turn, was financed by the CIA). Mboya had called for capitalism (under regulation) and colorblind treatment of white and Indian-owned businesses in Kenya.

D’Souza writes in Forbes:

“Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called ‘Problems Facing Our Socialism.’ … Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.”

This important historical document from 1965 wasn’t online until April 2008, when libertarian blogger Greg Ransom obtained a copy of Obama Sr.’s article from the dusty stacks of the UCLA library. Ransom’s April 7, 2008 blog post for the Ludwig von Mises Institute introducing his discovery, Obama Hid His Father’s Socialism from Readers, reads like a first draft for D’Souza book pitch:

"There’s a big mystery at the heart of Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father:  A Story of Race and Inheritance. What was Barack Obama doing seeking out Marxist professors in college? Why did Obama choose a Communist Party USA member as his socio-political counselor in high school? Why was he spending his time studying neocolonialism and the writings of Frantz Fanon, the pro-violence author of ‘the Communist Manifesto of neocolonialism,’ in college? Why did he take time out from his studies at Columbia to attend socialist conferences at Cooper Union?"

Ransom noted:

"… one thing is not left a mystery, the fact that Barack Obama organized his life on the ideals given to him by his Kenyan father. Obama tells us, ‘All of my life, I carried a single image of my father, one that I ... tried to take as my own.’ (p. 220) And what was that image? It was ‘the father of my dreams, the man in my mother’s stories, full of high-blown ideals.’ (p. 278) …

“So we know that his father’s ideals were a driving force in his life, but the one thing that Obama does not give us are the contents of those ideals."

But as far as I can tell from searching on Amazon’s online copy of The Roots of Obama’s Rage, the name “Ransom” doesn’t appear in D’Souza’s book.

It’s perfectly fine for D’Souza to profit off Ransom’s enterprise. But it would have been only polite to mention him.

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama the Yankee

With all the brouhaha over Dinesh D'Souza's Forbes article about President Obama's father, a reader comments on the most overlooked facet of the President's heritage. Consider his maternal grandfather:

... Stanley Armour Dunham, who was the son of Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, born in Sumner Country, Kansas. Sumner County is named after the Abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner. Sumner county is so puritanical in origin that it was "dry" until 1986.

Of course, eventually, Stanley Dunham moved his family to Hawaii, which was civilized by missionaries described by Mark Twain as "pious; hard-working; hard-praying; self-sacrificing; hospitable; devoted to the well-being of this people and the interests of Protestantism; bigoted; puritanical; slow; ignorant of all white human nature and natural ways of men, except the remnant of these things that are left in their own class or profession; old fogy - fifty years behind the age..."

Up from Hawaii, Obama managed acceptance to Harvard Law School (college transcripts?), named after the puritan minister, John Harvard.

There seems to be a pattern developing. It's obvious that Obama's big secret, even though it's right there for everyone to see, is that Obama's a Yankee, through and through (though he does play basketball and listen to Jay-Z!).

His silence on his Yankee heritage and, instead, his complete focus on his African heritage is puzzling. Or maybe not, considering how George W Bush became a born again Texas good ol' boy. Were those just cynical moves by each man to appeal to his base or indicative of something deeper?

Obama reminds me of Charles Bon the mulatto, illegimate son of a Mississippi plantation owner in Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom." Obama actually quoted Faulkner during his big race speech following Pastor-gate, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." Hopefully the future will be better for Obama than it was for Charles Bon.

Meanwhile, I hope Steve will write more about Obama's family and the CIA. another organization that Obama shares in common with the Bush's, other Yankee elite, and Mormons (Yankees once removed.) I'm not going to hold my breathe in anticipation of D'Souza's follow up article on the story of Obama's Yankee inheritance.

That the Obama family engaged in favor-banking with the CIA is pure speculation on my part, but the more I've thought about it over the last 14 months, the less crazy it sounds.

Obama's mother and father, while on the left ideologically, may have been minor players on the American side in the Cold War. The CIA, among other American government and quasi-governmental agencies, liked to recruit non-Communist leftists of cosmopolitan / academic orientation. I'm not sure what the implications would be, but it makes Obama more interesting, and his life story makes a little more sense.

What about his mother's second husband, Lolo Soetoro? Obama writes: "With the help of his brother-in-law [a millionaire muckety-muck in the national oil company], he landed a new job in the government relations office of an American oil company." In other words, he got a great job because he knew people.

These people seem connected.

Think about the President's mother: a girl from Kansas (of solid Yankee family on her mother's side) who keeps marrying politically well-connected men from decolonized countries on the very frontlines of the Cold War in the Third World, Kenya and Indonesia. She keeps showing up at places like the East-West center in Honolulu, the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, and in Pakistan. How incompetent would the CIA have to be not to notice her? (Granted, I may have just answered my own question: as bad as they gotta be.)

For example, consider this excerpt from the Wikipedia account of the President's mother's life (I've added descriptions of the various organizations in brackets):

Dunham studied at the University of Hawaii [where she met Obama Sr. in Russian class] and the East-West Center [proposed by Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1959 and signed into law by President Eisenhower as part of the Mutual Security Act] and attained a bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. in anthropology. ... To address the problem of poverty in rural villages, she created microcredit programs while working as a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development [U.S. government agency, often linked to CIA]. Dunham was also employed by the Ford Foundation [flagship of WASP elite, worked closely with the U.S. government in Indonesia after the 1965 coup] in Jakarta and she consulted with the Asian Development Bank [15% owned by the U.S. government] in Pakistan. Towards the latter part of her life, she worked with Bank Rakyat Indonesia [owned by the Indonesian government, which was run by General Suharto, victor in the 1965 coup], where she helped apply her research to the largest microfinance program in the world.^[4]

That's a pretty cozy career. At every stop along the way, she likely knew people who knew people who were CIA.

Obama describes in general terms some of his mother's CIA contacts in Dreams from My Father in the chapter on his years in Indonesia [1967-1971]:

She found herself a job right away teaching English to Indonesian businessmen at the American embassy, part of the U.S. foreign aid package to developing countries. ... The Americans were mostly older men, careerists in the State Department, the occasional economist or journalist who would mysteriously disappear for months at a time, their affiliation or function in the embassy never quite clear [i.e., Obama is implying that they were CIA]. ... 

In Obama's account, his mother, a future Ph.D., hadn't paid attention to the world-historical events happening in her fiance's/husband's homeland in 1965-1966 until she heard about them from American diplomats and CIA guys at the American embassy in Jakarta:

These men knew the country, though, or parts of it anyway, the closets where the skeletons were buried. Over lunch or casual conversation they would share with her things she couldn’t learn in the published news reports. They explained how Sukarno had frayed badly the nerves of a U.S. government already obsessed with the march of communism through Indochina, what with his nationalist rhetoric and his politics of nonalignment-he was as bad as Lumumba or Nasser, only worse, given Indonesia’s strategic importance. Word was that the CIA had played a part in the [1965] coup, although nobody knew for sure. More certain was the fact that after the coup the military had swept the countryside for supposed Communist sympathizers. The death toll was anybody’s guess: a few hundred thousand, maybe; half a million. Even the smart guys at the Agency had lost count.

Innuendo, half-whispered asides; that’s how she found out that we had arrived in Djakarta less than a year after one of the more brutal and swift campaigns of suppression in modern times. ... And with each new story, she would go to Lolo in private and ask him: “Is it true?”

I dunno. It sounds very 1968 to me. More likely, Mrs. Soetoro, rather than being totally clueless about her husband's country, had an Agonizing Reappraisal during the Vietnam War.

As for Barack Obama Sr., almost certainly the CIA knew his name from that American Cold War ploy, the Tom Mboya Airlift of young African elites to America, Obama Jr. being on the first one to the U. of Hawaii.

Although he attacked from the left Tom Mboya's pro-American economic policy in his 1965 article Problems of Our Socialism, Mboya, a fellow Luo, didn't seem to hold it against him. David Horowitz's new left magazine Ramparts alleged that Mboya was on the CIA payroll. I don't know about that, but Mboya was well-funded by anti-Communist Americans such as the AFL-CIO. The Kennedy family contributed to the second Tom Mboya Airlift

In anticolonialist terms, Mboya represented the Kenyan center. President Jome Kenyatta was on the side of the British ex-masters, Mboya was in bed with the the Americans, and in the mid-1960s, the other Luo leader, Kenyan vice-president Oginga Odinga, made a deal with the Soviets for aid in return for Kenya joining the Soviet side, sending his son Raila Odinga (the current prime minister) to college in East Germany. At President Jomo Kenyatta's request, Mboya maneuvered Odinga into resigning. But with the Luo Left out of the way, Kenyatta was free to turn on the Luo Center.

Mboya mentored Obama Sr., until Mboya was assassinated by a Kikuyu gunman in front of Obama Sr.'s horrified eyes in 1969, the great crime / conspiracy in Kenyan history. Obama Jr. left this out of Dreams from My Father, but his father claimed to have been the chief witness at the trial of the hitman, who was probably hired by Kenyatta's Kikuyu associates to rub out the most obvious successor to Kenyatta. He claimed to have been persecuted until Kenyatta's death for having testified to the identify of the assassin.

In Dreams from My Father, it's apparent from certain understated details that the Obama family in Kenya hates the memory of Kenyatta.  Overtly, though, Obama's retelling (through the mouth of his half-sister Auma) is bland and leaves out the more fascinating details:

“Then things began to change. When Ruth gave birth to Mark and David, her attention shifted to them. The Old Man, he left the American [oil] company to work in the government, for the Ministry of Tourism. He may have had political ambitions, and at first he was doing well in the government. But by 1966 or 1967, the divisions in Kenya had become more serious. President Kenyatta was from the largest tribe, the Kikuyus. The Luos, the second largest tribe, began to complain that Kikuyus were getting all the best jobs. The government was full of intrigue. The vice-president, Odinga, was a Luo, and he said the government was becoming corrupt. That, instead of serving those who had fought for independence, Kenyan politicians had taken the place of the white colonials, buying up businesses and land that should be redistributed to the people. Odinga tried to start his own party, but was placed under house arrest as a Communist. Another popular Luo minister, Tom M’boya, was killed by a Kikuyu gunman. Luos began to protest in the streets, and the government police cracked down. People were killed. All this created more suspicion between the tribes. “Most of the Old Man’s friends just kept quiet and learned to live with the situation. But the Old Man began to speak up. He would tell people that tribalism was going to ruin the country and that unqualified men were taking the best jobs. His friends tried to warn him about saying such things in public, but he didn’t care. He always thought he knew what was best, you see. When he was passed up for a promotion, he complained loudly. ‘How can you be my senior,’ he would say to one of the ministers, ‘and yet I am teaching you how to do your job properly?’ Word got back to Kenyatta that the Old Man was a troublemaker, and he was called in to see the president. According to the stories, Kenyatta said to the Old Man that, because he could not keep his mouth shut, he would not work again until he had no shoes on his feet."

What's the real story? I don't know. Maybe his hard-drinking father was making up the part about being the chief witness to the Mboya slaying (which would be like being the chief witness to the JFK assassination in the U.S. in terms of undying interest in Kenya, although Mboya was more like RFK in 1968, the heir apparent).

Or maybe it really did happen, making Obama Jr. something of an heir to massacres in Indonesia and Kenya. The word "power" comes up over and over in Dreams from My Father, and Obama implies that, for him, the word has bloody connotations.

If so, that Obama then chose to devote his life to the pursuit of power frightens and impresses me.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer