May 2009
The Real Obama:
America's Multicultural Prince
Public sentimentality polls released while President Obama was on his recent Grand Tour abroad indicate that the American public is broadly approving of the President’s handling of his job in his first three months in office, and that it has confidence that the economic crisis is stabilizing. As there is little to suggest that the crisis has in fact abated, this public relations success seems one more indication of Barack Obama’s ability to induce people to see in him what they wish to see.
America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance” (VDARE.com Books, 2009) by Steve Sailer, a regular contributor to the anti-immigration website edited by Peter Brimelow, is abundantly clear on three essential points. 1.) Barack Obama’s overwhelming interest is, and always has been, Barack Obama. 2.) Obama is not the postracial man he represents himself to be; rather, he is a man obsessed by race, the black race in particular. 3.) Barack Obama is a fraud.
Number Four, one might add, is that Barack Obama is also an intolerable bore, one very much in the mold of President Clinton before him. That is to say, he is a Charming Bore (charming for a certain sort of person, anyhow). The phenomenon of the Charming Bore is a complicated one. Perhaps the shortest way to account for him is by saying that the Charming Bore pleases and assures by dint of, not in spite of, his own hollowness and vanity. Just how he works his magic seems impossible to explain. Clinton had that magic in spades. George W. Bush has it not at all. He belongs to that garden variety of bore, the Charmless Bore. As for Obama, though he excelled as a Charming Bore during the recent campaign, as president he may be losing his touch. We shall see. If so, Steve Sailer’s book will have gone a long way toward explaining why.
In this respect, America’s Half-Blood Prince does seem to contradict itself. Sailer’s Obama is an obsessed, and self-obsessed, politician, very much the product of the multicultural America of his generation. The man has no learning, no ideas, no historical perception or awareness (even on the subjects of race and racial relations), no interest in the world save insofar as the world reflects his personal experiences, resentments, and confusions writ large. (Africa, its peoples and its problems, concern him; Asia and Asians do not. On a three-week sojourn in Europe as a young man, Obama was repelled: European history, he complained, is not his history, his inheritance, European peoples not flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood.) Sailer insists that Obama writes well--that he is, indeed, a born literary artist. Thus he quotes liberally (ad nauseam, actually) from Obama’s two published books, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006), a campaign book written to test the waters for the author’s coming campaigns. Yet Sailer constantly takes shortcuts in telling his story or making a point by quoting from other writers—writers, he admits, who cover the same ground in a far more clear and direct manner than Obama, with his chronic indirection, verbosity, and preference for being misunderstood (or not understood at all) can, or is willing, to do. Now, it is the job of a writer—a real writer—to make himself as clear as possible to his readers. For a natural writer of ability, the aim presents itself naturally--provided, of course, that he has something to say. Every dedicated writer learns early on to suspect himself when his pen begins to slow and at last stops altogether. This is not ordinarily a sign that some great idea in his brain is unable to find articulate expression. It is far more likely to signal that he has no ideas at all, great or otherwise. Sarah Palin noted during the Republican convention last year that, “…the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of ‘personal discovery.’” But it was precisely the appeal that Obama’s very dull and hackneyed journey had to a significant portion of the electorate, together with the candidate’s unfathomable luck, that got Barack Obama elected President last fall.
Sailer argues that Obama’s “journey of ‘personal discovery’” has not in fact been concerned with transcending race and so bringing the races, black and white, together. On the contrary, it has been a quest for assurance and self-assurance by the son of a morally loose and irresponsible white radical and a bigamous alcoholic and ne’re-do-well from Kenya: the assurance that Barack Obama is “Black enough” to represent and lead his race, in the United States and elsewhere. And in this quest for assurance, “religion” as it is understood by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church in Southside Chicago played a crucial role.
On the subject of Dr. Wright, Sailer is devastating. Obama’s admirers and well-wishers have excused their idol’s relationship with this vicious clown and his congregation by arguing that the connection with Trinity was as essential to a rising black Chicago politician’s career as the city’s Catholic parishes have been historically to Catholic office seekers in Chicago. Sailer tells the plain truth: Obama and Wright were made for one another. Barack Hussein Obama is no Muslim. But he is no Christian either. Unlike Malcolm X, whose Autobiography inspired Barack as a young man and who ended his life as a convert to orthodox Muslim racial universalism, Obama did not discover in his “conversion” to Christianity a readiness to put aside his racial antagonisms. Indeed, Sailer says, the Rev. Wright’s church is the last place where such a conversion could be encouraged. “Trinity offers what is essentially a racial religion. Obama’s celebrated acceptance of Christianity turns out to have been an affirmation of African-American psychic separatism.” Sailer drives home his point several pages later when he adds, “…Wright’s church offers Obama the only kind of religion he is interested in: a radically racial one. Wright goes easy on the ask-forgiveness-for-your-sins stuff and heavy on the anti-white paranoia and far-left politics.” Moreover, as public speakers Obama and Wright have essentially the same message, delivered in different terms. While Wright speaks in the terminology of liberation theology, as Jonathan Raban has perceptively noted, “‘…Obama can entrance largely white audiences with the same essential story, told in secular terms and stripped of its references to specifically black experience. When Wright says “white racists,” Obama says “corporate lobbyists;” when Wright speaks of blacks, Obama says “hardworking Americans” or ‘Americans without health care”….’”
Barack Obama’s morbid, dishonest, and hypocritical obsession with his uncertain racial identity was partly instilled, and relentlessly encouraged, not by his Kenyan father primarily but rather by his mother, a neurotic white woman with a sexual predilection for colored men, always eager to disavow her own people. That is Obama’s past. As for the future—the future, that is, of the United States of America for the next four years—it is too soon still to venture a prediction. Sailer’s concluding chapter, “Senator Obama,” written before November 4 2008, notes that Obama, as a “blank screen” on which anyone can write, is bound to disappoint many of his original constituencies. Which ones, then, will he disillusion? Once again, it is too soon to say.
One thing is clear, however, and that is the meaning of Obama’s candidacy and election. Here Steve Sailer has the last word. “The widespread assumption that Obama must be our Half-Blood Prince, born and bred to solve our racial disputes, is symptomatic of the American elites’ loosening grip on reality regarding anything dealing with ‘diversity.’” That is not just Mr. Sailer’s private opinion. It happens to be as well a very certain (if, alas, widely disputed) fact of life in this uncertain, now rapidly deteriorating, country of ours. ### ###
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