Legal Commentary

Barack Obama: multi-cultural success, fiscal disaster

By Beldar

This is an interesting article about President Obama on Politico.com. The gist is that because "his background is more exotic than the typical president," he therefore has "more touchstones and cultural reference points than any predecessor ? and he is not shy about invoking them in all manner of forums to make all manner of points":

As candidate, he often seemed to be carefully editing his biography, emphasizing the parts that were resonant and reassuring to an American audience: his family roots in Kansas, being raised by his single mother and doting grandparents in Hawaii.

As president, he evidently feels much more liberated to invoke other parts of his personal story when they can be used for effect.

?I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries,? he told the Arab news organization Al-Arabiya in an interview.

That comment would not likely have been heard during 2008, when Obama was laboring to combat an inaccurate but widespread perception that he was himself Muslim.

Either writer Carol Lee or one of her editors was correct in ensuring that the qualifier "family" preceded that "roots in Kansas" phrase, but it's still misleading and (in my opinion) an implied libel of the good people of Kansas. I got sick and tired during the 2008 campaign hearing and reading about the "Kansas values" that Obama supposedly absorbed. Obama never lived in Kansas, his mother only lived there briefly as a child, and even though his grandparents were born and lived parts of their lives there, they also lived in Texas, California, and Washington State ? and of course in Hawaii. But you damned sure never heard the Obama campaign talk about Obama's inherited "Texas values" ? no more than you did about his "Kenyan values" from his father.

And the flip-side of these "diverse roots" is not mentioned in this article, no more than it was by the Obama campaign. I wrote about it last summer in response to a Peggy Noonan essay which suggested that both candidates shared a "lack of placeness":

[W]hat Ms. Noonan misses ? what's so different between McCain's and Obama's respective geographic "placelessness" while growing up ? has to do with the vastly different reasons for their families' constant moving, and what those reasons entailed for the people they grew up amongst. Barack Obama's young life, and the people around him then, were filled with unconnected randomness. John McCain's young life, and the people around him then, were filled with deeply shared purpose.

McCain knew both his father and his paternal grandfather very well as real-life men ? men who were often physically and sometimes emotionally distant, but not truly absent. Indeed their metaphysical presence in his life was constant and obvious. Obama, by contrast, can only remember meeting his father once, briefly, when he was 10, and he never met his paternal grandfather at all. They had no presence in Barack Obama's life while he was growing up; they were only dreams and stories and faded photos, with an occasional letter.

And the contrast continues with the other adults in the two candidates' young lives. While Obama at least had a long-term relationship with his maternal grandparents, even that came at the expense of being effectively abandoned to their care by his own mother ? hardly an ideal situation. Indeed, the adults around young Obama seemed in his book to be tied to nowhere and nothing ? and outside of their immediate family (and sometimes not even that), to nobody. Obama was both a literal and figurative "step-child," someone whose main self-identity came to be in his apartness, someone who was continually trying to find himself, someone whose struggle for even a racial self-identity was far from the worst of his self-identification problems.

I'm sure that our new POTUS can indeed pluck anecdotes from his very interesting and unusual life to serve many rhetorical purposes. But that still leaves him lacking in what the country needs today: not rhetoric, but correct decisions; not anecdotes, but wisdom.

I don't care a whit that he can "relate" to many different audiences when ? not yet full three months into his first term ? he, his partisans who run the Congress, and the Federal Reserve have already "spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year." (H/t InstaPundit.)

Full post as published by BeldarBlog on March 31, 2009 (boomark / email).