David Samuels has an interesting Tablet piece on his interview with historian David Garrow. It is based around Garrow's biography of Barack Obama’s early years - Rising Star. The piece is well worth reading but it's long - too long for a blog post summary so I'll just quote a few snippets.
The Obama Factor
A Q&A with historian David Garrow
There is a fascinating passage in Rising Star, David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama’s early years, in which the historian examines Obama’s account in Dreams from My Father of his breakup with his longtime Chicago girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager...
The idea that the celebrated journalists who wrote popular biographies of Obama and became enthusiastic members of his personal claque couldn’t locate Jager—or never knew who she was—defies belief. It seems more likely that the character Obama fashioned in Dreams had been defined—by Obama—as being beyond the reach of normal reportorial scrutiny. Indeed, Garrow’s biography of Obama’s early years is filled with such corrections of a historical record that Obama more or less invented himself...
The election of Joe Biden in 2020 gave the Obamas even more reasons to stay in town. The whispers about Biden’s cognitive decline, which began during his bizarre COVID-sheltered basement campaign, were mostly dismissed as partisan attacks on a politician who had always been gaffe-ridden. Yet as President Biden continued to fall off bicycles, misremember basic names and facts, and mix long and increasingly weird passages of Dada-edque nonsense with autobiographical whoppers during his public appearances, it became hard not to wonder how poor the president’s capacities really were and who was actually making decisions in a White House staffed top to bottom with core Obama loyalists. When Obama turned up at the White House, staffers and the press crowded around him, leaving President Biden talking to the drapes—which is not a metaphor but a real thing that happened...
Obama didn’t invent any of this stuff; he was just a wounded kid trying to figure out his own place in the world and get ahead. Still, looking back, it is hard to avoid the sense that Obama himself was exceptional. He was the guy chosen by history to put something in the American goldfish bowl that made all the fish go crazy and eat each other: America’s emerging oligarchy cementing its grip instead of going bust. The rise of monopoly internet platforms. The normalization of government spying on Americans. Race relations going south. Skyrocketing inequality. The rise of Donald Trump. The birth of Russiagate. It all happened with Obama in the White House.
7 comments:
I've always wondered who Biden's handlers were. You could argue that since Obama had already used up his two Presidential terms, and Bill Clinton had used up his two terms, it fell to Hilary Clinton to step forward as the Obama glove puppet but she stumbled. After Trump the next Obama glove puppet was Biden... and there we are.
Surely Biden is too frail to run for a second term? But who will step forward as the next glove puppet?
DJ - I suppose Harris is seen as a satisfactory glove puppet if Joe keels over and maybe she always was. It's sinister, but talking about it socially isn't easy because it comes across as conspiracy theory even though it's all quite coherent.
I remember when the first Hillary campaign for the presidency circulated the (implausible) allegation that Obama wasn't an American citizen.
Later I saw someone trace the claim that Obama had been born in Kenya to ... Obama. Or, at least, to whoever had written the blurb on the cover of one of his autobiographies. And I still don't know what it was about his birth that Obama has always been so keen to cover up.
Nor do I know whether it is still the case that no reporter has managed to find anyone who was a friend or classmate during Obama's purported undergraduate years at Cornell. He really is a mysterious bugger.
Some time ago, I happened across a video of the young Barak Obama, or 'Barry' as he preferred to be called, staying that was born in Kenya, rather than in the USA. Whether it was fake or not, I have no idea but, more recently, learnt that the lady official in Hawaii who stated his American birth certificate was genuine, had died suddenly and mysteriously.
Am now waiting to learn if Trudeau really is Castro's bastard son, or Tony Blair and Bill Clinton are brothers, separated at birth. Conspiracy theorist? Moi?
Penseivat
dearieme - according to the Tablet piece, Obama was afraid that the birth certificate would make his Hawaiian-Kenyan-Indonesian outsiderness even more plain. Presumably there is something similar about his Cornell years.
Penseivat - such people seem to rely on a certain level of fiction and omission in their biographies, as if the need to invent themselves runs deep. Journalists who don't go along with it don't get interviews.
Two things. (i) "a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago named Michelle Robinson": has anyone checked her birth certificate?
(ii) "They’re all hollow. That’s what the system produces."
Well, of course; they are actors. Toni Blair is hollow. Boris Johnson is hollow.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
dearieme - I wondered about Michelle while reading the Obama article. If "journalists" didn't probe his past, presumably they are even less inclined to investigate Michelle's.
Hollowness seems to be what string-pullers look for in a political actor.
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