[A-List] Obama unmasked

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

What's going wrong for the man who would be president?

by Andrew Stephen

New Statesman (January 10 2008)


We at the New Statesman must take some of the blame, I suppose. Barack
Obama had been a senator for just ten months in 2005 when we devoted a
cover to his face, anointing him as one of ten people likely to have an
impact on the world. It was only during 2007, however, that the American
media fell head-over-heels in love with Obama; when he trounced Hillary
Clinton in the Democratic party caucuses in Iowa on 3 January, it seemed
that the electorate was swooning in a headlong rush to the altar with
Obama, too. By the end of the first week of the 2008 presidential
election year, the media had all but handed over the keys to the White
House to him.

So it all came as a shock to the pundits and pollsters on the night of 8
January when, despite predictions of an overwhelming Obama triumph, it
became clear that the voters of New Hampshire had given Hillary Clinton
the victory over Obama she badly needed. The reason for the media's
distortions, I believe, is that Obama's relationship with the press and
the electorate is still at the stage of starry-eyed infatuation. Yes, he
is a mesmerising political orator who offers a magic elixir that somehow
contains both stimulants and sedatives: that we need not worry about the
present or future, because we can look forward to a new dawn of hope and
reassurance in the safe hands of President Obama. Exactly how and why
this would happen is not clear, but it is heady and exciting stuff.

I suspect that the longer the relationship continues, however, the more
Obama's many faults and shortcomings as a presidential candidate will
emerge. In his speech admitting defeat in New Hampshire on Tuesday, for
example, a hint of his bad-tempered haughtiness emerged. He is not the
fresh-faced young idealist the media like to portray, but a hard-headed
46-year-old lawyer whose monumental drive and political calculations
make the Clintons seem like a pair of amateurs. The media and electorate
may have fallen in love with him spontaneously, but Obama has been
carefully plotting his strategy to seduce them for decades.


A little "blow"

Even dedicated political operators such as the Clintons, for example,
did not publish self-promoting memoirs at the age of 33 - but that is
exactly what Obama did, revealing his use of cocaine ("a little blow")
before anybody else could beat him to it, for example. In those memoirs,
Dreams from My Father (1995), he burnished a personal and political
resume that, in places, seemed almost unbelievable - so I was not
surprised to read in his introduction to the reissued edition of
"selective lapses of memory" and "the temptation to colour events in
ways favourable to the writer".

I'll provide two brief examples of how Obama did just that. He wrote
movingly of a turning point in his life when, as a nine-year-old, he
read in Life magazine of a "black man who had tried to peel off his
skin". But the Chicago Tribune - it and the Chicago Sun-Times being
honourable exceptions to the media quiescence I have described -
reported that "no such Life issue exists", and an exhaustive search of
similar magazines failed to find any article remotely similar to the one
Obama had described. The Obama media machine, too, obligingly enabled
television crews this month to interview Obama's very elderly Kenyan
"grandmother"; the only problem was that the woman in rural Kenya was
not Obama's grandmother, but the alleged foster mother of Obama's
father. "Give me a break ... this whole thing is the biggest fairy tale
I've ever seen", huffed Bill Clinton, visiting Dartmouth College on the
eve of the New Hampshire vote, telling his audience the US media are not
being tough enough on Obama.

Politically, there is remarkably little difference between the three
leading Democrats - Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Obama was
not in the Senate in 2002 and did not therefore vote for the resolution
that authorised the invasion of Iraq. But he has not been the sainted
man of peace his supporters portray, either. In his three years in the
Senate he has kept his head safely below the parapet, leaving two
congressional colleagues - Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and
Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania - to spearhead opposition to
the war on Capitol Hill. In 2006 he voted against a Senate resolution
calling for the withdrawal of troops and has also voted to continue
funding the war.

Most recently, he said he would not hesitate to send US troops into
Pakistan without Pakistan's permission to hunt down terrorists, and he
insists that the US must not "cede our claim of leadership in world
affairs". He wants the military to "stay on the offensive, from Djibouti
to Kandahar" and to increase defence expenditure. Like most identikit US
mainstream politicians, he talks of "rogue nations" and "hostile
dictators", and says the US must maintain "a strong nuclear deterrent"
and be ready to "seize" the "American moment". He appeared to support
Israel's attack on Lebanon, but then said "nobody is suffering more than
the Palestinian people" - which, in turn, he denied saying.

In the meantime he let his mentor and fellow senator from Illinois, Dick
Durbin, swing alone in the wind after Durbin - perhaps the most liberal
Democrat in the Senate - compared US interrogation techniques of
prisoners in Guantanamo with those of the Soviet Union, Nazis and Khmer
Rouge. He voted to reauthorise the Bush administration's repressive
Patriot Act, and says that as president he would not rule out a US
first-strike nuclear attack on Iran.

His equivocations and contradictions thus proliferate. He promised
solemnly on coast-to-coast live television on NBC in 2006 that he would
complete his six-year Senate term and definitely not run for the
presidency. He voted in favour of President Bush's nomination of
Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state. I am not the first to see
Obama's self-portrayal as almost Christlike: a young black man is
tormented by racism and gets into drugs, and only his own inner goodness
rescues him from the ghettos to which he was surely consigned. Human
foibles - that he smokes and likes playing poker, for example - are
determinedly kept under wraps.


Dysfunctional

The sad point of all this is that the reality of his life is actually
much more fascinating than the manufactured version. His background is
strikingly dysfunctional but by no means economically underprivileged.
His eccentric white American mother met his Kenyan father when both were
students at the University of Hawaii, but like so many male politicians
- Bill Clinton, for one - his father, an alcoholic who ended up
fathering several families before being killed in a car accident in
Kenya in 1982, was literally and figuratively absent from his life. He
abandoned Obama and his mother to take up a scholarship at Harvard when
the young Barack was a toddler. So much for his Kenyan "relatives".

His mother, who died in 1995, subsequently remarried an Indonesian
student destined to become an oil company executive, and the newlyweds
took the young Obama to live in Jakarta when he was six. He duly
attended a local school that the Fox News channel gleefully but
inaccurately labelled a madrasa. His middle name, like his father's, is
Hussein - though Obama insists that his father was not, in fact, a
Muslim but an atheist. The adult Obama now attends the evangelical
Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and says he is a devout
Christian.

The young Obama acquired a half-sister when he lived in Jakarta (she is
now a Buddhist), but his mother sent him to live permanently with his
white grandparents in Honolulu when he was ten. He then began a new,
elitist life that even he describes as "a childhood dream": surfing in
Hawaii and attending the renowned private Punahou School, founded by
Congregationalist missionaries in 1841 and known to local people as a
school for the haole (whites). Its annual tuition today costs $15,725.

Far from being the brilliant student his image suggests, Obama was a
consistently B-grade pupil. He went on to attend Occidental College, a
perfectly respectable private liberal arts college in Los Angeles, but
hardly an academic powerhouse; its present-day endowment is $377
million. He transferred to Columbia University in New York and completed
his degree there, and finally graduated with a degree from Harvard Law
School at the age of thirty. His upwardly mobile ascent had begun, and
Obama joined the Chicago law firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland. He began
his professional political career when he stood successfully for the
Illinois General Assembly (the state senate) in 1996.

Here we come to one of the major contradictions between Obama's image
and reality. The media, both here and in Britain, assume that Obama has
the black vote sewn up - a Daily Telegraph columnist, with stupendous
racism, casually asserted on Monday that Hillary Clinton has lost an
opportunity because American blacks now "have one of their own to
support" - but Obama is regarded with suspicion by most African
Americans. My postman, for example, screws up his face with disdain at
the mere mention of Obama's name. He alienated much of the black
political Establishment in 2000, when he ran unsuccessfully in the
Democratic primaries against the incumbent congressman for an Illinois
district, Representative Bobby Rush - a former Black Panther and current
leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus. His congressional
district has more black people than any other in the country, and Obama
lost to Rush by 31 points.

In a career that has seemed - until now, at least - to be unstoppable,
he nonetheless went on to win the Democratic nomination to run for the
US Senate in 2004. The seat was being vacated by a retiring Republican,
Peter Fitzgerald, but Obama had a tremendous stroke of luck: the former
wife of his strong Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, made sordid
allegations about their sex life and Ryan was forced to drop out. He was
replaced by Alan Keyes, a former black activist and diplomat who had
morphed into a figure of the far right and become one of America's fully
paid-up political lunatics. Obama, having won national attention for the
first time by delivering the keynote address at John Kerry's Democratic
coronation convention in Boston the previous July, won by a 70-27 per
cent landslide.

Which brings us back to his entry to the Senate in 2005 and our cover of
him less than ten months later. Part of Obama's contrived sainthood is
an undertaking that he will not take funds from lobbyists or political
action committees. But, like the Clintons and just about any other
American politician, he has assiduously done just that. According to the
Washington Post, Hillary Clinton has so far raised $78,615,215 and Obama
$78,915,507; Obama's campaign has relied heavily on people such as
Kenneth Griffin, a Chicago-based hedge-fund manager who reportedly
earned $1.4 billion last year.

The further away you get from Chicago, though, the more the saintly
image takes hold. Publications like the New Yorker may coo for pages
over "the conciliator", but the two Chicago newspapers are much more
interested in Obama's close seventeen-year friendship with Antoin "Tony"
Rezko, a long-time Obama donor and property developer awaiting trial on
charges of attempted extortion, money laundering and fraud. A low-income
housing project received more than $14 million from taxpayers while
Obama was a state senator, but he consistently denied that he had done
any favours for Rezko.


The hope mantra

That was until the Chicago Sun-Times unearthed two letters Obama wrote
to state officials in 1998 urging them to grant extra funds for Rezko's
project. Democrats and Republicans alike in Chicago, too, are intrigued
by the question of why Obama paid $1.65 million for a mansion in the
city's south side in 2005 - $300,000 less than the asking price - on the
very same day Rezko's wife happened to buy the house next door for the
asking price. In their tax return for the following year, Obama and his
wife, Michelle, who is vice-president of a non-profit hospital
organisation, reported taxable income of $983,826 for 2006, down from
$1.6 million the previous year.

"Hope" is the mantra word in Obama's magic elixir, but Bruce Reed -
president of the Democratic Leadership Council - points out that tens of
millions of Americans are supporting Obama not because of what he's
done, but because of what they hope he might do. "We don't need leaders
to tell us we can't do what we need to do", Obama said in a typical
stump speech on 7 January. "We need them to say 'yes, we can', to say
'yes, we believe'."

Huge crowds roar their approval over lines like this, long on
beautifully delivered rhetoric but short on facts and concrete
undertakings. A casual observer might assume Obama is proposing a vastly
more ambitious health-care plan than Clinton; in fact, the reverse is true.

Those who know Obama say privately that he has a healthy sense of
entitlement that often manifests itself in an imperious, thin-skinned
manner. We caught just a glimpse of this peevishness in his concession
speech in New Hampshire, I thought - of a man somehow denied his
rightful Schadenfreude over the second humiliating defeat of Clinton
that he and the American punditocracy had confidently anticipated.
Obama's latest book may be called The Audacity of Hope, but it really
should be called The Audacity of Hype.

_____

Andrew Stephen was appointed US Editor of the New Statesman in 2001,
having been its Washington correspondent and weekly columnist since
1998. He is a regular contributor to BBC news programs and to The Sunday
Times Magazine. He has also written for a variety of US newspapers
including The New York Times Op-Ed pages. He came to the US in 1989 to
be Washington Bureau Chief of The Observer and in 1992 was made Foreign
Correspondent of the Year by the American Overseas Press Club for his
coverage.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200801100000


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