All these points will be elaborated and substantiated in this book. In my earlier book
The Roots of Obama’s Rage
, I had only Obama’s autobiography to go on, along with some news reports. Moreover, since that book was published in the fall of 2010, I could report only on the first eighteen months of the Obama presidency. Since then a good deal of important information about Obama’s background has become available. I have traveled to many places, including Hawaii, London, Indonesia, and Kenya, to capture the Obama story for a documentary film. All this has given me first-hand insight into Obama’s world. Obama is now at the end of his presidential term, leaving behind him a four-year record. So what I earlier offered as a tentative hypothesis, I am now in a position to prove.
Obama is not a conventional liberal; he is not from the same mold as Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, Michael Dukakis, or Jimmy Carter. Rather, Obama draws his identity and his values from a Third World, anti-American ideology that goes by the name of anti-colonialism. Obama’s philosophy can be summed up in David Gelernter’s phrase: America the Inexcusable. Notice that this is an affirmation of American exceptionalism, but exceptionalism of a special kind. According to this ethos, America is exceptional in being exceptionally militaristic, violent, greedy, selfish, and rapacious. For Obama, America is the plunderer, and he is the restorer. Traditional Democrats want to preserve American leadership and have America be a model for the world; Obama wants to displace American hegemony and realign America in the world. Traditional Democrats want a bigger economic pie so they can redistribute income in America; Obama wants to curb America’s growth and redistribute wealth globally so he can reduce the gap in living standards between America and the rest of the world.
Over the past four years, Obama has worked hard, within political constraints, to implement his anti-colonial ideology. He has met with considerable success. Yet his agenda is incomplete, because America, although poorer and weaker than when he took office, is still the richest and most powerful country on the planet. All that could change in the next four years; if Obama has his way, it will change. If we understand Obama’s ideology, we can make sound projections about what America will look like in 2016 if Obama is re-elected.
For me, the boy from India all grown up now, this prospect comes with a bitter irony. I came to America, the greatest and most powerful nation in history, to be part of an American project, this new order for the ages. Yet it is entirely possible that in a very short time I will live through the eclipse of the American era. Something else will take its place. It is even possible that, as China supplants America, India will then supplant China as the world’s economic and political giant. It crosses my mind now: Would I have been better staying in India and never coming to America? Was my American dream a mistake? I have thought hard about this, and I refuse to believe it. And I am writing this book because I do not want to allow one man with a very different vision to destroy the American dream that has sustained me and millions of others.
CHAPTER TWO
INVISIBLE MAN
I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.
1
—Barack Obama,
The Audacity of Hope
F
or the past two years, since the publication of
The Roots of Obama’s Rage
, I’ve been learning as much as I can about Barack Obama. I am not alone in this pursuit. Others are mining this territory, one seeking to invalidate Obama’s birth certificate, another trying to prove that someone else wrote Obama’s book, a third attempting to establish that Obama’s real father was the Communist Frank Marshall Davis, and so on. Incredibly, there is very little mainstream investigation into Obama and his background. In this respect, as I journeyed to Hawaii and Indonesia and Kenya, following in Obama’s path and understanding his life’s journey, I feel that I have the territory almost to myself. As I unearth things, I have a sense of discovery, of a private world opening up between Obama and me. Not that I am a master sleuth, but no one else seems even to be looking. Moreover, I can see the world as Obama does, not through American eyes but through “global” eyes. Like Obama, I know how to switch back and forth between the American perspective and the global perspective. Obama has this bifocal vision because that’s how he grew up, and he’s been doing it all his life. As an immigrant who sees America from the outside and from within, I can do it, too. All of this helps me to “get” Obama and show him as he hasn’t been shown before. And the subject is one of surpassing importance, because at a critical time for America, Obama seeks a second presidential term. If we didn’t know and understand him before, we need to know him now.
Barack Obama is perhaps the most unknown figure to enter the White House. Columnist Charles Krauthammer observed in 2008, “Eerily missing at the Democratic convention this year were people of stature who were seriously involved at some point in Obama’s life standing up to say: I know Barack Obama. I’ve been with Barack Obama.”
2
Consider the following exchange between journalists Charlie Rose and Tom Brokaw near Election Day 2008.
Rose
: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?
Brokaw
: There’s a lot about him we don’t know.
Rose
: I don’t know how he really sees where China is.
Brokaw
: We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.
Rose
: I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is.
Much more surprising is that even with Obama in the White House, the mystery has not been cleared. Obama remains, as columnist James Fallows puts it, “the man we have become familiar with, without really knowing.” Two years into his presidency, in 2010, Obama biographer Jonathan Alter could write, “Never before have we known so little about someone so intensely observed.” Around the same time, columnist Richard Cohen noted, “There was never a question about who Reagan was and what he stood for. Not so Obama.” A year later, in 2011, Bill Keller wrote in the
New York Times
, “He has in a sense failed to define himself. He is one of our more elusive presidents, not deeply rooted in any place or movement.” Keller’s column was titled “Fill in the Blanks.” And even now, the blanks have not been filled in. Obama biographer David Maraniss writes, “As Obama approached the fourth year of his presidency, many people considered him more of a mystery than when he was elected. This seemed especially true for those who supported him and wanted him to succeed.”
4
Part of the Obama mystery is personal. There are still gaps in his personal story. I am not speaking here of the so-called birther issue, whether Obama was born in the United States. That issue is a distraction from other aspects of Obama’s life that remain obscure. For instance, no one has revealed Obama’s SAT score for getting into college, or his grades at Columbia University, or his LSAT score for getting into law school. We don’t even know who Obama’s friends and associates were at Columbia. “I spent a lot of time in the library,” Obama told a student journalist in 2005. “I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk.” Even monks live in communities, however, and this monk also attended classes. One would expect that, with an unusual name like Barack Obama, several of his fellow students would recall him. When Obama was elected president, the
New York Times
sought to identify and interview people who knew and remembered him at Columbia. The
Times
found no one, and when reporters contacted Obama, “he declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript, or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, room-mate or friend from those years.”
Obama’s romantic life, prior to meeting his wife Michelle, also escaped public and journalistic attention for several years. Obama describes a serious relationship that he had with a white woman, even going for a weekend to her country home. This was no casual relationship: “We saw each other for almost a year.” Finally journalist David Maraniss identified a woman who dated Obama in New York and suggested that she might be the missing girlfriend. Yet her description of their relationship did not match the one that Obama gave, and Maraniss quoted Obama saying that his account was based on a composite of several girlfriends. This only deepens the puzzle: Where are those girlfriends? Why haven’t at least some of them come forward? Why has no journalist tracked them down and interviewed them?
5
All of this is strange, not only that so much remains unknown about the president at the end of his first term, but also that reporters seem uninterested in chasing down the facts. Even Obama’s critics, such as the right-wing press or the Republican National Committee, have not taken the time or trouble to pursue this missing information. Consequently, the Obama mystery isn’t just about him; it is also about the peculiar incuriosity of our political culture. Why are we content to know so little about this president?
Here is a telling personal peculiarity about Obama: some of his closest relatives are living in desperate poverty, yet he refuses to help them in any way. His father’s sister is Hawa Auma. This is how she describes herself: “I am the daughter of Hussein Onyango Obama and the sister of Barack Obama senior and the aunt of the president.” Hawa Auma is a widow in her seventies, and you can find her on the streets of a small town in Kenya called Oyugis. There she sells charcoal by the side of the road, making barely enough to live on. She says she would like to get her teeth fixed, but she doesn’t have the money.
6
Then there is George Obama, the president’s half-brother. George is the eighth and youngest child of Barack Obama Sr., a son he conceived with his fourth wife, Jael Otieno. I first encountered George during the 2008 presidential campaign when I came across an article in a London newspaper saying that “George Obama, Barack Obama’s long-lost brother, was tracked down living in a hut on the outskirts of Nairobi.” In the article, George was quoted saying that he lived on a few dollars a day. He was reluctant to use the name Obama. “If anyone says something about my surname, I say we are not related. I am ashamed.” A subsequent report on CNN showed George’s six-by-ten-foot hut in the Huruma slums of Nairobi. One of George’s neighbors, Emelda Negei, told CNN, “I would like Obama to visit his brother to see how he is living, to improve his way of life.” But Obama never has, nor has he provided a penny to help George. We will meet George, and learn more about him, later in this book .
7
Finally, there is the case of the Barack Obama Schools in the Kenyan village of Kogelo, where Obama’s father grew up. Obama visited Kogelo as a U.S. senator in 2006, and he was given a hero’s welcome. There are two schools in Kogelo, and both were renamed after him: Senator Obama Primary School and Senator Obama Secondary School. One third of the students there are orphans. Obama toured the secondary school and saw its dilapidated classrooms that lacked electricity, sanitation, and running water. He told the people gathered there, including the Kenyan president, local politicians, and the press, “Hopefully I can provide some assistance in the future to this school.” Later he assured Principal Yuanita Obiero, “I have said I will assist the school and I will do so.” Two years later, in July 2008, Obiero told the London
Evening Standard
, “Obama has not honored the promises he gave me. He has not given us even one shilling. But we still have hope.”
8
I recently visited the school and was told that Obama has yet to contribute anything to help. One local resident told me, “We have completely given up hoping that he is going to do anything for us.”
Most of the American press simply refuses to report this kind of information about President Obama. This is bizarre in itself, because the stories are both interesting and relevant. Obama’s own conduct in these situations is odd, not only because Obama is a multimillionaire and the most powerful man in the world—it would take so little for him to help—but also because his entire political agenda seems to be based on asking people who are well off to pay more to assist those who are not so well off. Obama wants to force the rich to pay more taxes in order to benefit the poor and the middle class. Yet in situations where Obama is in a direct position to contribute and one would think has every reason to contribute, where a little assistance would go a long way, he doesn’t provide any.
I think I can clear up some, although not all, of these personal mysteries. My focus in this book, however, is on the ideological mystery of Barack Obama. In deciphering the ideological mystery, I believe we will better understand why Obama has no interest in the school that bears his name, why he doesn’t bother to help his needy relatives, and why he has taken such trouble to conceal important personal details about himself.
We can see the ideological mystery of Obama in the fantastically contradictory things that people say about the man. From the liberal side: he is the first African-American president. This is probably the most common way that Obama is understood. It is certainly the way that Obama biographer David Remnick understood him in his admiring book,
The Bridge
. Yet there are others who insist that Obama is not really black.
9
That’s because he never sat at a segregated lunch counter, nor are any of his ancestors descended from slaves. This is in sharp contrast with Michelle Obama, who traces her roots back to a Carolina slave plantation. Her husband, however, grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia with multiple visits to Kenya, Indonesia, and Pakistan. By his own acknowledgment, he didn’t live the typical black American experience.