Article on Obama’s motivations

Conservative readers have expressed great enthusiasm about Joan Swirsky’s article, “Obama’s Revenge.” I have a more critical view of it. In this entry I have posted an e-mail I sent to Joan Swirsky yesterday concerning factual inaccuracies at the beginning of her article. After that comes a long comment in which I discuss further factual mistakes and then consider her theory of Obama, which includes both her “revenge” theory and, contradictorily, her conspiracy theory which says that a group of leftists exploited Obama, using him as their “pawn,” in order to advance their own ends.

Dear Miss Swirsky,

I began reading with interest your article on Obama because it had been recommended strongly. Your idea that he seeks revenge on America makes sense. I do believe he is an alien, psychologically speaking, or at least that his divided nature, which he has written a great deal about, makes him deeply divided in the way he feels about America. Such a, at best, ambiguous figure, should never have been made the leader of the country.

However, your article contained two errors of fact right in the first paragraph. Here is your first paragraph, with the two problematic sentences bolded:

Once upon a time, a white teenager from Kansas got pregnant by her black Kenyan boyfriend, Barack Obama Sr., or was it her husband? Whatever. (I say whatever because we’ve never seen either marriage or divorce certificates). Some say the couple was in Kenya visiting relatives when the birth of their son, Barack Obama Jr., occurred. No matter. (I say no matter because we’ve never seen an authentic birth certificate). By the time the baby was two years old his father abandoned him for his other wife and child in Kenya.

1. Stanley Ann Dunham was born in Kansas. But, as Wikipedia explains, when she was three, her family moved to Oklahoma, then Texas, then back to Kansas. When she was 12 or 13 her family moved to Washington state, where she went to junior high school and high school. When she started college she moved to Hawaii. At the time she met Barack Sr., she was not “from Kansas,” she was from Washington.

2. Barack Sr. did not abandon them when the child was two “for his other wife and child in Kenya.” That makes it sound as though he left Hawaii for Africa. No. As everyone knows, he left Hawaii to go to Harvard, where he got a degree in economics. He was at Harvard from 1962 to 1965, then he returned to Kenya.

Now perhaps those seem like trivial mistakes. And of course the family’s biography is so muddled it’s hard to make sense of it. But when you’re writing an article about Obama’s life and you make such obvious mistakes of fact in the opening paragraph, it harms your credibility.

Also, you write this:

“it is clear that his experiences in impoverished Kenya and totalitarian Indonesia,…”

But when the family moved to Indonesia, the pro-Communist Sukarno regime had already been destroyed and replaced by the pro-U.S., pro-capitalist Suharto regime. In fact, his step father Lolo Soetoro, had a corporate job, which alienated the leftist Stanley Ann, who expected her second husband to be participating in a revolution. This is discussed in Steve Sailer’s very interesting book on Obama, America’s Half-Blood Prince, which I recommend.

Regards,
Lawrence Auster

P.S. In looking up Stanley Ann, I’ve found something very provocative but not verified. In the Wikipedia article on her, it suggests that she left her husband, not he her. They were (supposedly) married in Feb. 1961. Little Barack was born in August 1961. In January 1962, she enrolled in University of Washington in Seattle, while her husband continued studying in Hawaii. So she left him. He graduated U. of Hawaii in June 1962 and then took scholarship at Harvard and started studies there in fall 1962. Wikipedia suggests that it was the knowledge that her husband had another wife that led her to leave him.

On August 4, 1961, at age 18, she gave birth to her first child, Barack Obama II.[19] Old friends in Washington State recall her visiting them with her new baby in 1961.[20][21][22][23] At some point, she gave her old friends the impression that she was on her way to visit her husband at Harvard (where he would not enroll until Fall of 1962).[24] By January 1962, she had enrolled at the University of Washington, and was living as a single mother in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle with her son, while her husband continued his studies in Hawaii.[14][21][25][26][27] She had become aware that she would not be the only wife of her husband.[26][27]

When Obama Sr. graduated from the University of Hawaii in June 1962, he was offered a scholarship to study in New York City[28] with which he could have supported his family, but he declined it preferring to attend the more prestigious Harvard University.[16] He left for Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he would begin graduate study at Harvard in the fall of 1962.[18]

This is new information and I don’t know if it is reliable. Also, it is contradicted by the Wikipedia article on Obama Sr., which implies that Stanley Ann started studies at the University of Washington AFTER Obama Sr. began studies at Harvard, meaning he left Hawaii first, not she.

* * *

LA writes:

I’ve now read Swirsky’s entire article and have more comments on it. First, she makes additional factual errors.

She writes:

Although he had been exposed to American exceptionalism through his life in the United States and his privileged education, it is clear that his experiences in impoverished Kenya and totalitarian Indonesia, as well as his exposure to Marshall and the other radicals he had met during his years in New York—among them the unrepentant domestic terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn of Weather Underground infamy—made the deepest and most lasting impressions.

Their messages of American imperialism and its white-devil culture clearly resonated in the thrice-abandoned boy.

There is no evidence that Obama met Ayers and Dohrn when he lived in New York, though a writer (I forget who at the moment, it might have been Jack Cashill) has theorized that he did.

She writes:

When given the opportunity to join one of dozens of churches in Chicago, Barry—who had morphed into Barack—opted for the Trinity United Church of Christ,

According to Steve Sailer, Barry began calling himself Barack when he graduated from high school at age 18, not after he moved to Chicago from New York in the mid 1980s, and not when he began attending Trinity Church in 1988 at about age 27.

Journalist Jack Cashill has credibly speculated that Obama’s two memoirs were actually written by his pal Bill Ayers, who was and is a University of Illinois at Chicago English professor, having escaped life in prison on a technicality.

In fact, Cashill in his article at American Thinker (which I discussed here) seems to say that Ayers did not write Audacity, but that Obama had professional ghostwriters helping him on the later book:

“Fugitive Days” averaged 23.13 words a sentence. “Dreams” averaged 23.36 words a sentence. By contrast, the memoir section of “Sucker Punch” averaged 15 words a sentence.

Interestingly, the 30-sentence sequence that I pulled from Obama’s conventional political tract, Audacity of Hope, averages more than 29 words a sentence and clocks in with a 9th grade reading level, three levels below the earlier cited passages from “Dreams” and “Fugitive Days.” The differential in the Audacity numbers should not surprise. By the time it was published in 2006, Obama was a public figure of some wealth, one who could afford editors and ghost writers.

The point is ambiguous. In parts of his article, Cashill seems to suggest that Ayers was involved in Audacity; but his examples of similarities between Ayers’s style and Obama’s relate to Dreams, not to Audacity. However, since Cashill is ambigous on the point, Swirsky is not out of line is saying that Cashill says that Ayers was involved in both books.

Overall, however, a person who writes a 2,500 word article about Obama’s life, character, and motivations ought to have the facts down a lot better than Swirsky does.

But now let’s leave behind the issue of factual accuracy, which may seem of trivial importance to some readers, and turn to Swirsky’s theory of Obama. She writes:

This leads me to only one conclusion, which I wrote about in a former article: “Obama: The Trojan Horse.” My theory is that President Obama’s narcissistic charm, even temperament, skill with words (teleprompter included), hunger to please, radical agenda, and subterranean rage at the “unfair” American system have been brilliantly exploited by powerful leftist radicals and Marxists in the United States, who for decades have plotted America’s path to socialism. He is their pawn, totally dispensable but handy while the “aura” lasts.

These “handlers” saw in Obama the ideal blank slate on which to actualize their agenda, and they made sure the slate remained blank by concealing (or destroying) any evidence of his past, including his birth certificate, Selective Service record, visa(s), school transcripts, and other vital documents. All of which is costing his moneyed backers—including America-loathing billionaire George Soros—multimillions in lawyers’ fees to fight the proliferating lawsuits that seek the truth about this stealth president.

I think this kind of grand conspiracy theory is foolish. Obama is not the product of some cabal. Undoubtedly, people saw his unusual possibilities and helped him along the way. But to have the career he has had, HE had to choose it. HE chose to make himself into a black man. (No one imposed that on him.) HE chose to immerse himself and make his career in a black community. HE chose to move to Chicago, probably America’s premier black city. He chose to be a community organizer. HE chose to go to law school. HE chose to join Trinity United Church, after checking out many churches and talking with Jeremiah Wright. HE had the epiphany the first time he attended services at Trinity Church, which he eloquently describes in Dreams from my Father. (Did a cabal of leftists have that epiphany for him?) HE chose to enter politics. HE chose to stiff his predecessor in the Illinois Senate when she tried to re-enter the race. HE conceived the ambition of becoming mayor of Chicago. HE chose to run for Congress (and lost—did the cabal plan that?). HE then chose to remake himself as a post-racial conciliatory figure instead of wannabe leader of the black race. HE then ran for the U.S. Senate. HE then explored the possibilities of a presidential run. HE then chose to run for president.

All of these acts required that HE chose to do them, that he determined to do them, and that he did them. The notion that a person’s entire life and career can be the product of some hidden cabal that is pulling the strings, especially when the person has written at great length about his traumas and his search for identity, as Obama has done, is the rankest sort of conspiracy thinking, out of touch with the way reality works, and unworthy of a rational person. Conservative readers who credulously swallow such trash are going to do to conservatism what the “Bush lied, people died” hordes on the left did to liberalism, render it incapable of rational thought and debate.

Fortunately, the conspiracy theory only takes up two paragraphs of the article, and does not seem central to it. In fact, it rather flagrantly contradicts Swirsky’s main thesis, which is that Obama is driven by his desire for vengeance against America. You can’t write at length about a man’s supposed traumas that give him a deep impulse and ambition to hurt America, and then say that the man is a puppet of a conspiracy. I think the revenge theory, though Swirsky overstates it, is closer to the truth.

Here’s an insightful passage:

And Obama has done all this with the predictable double-speak that characterizes malevolent intention, i.e., touting transparency while concealing everything, speaking of integrity while appointing crooks and incompetents riddled with conflicts-of-interest, supporting energy independence while killing off-shore and domestic oil-drilling and nuclear power, and feigning optimism while he speaks of impending “catastrophe” in order to push through a pork-laden, trillion-dollar-plus Stimulus plan that rewards the corrupt voter-fraud organization Acorn with billions and unions with discriminatory union-only labor agreements, paves the way for socialized medicine, and threatens to take away the most cherished rights of We The People.

Then she concludes the article:

You can be sure that the sad-lonely-angry two-year-old, the jealous-confused-resentful 10-year-old, the self-conscious- cheated-victimized adolescent, and the man who found solace in and identified with his hate-America mentors is now determined to redeem all of his demons.

Unfortunately, he is acting out his rage on free-market capitalism, a free press, property and gun rights, a limited constitutional government, protection of the unborn, and everything else that is good and great about our country.

This is Obama’s revenge!

It think this is greatly exaggerated. I don’t see Obama as being driven by “demons” or “rage.” Indeed, everything we know about him tells us that he is not a man of passion. His alienation, of which I’ve spoken, is more of a calm, superior kind of alienation. It’s not so much that he’s vengeful against America (the main theme of Swirsky’s article), but that he’s disdainful of America.

- end of initial entry -

LA writes:

By the way, I notice that Steve Sailer has not said anything about the Swirsky article.

Andrew E. writes:

The blogger Mencius Moldbug has speculated that Obama might have met Ayers in New York City in this blog post and this one.

February 18

Clark Coleman writes:

Your critique of Joan Swirsky’s article takes her to task for factual errors, among them that Barry Soetoro had started going by the name Barack as soon as he graduated from high school. I was surprised by your claim, as I had heard the opposite about his time at Occidental College. There are certainly sources who seem pretty convincing on the subject.

LA replies:

The issue raised in the linked article is different from the issue you’re raising with me. Whether he changed his first name to Barack on graduating high school, on matriculating at Occidental a couple of months later, or after a year at Occidental, is immaterial; and, further, all three scenarios are different from Swirsky’s statement that he changed his name to Barack when he moved to Chicago from New York in 1985 when he was in his mid 20s. I got my angle on that from Sailer.

The issue raised by this article is his use of the surname Soetoro as a student at Occidental. This seems unlikely. He had not lived with Lolo Soetoro since he was ten. His mother had separated from Soetoro shortly thereafter, though she did not divorce him for several years. Sailer tells us that during his four years in Indonesia, his mother, displeased with her second husband, constantly filled Barack with the greatness of his father and of the black race. So even if he used the name Soetoro in Indonesia, which is certainly possible, I find it unlikely (though not impossible) that he would be using it in college. Remember how important blackness was to him.

Second, I don’t believe the statement that he had an Indonesian passport when he was at Occidental. Why would he have that? He was an American citizen who had lived in Indonesia for four years and since then had lived in the U.S. again, from age 10 to 18.

But even going over these facts about his life again we are brought face to face with the utter strangeness of this person’s upbringing, the insanity of making such a marginal person with such a confused identity, and certainly no solid American identity (he says in Dreams that when he visited Europe, he felt uneasy in his identity as a Westerner) the president of the United States. It’s insane. It’s like the Manchurian Candidate. (Which doesn’t mean I’m changing my mind about not voting for McCain. I knew it would be strange and bad. I didn’t know the contours of the strangeness and badness. We’re in the process of finding out.)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 17, 2009 10:10 AM | Send