Steele on Obama

Shelby Steele writes in the WSJ on the central issue of the 2012 election:

What gives Mr. Obama a cultural charisma that most Republicans cannot have? First, he represents a truly inspiring American exceptionalism: He is the first black in the entire history of Western civilization to lead a Western nation—and the most powerful nation in the world at that. And so not only is he the most powerful black man in recorded history, but he reached this apex only through the good offices of the great American democracy. 

Thus his presidency flatters America to a degree that no white Republican can hope to compete with. He literally validates the American democratic experiment, if not the broader Enlightenment that gave birth to it. 

He is also an extraordinary personification of the American Dream: Even someone from a race associated with slavery can rise to the presidency. 

The Obama lineage was associated with slavery in the sense that they sold slaves to the Arabs, but who cares about details?

Whatever disenchantment may surround the man, there is a distinct national pride in having elected him. 

All of this adds up to a powerful racial impressionism that works against today's field of Republican candidates. This is the impressionism that framed Sen. John McCain in 2008 as a political and cultural redundancy—yet another older white male presuming to lead the nation. 

The point is that anyone who runs against Mr. Obama will be seen through the filter of this racial impressionism, in which white skin is redundant and dark skin is fresh and exceptional. 

This is the new cultural charisma that the president has introduced into American politics. Today this charisma is not as strong for Mr. Obama. The mere man and the actual president has not lived up to his billing as a historical breakthrough. Still, the Republican field is framed and—as the polls show—diminished by his mere presence in office, which makes America the most socially evolved nation in the world. Moreover, the mainstream media coddle Mr. Obama—the man—out of its identification with his exceptionalism. 

Conversely, the media hold the president's exceptionalism against Republicans. Here is Barack Obama, evidence of a new and progressive America. Here are the Republicans, a cast of largely white males, looking peculiarly unevolved. ... 

How can the GOP combat the president's cultural charisma? It will have to make vivid the yawning gulf between Obama the flattering icon and Obama the confused and often overwhelmed president. Applaud the exceptionalism he represents, but deny him the right to ride on it as a kind of affirmative action. 

A president who is both Democratic and black effectively gives the infamous race card to the entire left: Attack our president and you are a racist. To thwart this, Republicans will have to break through the barrier of political correctness. 

Mr. McCain let himself be intimidated by Obama's cultural charisma, threatening to fire any staff member who even used the candidate's middle name.

Okay, but for America to not re-elect Obama would be tantamount to recognizing him as a guy who rode affirmative action to the top, with a massive push from the press, then proved inadequate. That's not a narrative the media is going to like. The media will actively work to prevent that from happening. 

Let's look back in history for examples of one-term black leaders. The most obvious is David Dinkins, first black mayor of the media capital of New York. His election was of some symbolic importance, too.

Yet, why did Dinkins fail of re-election? There were a number of reasons, but the key, almost certainly, was the black anti-Semitic riot in Crown Heights that Dinkins didn't seem to take seriously. Since then, New York voters haven't elected a Democratic candidate mayor in the last five mayoral elections. Dinkins' term has largely been dropped down the media memory hole. You almost never read in the press about how white racism stole a second term from Dinkins. This major historical event in the recent past of the capital of the world is just not the kind of thing it's appropriate to mention in New York media circles. They are in favor of blacks succeeding in politics in general, but not as mayor of where they live.

This can help explain the Republican enthusiasm this week for the notion they can somehow ride Bibi Netanyahu's coattails in 2012 and thus turn Obama into Dinkins.

How exactly would that work in a world where Bibi really can't run for President?

I dunno.

I noticed that two days ago, Rep. Eric Cantor was telling Rep. Paul Ryan to get into the Presidential race:

Count House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) as one top Republican who’d like to see Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) jump into the presidential race.

But after yesterday's disastrous special election defeat for Republicans in upstate New York fought in large part over Ryan's plan to privatize Medicare, Ryan's luster has dimmed. So, why not reverse the polarity and have Ryan tell Cantor to jump in the race?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

2012 Bibi Bandwagon gains momentum

Akiva Eldar writes in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about Bibi Netanyahu's triumphant address (two dozen standing ovations) to the U.S. Congress:

Sara Netanyahu once said during a family gathering that if her husband had run for president of the United States, he would easily be elected (assuming, of course, that he were legally allowed to run). Indeed, in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address before both houses of Congress on Tuesday, he made impressive use of all the gimmicks of an experienced and sharp-tongued American politician. ... 

Netanyahu proved that he has no Israeli equal when it comes to plucking the strings of American patriotism, of guilt feelings over the Holocaust, and most of all, of the wish of Congress members to preserve their close ties with the large Jewish organizations.

Old joke:

Q: Why doesn’t Israel apply to become the 51st state?
A: Because then they’d have only two senators.

Poor Obama figured he could take a gentle swipe at Bibi, thought he could articulate American policy without clearing every jot and tittle with Bibi beforehand, because Bibi is the equivalent of a Republican in Israel, so the President would at least have the Democrats in America on his side out of sheer partisanship. He didn't realize that in the U.S. Congress, "Politics stops at the border (of Israel)."

In The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan feels sorry for his President:

Not since Nikita Khrushchev berated Dwight Eisenhower over Gary Powers’ U-2 spy flight over Russia only weeks earlier has an American president been subjected to a dressing down like the one Barack Obama received from Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday. 

With this crucial difference. Khrushchev ranted behind closed doors... Obama, however, was lectured like some schoolboy in the Oval Office in front of the national press and a worldwide TV audience. 

And two days later, he trooped over to the Israeli lobby AIPAC to walk back what he had said that had so infuriated Netanyahu. “Bibi” then purred that he was “pleased” with the clarification. Diplomatic oil is now being poured over the troubled waters, but this humiliation will not be forgotten. 

What did Obama do to draw this public rebuke? In his Thursday speech on the Arab Spring and Middle East peace, Obama declared: “We believe the borders of Israel should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. … Israel must be able to defend itself — by itself — against any threat.” 

Ignoring Obama’s call for “mutually agreed swaps” of land to guarantee secure and defensible borders for Israel, Netanyahu, warning the president against a peace “based on illusions,” acted as though Obama had called for an Israel withdrawal to the armistice line of 1967. 

This was absurd. All Obama was saying was what three Israeli prime ministers — Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert — have all recognized.  ...

Undeniably, Netanyahu won the smack-down. The president was humiliated in the Oval Office, and in his trip to AIPAC’s woodshed he spoke of the future peace negotiations ending just as Israelis desire and demand. ...

The one explanation that makes sense is that Netanyahu sees Obama as more sympathetic to the Palestinians and less so to Israel than any president since Jimmy Carter, and he, Netanyahu, would like to see Obama replaced by someone more like the born-again pro-Israel Christian George W. Bush. 

And indeed, the Republicans and the right, Mitt Romney in the lead, accusing Obama of “throwing Israel under the bus,” seized on the issue and, almost universally, have taken Netanyahu’s side.

Personally, I don't think the West Bank is very important. I received this great gift a number of Christmases ago, an extra-large free-standing globe for my office. But even on this globe, I can barely find the West Bank. If the Israelis want to push around the Palestinians, well, I don't really care much. I roused myself enough to write a two part review of Jimmy Carter's book Palestine Peace not Apartheid for Taki's Magazine in 2007 (Part 1 and Part 2), but I haven't had much to say since then because it's not my country.

What I do care about is what all this says about my own country.

"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. … Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite [foreign nation] are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests."

—George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

Here's the irony. The GOP is, more or less, the party of WGPs -- White Gentile People, the heart of the nation. But, normal, natural national feelings among WGPs have been so demonized over the years that they've adopted a foreign nationalist politician, Bibi Netanyahu, as their proxy so they can enjoy nationalism by proxy.

Bibi's quite a guy. He just isn't my guy.

But what are the Democrats in Congress' excuses?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Brock O'Bama

President Barry O'Bama visited his ancestral village of Moneygall in Ireland yesterday.

Of course, he didn't realize he had any Irish ancestors until a genealogist looked them up in 2007. But, like I pointed out in my review of Jared Taylor's White Identity, it's cool for politicians to identify as black or Irish, or even black and Irish, but it's not cool to identify as white.

It was on one of these Irish Roots trips that Bill Clinton fell in love with the great Ballybunion golf course. (The two towns that feature Bill Clinton statues are Ballybunion and Pristina.) So far, Obama is lacking in discriminating taste in golf courses, so maybe he'll learn something in Ireland.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Cornel West peeved Obama takes him less seriously than Wachowskis did

Chris Hedges writes in TruthDig about the cruel disillusionment of Cornel West, Princeton professor of African American Studies and Religion and a star in The Matrix sequels:

The moral philosopher Cornel West, if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan. ... 

No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”... 

“I have to take some responsibility,” he admits of his support for Obama as we sit in his book-lined office. “I could have been reading into it more than was there. 

“There is the personal level,” he says. “I used to call my dear brother [Obama] every two weeks. I said a prayer on the phone for him, especially before a debate. And I never got a call back. And when I ran into him in the state Capitol in South Carolina when I was down there campaigning for him he was very kind. The first thing he told me was, ‘Brother West, I feel so bad. I haven’t called you back. You been calling me so much. You been giving me so much love, so much support and what have you.’ And I said, ‘I know you’re busy.’ But then a month and half later I would run into other people on the campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of strange. He doesn’t have time, even two seconds, to say thank you or I’m glad you’re pulling for me and praying for me, but he’s calling these other people. I said, this is very interesting. And then as it turns out with the inauguration I couldn’t get a ticket with my mother and my brother. I said this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says, ‘That’s something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can’t get one, honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa.’ Beginning in Iowa to Ohio. We had to watch the thing in the hotel."

Hopefully, the Wests got a good glimpse on their hotel TV of the newly sworn-in President exchanging a celebratory fist bump with their bellhop.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama's mom on his choice of racial identity

There had been a lot of subtle evidence available before about Dr. Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro's psychological hurt over her son's choice to identify solely as black, but it's historically valuable to have it now all spelled out in Janny Scott's new biography of Ann Dunham, A Singular Woman. Now, we learn (via Jacob Weisberg's review in Slate) what the President's own mother thought about her son's choice of racial self-identification. From Scott's biography:

"She felt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity," recalled Don Johnston, Ann's colleague at Bank Rakyat Indonesia. That identity, she felt, "had not really been part of who he was when he was growing up." She felt he was making what Johnston called 'a professional choice' to strongly identify himself as black."

Scott's revelations are not just important for what they say about the President of the United States of America, but, more essentially, for what they say about modern America.

David Axelrod's version of Barack Obama's Narrative as the racial transcender always had one obvious weakness: the politician himself self-identifies as black and only black (as he chose to do on the 2010 Census). When this inconvenient fact has been brought up, it has usually been explained away by noting that white racism wouldn't allow poor Obama to identify as both black and white. The One Drop Rule, you know.

Yet, the existence of part-black celebrities, such as Tiger Woods and Derek Jeter, who take a less dogmatic view of how to self-identify racially, has seldom been mentioned in the press in relation to Obama's choice. Further, Obama's Hawaiian upbringing in the laid-back 1970s, where he was thought of as "just another mixed kid" at his highly mixed prep school, is also ignored.

Another implicit suggestion of the Axelrodian version of The Narrative is that being half-black made the rise of Barack Obama harder. If he were white, presumably, an amazing talent like Obama would have been President at 37 instead of 47.

The subversive counter-narrative is that Obama figured out fairly early on that his path to power would be much easier in modern America if he self-identified only as black. (He made a mid-course correction in  whom to target his Narrative to after his humiliation by Bobby Rush in the 2000 House primary taught him that black voters, who are more savvy about matters of black identity, would not recognize him as "black enough" relative to other black candidates, but that clueless white people would.)

When Obama was elected head of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, he banged the paternal race gong hard in the ensuing PR, to his mother's bemusement. You can read this important account from Scott's book on Google Books.

"A longer article a week later in The Boston Globe went into greater detail. "What seems to motivate Barack Obama is a strong identification what what he calls 'the typical black experience,' paired with a mission to help the black community and promote social justice," the Globe reported. It described "his unusual path, from childhood in Indonesia, where he grew up, he says, 'as a street kid [with several servants looking after him],' to adolescence in Hawaii, where he was raised by his grandparents." The article dwelt at some length on the influence of Obama's father, who, it said, was born in Kenya, "studied at Harvard and Oxford [?] and became a senior [?] economist for the Kenyan government." In high school, the article said, Obama began a regular correspondence with his father, "whose heritage was to be a major influence on his life, ideals and priorities." One of Obama's most valued possessions, the article said, was the passbook that his grandfather, a cook for the British before Kenyan independence, was required to carry. "He said that even though his heritage is one-half white, and although has had a mixture of influences in his life, 'my identification with the -- quote -- typical black experience in America was very strong and very natural [?] and wasn't something forced and difficult," the article said. Of Ann, it said little more than "His mother, who is white, is a Kansas-born anthropologist who now works as a developmental consultant in Indonesia." 

In an even longer article in the Los Angeles Times a month later, Ann was described simply as "an American anthropologist" and "a white American from Wichita, Kan." 

The marginal role to which Ann was consigned in those accounts did not go unnoticed. She had raised Obama, with the help of her parents, after his father had left for Harvard when Obama was ten months old. She had been his primary parent for the first ten years of his life. 

She had returned to Hawaii to live with him when he was in middle school. She had moved back to Hawaii from Indonesia for several months during his senior year. Yet in those accounts, Obama had been "a street kid" in Indonesia, then sent back to Hawaii to be "raised by his grandparents." Yang Suwan, Ann's Indonesian anthropologist friend, recalled Ann returning to Jakarta around the time of the Harvard Law Review election. As always, she was extraordinarily proud of her son. But on another level, she seemed crushed. 

"'His mother is an anthropologist,' Ann told Yang, quoting an article she had seen. "I was mentioned in one sentence." ... 

When Ann told Made Suarjana that Obama was graduating from Harvard Law School, he said, "So, he's going to be a billionaire." Ann corrected him: No, she said, he wants to return to Chicago and do pro bono work. Because Suarjana knew that Obama was interested in politics, and because he felt he knew something about American public life, he said, knowingly, "Okay, so he wants to be president." 

To his surprise, Ann began to weep. ... 

"No, not this time," she answered, according to Suarjana. "He's going to be a senator first."

Had they already talked about it, Suarjana wondered later. ... 

"She felt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity," recalled Don Johnston, Ann's colleague at Bank Rakyat Indonesia. That identity, she felt, "had not really been part of who he was when he was growing up." Ann felt he was making what Johnston called "a professional choice" to strongly identify himself as black." It would be too strong to say that she felt rejection," he said. But she felt, in that way, "that he was distancing himself from her.""

This may offer clues for some of the missing pieces in the puzzle of Obama's life, such as why he wound up at Occidental College, a fine liberal arts college but not exactly the Ivy League. And he came from an academically ambitious family: his father had gone to Harvard, his mother was working on her Ph.D., his grandmother's sister was a statistics professor at (I believe) the University of North Carolina, and his grandmother's brother was an executive in the U. of Chicago libraries. 

Similarly, Obama seems like a smart guy, but not only didn't his PSAT score at his prep school allow him to make National Merit Semifinalist (a very high bar, one that few recent Presidential candidates would have cleared), but he didn't even make the much lower bar of National Achievement Scholar, the affirmative action version of National Merit Scholar for blacks. 

Then, after two years at Oxy devoted largely, in his own account, to smoking weed and and hanging out with rich Pakistani Marxists, he suddenly transferred to the Ivy League.

What happened? 

Well, one thing we know happened at Oxy was that he changed the first name he went by from Barry to Barack. Perhaps, he also changed his racial identity as well?

Maybe on the PSAT and on his college applications he didn't check the "Black" box? If he didn't, college admissions officers would have looked at an application from some kid named Obama in Honolulu and figured he maybe was another Japanese kid, and they already had lots of applications from affluent East Asians with better grades than this Obama character.

His mother, who had lived with him in the fall of his senior year in high school when he would have been thinking about his college applications, recalled, "That [black] identity, she felt, 'had not really been part of who he was when he was growing up.'"

Maybe his idealistic mother suggested it wouldn't be fair for a privileged preppie like him to claim affirmative action benefits? Who knows?

Granted, this would sharply contradict Obama's own race-obsessed version of his teenage years. Accounts by his high school friends vary. Most of his friends remember him as a mellow pothead. His half-Japanese half-black friend Keith Kakugawa (whom Obama fictionalized as the all-black and bitterly anti-white "Ray" in Dreams from My Father) recalls Obama as being far more paranoid about white prejudice than he was. (Another character fictionalized in Dreams also told the LA Times that the anti-white views his character expressed in the book sound more like Obama's literary self-projections). But Kakugawa also said that the main emotional turmoil in Obama's life was caused not by race but by his feelings of abandonment by his parents.

Of course, Kakugawa is an ex-con, so who are you going to believe? The jailbird or the President? The guy who couldn't talk his way out of prison or the guy who talked his way into the White House?

Quite possibly, Obama's own view of his racial identity was subject to the usual teenage emotional flux.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Could Lolo Soetoro have been President Barry Soetoro's dad?

No, I'm not suggesting a new paternity theory to go along with all the wacky ones we already have. Instead, I'm suggesting a thought experiment to assess the impact that being able to self-identify as black has had on our President's career.

My contention has been: "Obama is President for the same dumb reason as the last guy was President: because of who his daddy was."

This is not a respectable view on either side of the aisle. It's not even a respectable view in the more fever swampish realms of anti-Obama theories. As I pointed out in 2008, the common denominator of everything from Obamamania to birtherism is "a widespread desire among whites of all political stripes to not think about race anymore, and to imagine that Obama doesn’t either." We're all past such crude, outdated ideas as race, right? Ancestry and family ties don't mean anything to anybody anymore.

Except that we're not, which is why Obama is President, and why Obama was even considered Presidential timber.

Yet, how can we test my theory that the common denominator of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama being considered Presidential timber is who their fathers were?

Fortunately, it's easy to perform a thought experiment on the previous President. If George W. Bush had been born George W. Rush, would he have become President? You can even assume the hypothetical Rushes were as materially prosperous as the real Bushes. The only difference in our thought experiment is that George W. Rush's father wasn't President Rush and his grandfather wasn't Senator Rush.

So, would George W. Rush have become President of the United States? Would he have been considered Presidential timber?

Of course not. He might have become, say, national sales manager of some corporation. But that's about it.

Note that this is not a question of whether George W. Rush would have beaten Al Gore and John F. Kerry. Maybe, knowing the deficiencies of those candidates, George W. Rush might have. Instead, this is a question of whether George W. Rush would have, out of 300 million people, ever been imagined to be President by anybody outside his own brain? I think most would agree the answer is: no. (George W. Bush would have lost a Presidential election if the only voters were his parents and his only opponent his brother Jeb.)

What about Obama? Would he have ever been considered for the Presidency if his father hadn't been black?

The current President would seem to have a much more unique background that would make it difficult to plug him into this kind of thought experiment. Yet, Ann Dunham's propensity for marrying U. of Hawaii students from politically well-connected families with a history of anti-colonial activism in their tropical homelands, who then return to their Third World countries and get jobs with American oil companies makes our conceptual task surprisingly easier.

Would our current President have become President in an alternative universe in which he was not Barack Obama, the son of Ann Dunham's Kenyan first husband, but (permanently) Barry Soetoro, the son of her Indonesian second husband? 

After all, Lolo spent more time and money on little Barry than Barack Sr. ever did. Barack Sr.'s contribution was limited to a few letters, one visit, a basketball, his genes, and as a role model of a black political leader in Ann's (highly fictionalized) lectures to her son about her romantic first husband's ambitions for his people (in sharp contrast to her increasingly unsatisfactory second husband's ambitions to provide for her and little Barry).

The question of "What If Obama Were Half-Asian" would sound less crazy to Obama than it does to most Americans since Obama has a half-Asian half-sister, Maya Soetoro.

Assume, for the purposes of this thought experiment, that the conventional wisdom that race doesn't exist is right, and that Barry Soetoro would have turned out exactly the same in all ways being Lolo's genetic son as Barack Obama Jr. did being Bararck Sr.'s genetic son, except that he wouldn't have had any justification to self-identify as black, which is, as we all know, purely a cultural construct.

Alternatively, assume that Lolo and Ann had never mentioned to Barry that Lolo wasn't his genetic father and, because race doesn't exist, therefore nobody else noticed either.

Minus the racial angle, that's roughly the story of Gerald Ford's upbringing -- he only spent 15 minutes in his life talking to his biological father. Likewise, nobody is all that sure who Bill Clinton's biological father really was.

If Ford and Clinton had self-identified with different fathers, would that have permanently banished them from ever being even considered as Presidential timber? Maybe, but maybe not. In their quite different ways -- Ford was an All-American athlete, a male model before he went bald, and a Yale Law School grad, while Clinton was a political ball of fire and a Yale Law School grad -- they were early on recognized as guys with a lot of political potential. Their unusual yet mundane family backgrounds didn't seem to play a huge role in their careers, one way or another.

So, is Obama more like George W. Bush or like Ford and Clinton? Assume everything else about his upbringing through age 18 was the same, except that instead of Barack Obama then going through life as a Potential First Black President, Barry Soetoro then went through life as, theoretically, a Potential First Half-Asian President. 

How far would an equally talented, equally ambitious half-Asian half-white Barry Soetoro have gotten in American life?

Being half-black, Barack Obama was the one we were waiting for.

But, as far as I can tell, not many Americans are particularly waiting around for the First Half-Asian Whatever. Would Barry Soetoro have gotten a six-figure advance to write the autobiography of the first half-Asian editor of the Harvard Law Review? Would Barry Soetoro have been elected editor of the Harvard Law Review? Would Barry Soetoro even have been been admitted to Harvard Law? (Barack Obama said, while he was at Harvard, that he had been the beneficiary of affirmative action, so it's certainly legitimate to wonder.) Would the U. of Chicago Law School have offered Barry Soetoro tenure despite publishing no legal articles?

Would Barry Soetoro have even been able to get Barack Obama's community organizer job?

No. Byron York reported:

So [Jerry] Kellman set out to find a black organizer. He ran an ad in some trade publications, and Obama responded. But at first Kellman wasn’t sure Obama was right for the job. “My wife was Japanese-American,” Kellman recalled. “I showed her the résumé, with the background in Hawaii. The name’s Obama, so I asked, ‘Could this be Japanese?’ She said, ‘Sure, it could be.’” It was only when Kellman talked to Obama on the phone, and Obama “expressed interest in something African-American culturally,” that a relieved Kellman offered Obama the job.

Overall, how far would Barry Soetoro have gotten?

Head of the admissions office at Occidental? Chief newsletter editor at Business International? Head of the New York chapter of Ralph Nader's Public Interest Research Group? State Senator from Evanston, IL? Magna cum laude graduate of the U. of Hawaii law school?

Everything I know about the man suggests that, all else being equal, if he weren't able to self-identify as black, he would have carved out for himself a comfortable, respectable, and worthy life and made a positive social contribution. He would certainly have ranked among the top several million people in America.

But, President Barry Soetoro?

Really?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

What's Obama hiding?

Famed landlord Donald Trump has been asking some questions about President Obama's background, such as what were his college records at Occidental and Columbia?

The basic impetus behind questions about Obama is the perfectly reasonable feeling: "Who is this guy?"

For example, I lived in Chicago from 1982 until the late summer of 2000. I read local newspapers, I watched local news. I've got a pretty good memory. When Barack Obama became a media superstar in 2004 and an heir apparent to the Presidency, I said to myself, "Oh, yeah, him! I remember him from my Chicago days from ... stuff. Well, I'm pretty sure I've been hearing his name for years, going back to the early 1970s when his radical Black Power plays were so controversial. Oh, wait a minute, I'm thinking of playwright Amiri Baraka, not Barack Obama. Well ..."

My best guess is that when Barack Obama's name surfaced in the news in 2004, it wasn't new to me, but I might just be kidding myself. 

Now, if I'd been paying close attention to local Democratic black politics on the South Side, I would have remembered him as the guy who got crushed by Bobby Rush (whom I was quite familiar with) in early 2000 in the House primary. If I was a player in Democratic rich white politics on the Gold Coast, I would no doubt have heard about how he leaves wealthy white liberals with fainting spells about how he should be President. 

But to a white Republican yuppie on the North Side with a job, he just wasn't on the radar. And why should he have been? What was he accomplishing that marked him out as Presidential timber?

Four years later, he's elected President, eight years after losing badly a House primary.

That's not the most amazing eight year rise in American Presidential history. For example, in 1860, Ulysses S. Grant was a counter clerk in his dad's shop in Galena, IL. Eight years later he was elected President. 

Of course, in the meantime, Grant had conquered Vicksburg and Richmond and defeated Robert E. Lee. 

In contrast, over eight years, Obama had ... uh ... well, mainly he had given up his lifelong ambition of rising to power on the back of black voters and switched to a strategy of rising to power on the back of white voters. 

Back in 2008 in VDARE, I considered various popular theories about Obama"

That he was really born in Kenya and thus isn’t eligible to be President.

That he isn’t black because his father was 7/8ths Arab.

That he is a practicing Muslim.

That his real father was a Communist poet, Frank Marshall Davis.

That Bill Ayers ghostwrote his 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father.

For example, obviously Obama wasn't born in Kenya. The cost and discomfort for a pregnant lady to travel from Hawaii to Kenya in 1961 would be prohibitive. And why would Barack Sr. have taken Ann to Kenya? To meet her co-wife?

I encourage you to reread my 2008 article for a sensible take on various controversies.

So, what is Obama covering up?

Well, one thing that he's not particularly trying hard to cover up, but almost nobody has noticed, is the dubiousness of his parents' marriage:

"In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I’ve never quite had the courage to explore. There’s no record of a real wedding, a cake, a ring, a giving away of the bride. No families were in attendance; it’s not even clear that people back in Kansas were fully informed. Just a small civil ceremony, a justice of the peace. The whole thing seems so fragile... "

He doesn't spell it out, but as a lawyer and a politician, the whole thing would strike him as trouble: Barack Sr. was already married back in Kenya with a wife and a couple of kids, so getting married in Hawaii would be the crime of bigamy. (This situation was anticipated uncannily in John Updike's 1978 bestseller The Coup, in which an African student in an American college in 1959 keeps trying to tell his white American girlfriend that he has a wife back home in Africa.) Or, you could argue that Barack Sr.'s marriage in Kenya according to the customs of his tribe wasn't a "real" marriage, but that sounds pretty racist. And the whole thing raises the topic of polygamy, which isn't really on-message in American political campaigns.

Obama introduced himself to America at the 2004 Democratic convention with a famous speech that began with 390 words about his ancestry, especially his parent's marriage. It's always been a big selling point for Obama that he unites through his parents' marriage the black and the white, just as Henry VIII united the white and the red roses of the War of the Roses. And, it's been a selling point that his parents' black-white marriage was illegal in many states in 1961 (although not, of course, Hawaii, where a huge fraction of marriages by then were interracial, a subject that Obama supporters don't like to talk about). This is a big part of the self-congratulation that helped get Obama to the White House: look how enlightened we are on race today!

But what's the political utility of the truth about his parents' marriage: that it was illegal because polygamy is illegal in America? The federal government fought a small civil war with the Mormons over polygamy in the 1850s. There's no way, no how to positively spin the fact that Obama's parents marriage was illegally bigamous, so let's not talk about it.

But, Obama has been reasonably forthcoming about his parents' illegal marriage. He's never mentioned that his parents marriage was bigamous, but he's laid out enough facts in Dreams from My Father that you can easily figure it out if you read the President's autobiography closely, but who's bothered to do that? (I have.)

So, what is Obama still hiding?

One theory that makes more sense out of his career's ups and downs -- graduating in the top 16% supposedly at Harvard Law School, where he made a big impression on everybody, alongside periods where he seemed down and withdrawn -- is that he's mildly bipolar. Lots of people are. Famous people often are famous because their up phases coincided with periods of opportunity in their lives. By his own accounts, he appears to have suffered major depressive episodes in New York in the 1980s and after his rejection by black voters as not black enough in 2000.

Another theory that I'm increasingly drawn to is that Obama got a little help along the way from CIA/NSA types, but that's completely off everybody else's radar because it doesn't fit ideological categories. His father was a protege of the CIA's main man in Kenya, Tom Mboya, and was chief witness of his assassination. His mother worked in the U.S. embassy in Indonesia, a main front in the Cold War, soon after the 1965 coup, and then went on to a long career with U.S. government-affiliated organizations in the Third World. Barack Jr.'s one private industry job was as a copy editor at a firm, Business International, whose owner had previously admitted the firm served as a front for four CIA agents.

But that likely wouldn't be that big of a deal: say that his parents and stepfather got some people they knew at Langley or NSA or the Ford Foundation or some oil companies to pull some strings to get young Barry transferred from Oxy to Columbia to study international relations. And then, somebody directed him to a job at a CIA-connected firm for a year after college There might be an interesting story here, but perhaps the more interesting one is how he rebelled against this path laid out for him in international affairs and came up with the idea of becoming mayor of Chicago, a very insular, anti-international ambition, a rebellion against his parents' internationalism.

Overall, though, I think the basic situation is that Obama wakes up every morning in the White House and says to himself, "Holy crap, those poor dumb saps really did elect a black lefty affirmative action baby to be President. I'd better act like a complete tool of Wall Street and the neocons, or the saps might finally figure it out. Fortunately, the Republicans are even bigger tools of Wall Street and the neocons, and white Democrats are complete idiots about race, so Democrats will never grasp why I have to sell them out: because I can't let anybody notice I'm a black lefty affirmative action baby! It's so ironic that if white liberals started to think about it, their heads would explode like that computer on Star Trek."

But, mostly, Obama's big dark secret is that he just didn't do much in his life other than self-promote himself as the guy who should be the first black President. The embarrassing secret is that Obama is President for the same dumb reason as the last guy was President: because of who his daddy was.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Mama Obama

The NYT Magazine has an excerpt from a new book by Janny Scott about Barack Obama's mother in Indonesia. It's pretty similar to the equivalent chapter in my book on Obama. It mentions that Ann Dunham was only 17 when she was impregnated, which is very rare in the press. But the excerpt doesn't mention that her subsequent marriage was polygamous. I guess there's only so much that respectable readers can be expected to put up with.

I had pointed out that Obama had been exposed to racism in Indonesia, which he completely failed to mention in his memoir (while exaggerating the anti-black behavior he'd been exposed to at his prep school in Hawaii). But this new book makes clear the relentlessness of the anti-black racism and even violence little Barry had to put up with in Jakarta:

After lunch, the group took a walk, with Barry running ahead. A flock of Indonesian children began lobbing rocks in his direction. They ducked behind a wall and shouted racial epithets. He seemed unfazed, dancing around as though playing dodge ball “with unseen players,” Bryant said. Ann did not react. Assuming she must not have understood the words, Bryant offered to intervene. “No, he’s O.K.,” Ann said. “He’s used to it.” 

“We were floored that she’d bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks,” Bryant said. ... 

Occasionally, she took Barry to work. Joseph Sigit, an Indonesian who worked as the office manager at the time, told me, “Our staff here sometimes made a joke of him because he looked different — the color of his skin.” 

Joked with him — or about him? I asked. 

“With and about him,” Sigit said, with no evident embarrassment.

As I pointed out in my book, the missing piece of the puzzle in Dreams from My Father is Asians. Compared to the average American, Obama had vastly more contact growing up with Asians -- in Indonesia, Hawaii, California, New York, and even in Kenya on his visit, where his half-sister resentfully calls his attention to the Indian dominance of commerce in Nairobi. But, his book is just about the usual black and white stuff that his white readers would expect. He never, ever reports learning anything about blacks or whites from the existence of Asians. 

Without thinking about a third group, it's hard to think intelligently about blacks and whites. This is what I call the midget-giant epistemological problem. In 2003, I wrote in VDARE:

One day in 1981, I was standing in front of UCLA's Royce Hall, when I noticed two young men walking toward me across the huge open quad. "Hey!" I said to myself. "There's something you don't see very often at UCLA. That tiny fellow talking to the normal-sized guy is a genuine midget." Then, another young man walked up to the pair. "Wow! Now there are two midgets with that regular guy," I thought. "What are the odds of that?" 

Highly unlikely, I suddenly realized, as I underwent one of those gestalt snaps, like where the vase in the picture suddenly becomes two faces in profile. Now that there were three people, it became clear to me that the two "midgets" were six-footers and the "normal-sized guy" was 7'-3" 290-pound Bruin basketball center Mark Eaton (who later became a league-leading shot blocker for the Utah Jazz). 

When I think about race, I'm frequently reminded of that lesson I learned in the difficulty of accurately comparing X to Y without a Z to provide perspective.

The elegant but intellectually vacuous Dreams panders to American X/Y thinking, despite all of Obama's experiences with perspective-granting Zs.

I did, however, like the President's gracious tribute in the article to his maternal grandmother, whom he had so coldly slandered -- while she was still alive -- for reasons of political expedience in his famous race speech to ward off questions about his relationship with Rev. Wright:

“She was a very strong person in her own way,” Obama said, when I asked about Ann’s limitations as a mother. “Resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, persistent — the fact that she ended up finishing her dissertation. But despite all those strengths, she was not a well-organized person. And that disorganization, you know, spilled over. Had it not been for my grandparents, I think, providing some sort of safety net financially, being able to take me and my sister on at certain spots, I think my mother would have had to make some different decisions. And I think that sometimes she took for granted that, ‘Well, it’ll all work out, and it’ll be fine.’ But the fact is, it might not always have been fine, had it not been for my grandmother. . . . Had she not been there to provide that floor, I think our young lives could have been much more chaotic than they were.”

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Kaus goes there

Mickey Kaus writes:

Jay Cost: “Obama is just plain bad at politics” I think Cost’s on to something, though a) there are worse things than being bad at politics, even in a president; b) it doesn’t mean Obama won’t be reelected (or that I won’t vote for him); c) Cost’s examples aren’t wildly compelling. (Every president says a few dumb things, And let’s see if Obamacare gets repealed, now that Paul Ryan has said its basic structure is OK for seniors.) 

Well, you don't have to be all that great at politics in an absolute sense, you just have to be better than the opposition, especially when the opposition keeps getting disqualified. Obama has contested seven elections in his career, from the election for Harvard Law Review supremo onward, one of which he lost badly (to Bobby Rush in 2000). In three of them, his chief opponents were driven off the ballot by, once, Obama contesting the opponents' signatures, and, twice, by seamy divorce records being opened. So, maybe that's proof of his political genius.

Cost would have been on stronger ground if he’d waited to hear Obama’s waste of a deficit speech; d) Cost doesn’t go into why Obama managed to get to the top of politics without being all that good at it. The answer is distressingly obvious: Obama’s the biggest affirmative action baby in history.  When other pols are trying, failing, learning, while climbing up the middle rungs of the ladder, he got a pass; e) He’s the second president in a row to get a pass–George W. Bush, after all, didn’t exactly have to fight his way through a 64-team bracket. He was a legacy exception. And, come to think of it, he wasn’t that good at politics either. …

People should read the hagiographic The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, and count the number of powerful people who told Remnick that the first time they met Obama, their reaction was: He should be President! Then compare this to Obama's actual record of accomplishment, as reported in The Bridge, such as all the brilliant legal articles he wrote that led to him being offered tenure by the U. of Chicago Law School, all the landmark cases he won as a discrimination lawyer, all the public school students whose test scores rose due to the $100,000,000 he handed out as Chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, all the jobs he helped people get as a community organizer, and so forth. (Remnick does devote pp. 164-169 to the asbestos Obama helped get partially removed.)

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama at Harvard Law School

President Obama's decision to plunge America into a war with virtually no prior public debate raises inevitable questions about his ability to foresee the future. For several years, we've been reassured about Obama's brilliance, mostly stemming from his record at Harvard. For example, in David Brooks' quasi-novel The Social Animal, the Obamaish character tells the David Brooks-like main character:

"I'm going to be a great president. I have the gifts. I know more about more policy areas than anybody else in the country. ... My attitude is going to be, 'I've got game. Give me the ball.'"

Buried deep in the comments to an earlier post, TangoMan points to a 1999 LA Times article that sheds some light on the mystery of how the President ranked in the top ten percent at Harvard Law School without much intellectually distinguishing himself during most other periods of his life. Most likely, he didn't rank in the top 10% at HLS, as has so often been assumed based on his magna cum laude honors. Only since 1999 has magna cum laude at HLS been restricted to the top 10 percent. 

Honors Grow Scarcer for Harvard Law Grads 

June 10, 1999|Reuters 

When members of Harvard Law School's class of 1999 receive their prestigious degrees Thursday, 36% fewer graduates than last year will be awarded with honors, the school said Wednesday. ... Under a system implemented three years ago that first took effect with this year's class, Harvard Law said it will limit magna cum laude degrees to the top 10% of the class. The next 30% will receive cum laude degrees. Under the old system, 76% of Harvard Law grads earned honors, the school said.

So, more likely, Obama finished in, say, the top 30% or 40% at HLS in grades. 

And, you want to know something? That's really good. He's a very smart guy. He's plenty smart enough to be President.

On the other hand, Obama has been told that he's a genius so many times that he apparently is starting to believe it. Peter Baker reported in the NY Times Magazine last year:

One prominent Democratic lawmaker told me Obama’s problem is that he is not insecure — he always believes he is the smartest person in any room and never feels the sense of panic that makes a good politician run scared all the time, frenetically wooing lawmakers, power brokers, adversaries and voters as if the next election were a week away. 

Emphasis mine.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A classmate's view of Obama

Much of what we know about Obama comes from people he sucked up to (David Remnick's biography The Bridge, for example, is unconsciously hilarious as various personages Obama has kissed up to go on and on about they told all their friends the first time they met him that he should be President). The more interesting perspectives have come from those people who observed him without being in a position to forward his glorious career, such as his Harvard Law School classmate who had been the bass player for The Runaways.

From the comments, here's another plausible sounding perspective on Obama at HLS:

I went there [Harvard Law School] one year behind Obama, had one class together. I graduated cum laude, and my measured IQ last time was 156, and I got perfect score on LSAT. But I am also a little bit ADHD-ish, and I don't think I studied as diligently as most of my peers. I mention this because (besides being defensive about not doing better) while the HLS population is quite smart, they are even more different from average in discipline and diligence, and while Obama was not the smartest guy there, he was f****** amazing in terms of discipline. Over all, I think his package of mental gifts are well superior to mine.

First of all, not all classes were blind graded. On many there were signed papers. And in my class, Obama sat in the front row every day and gazed at the professor with an adoration that Nancy Reagan would have been embarrassed to beam at Ron. He worked them incredibly assiduously. And very successfully. That helped his scores. That isn't LSAT intelligence, but it requires an interpersonal skill that is way beyond mine, and I hazard, way beyond anyone reading this. That is very demanding, and he had that ON TOP OF very respectable raw IQ.

I know that because there are a lot of classes that are blind graded, not easily gamed, and you can't be a dope in them and get magna. Even without his brilliant suck-up skills, he would make the top half of the Harvard distribution.

Steve is right to focus on his ability to paraphrase opponents' arguments to disarm them. Someone of glaringly average intelligence -- like say, Amanda Marcotte -- is a complete failure at that.

As far as his hesitation to make decisions, I don't ascribe that to lack of intelligence. It is part conscious strategy. He never gave a substantive opinion in class -- he just paraphrased others. People loved it, and thought he was brilliant. Those of us who thought that made him a pussy were few and far between. And he kept to that strategy with iron discipline. You might think of it as like the post-modern philosophy in chess: never commit until after the other guy does, and then you have the chance to decide what to do when you have learned more. I agree there are a lot of problems with that strategy for being president, but it sure does seem to work like gang-busters for getting to be president.

Though I think it is more than strategy, cause he does it even when it is stupid. I think that was his survival skill for being the only black kid in Hawaii and Indonesia. I mean think about it, that has to be terrifying, and living in that kind of fear for so long has to leave a mark. Clinton learned from his abusive alcoholic parents to lie lie lie, and do whatever feels good. Obama learned from his disinterested, abandoning parents to never let yourself be vulnerable by committing to anything.

Anyway, my main point is: I don't want this guy to be president, and I don't share his beliefs, and I think he is more than half a crook (see e.g. Michelle's bag collecting disguised as a phony baloney job at U of C hospital). But anyone is a fool who takes his talents lightly.

One thing that's fascinating about Obama is that he had such a hard time understanding that he had a Rev. Wright problem. He donated large amounts of money to Wright's church in 2005, 2006, and 2007, which appears on his publicly released tax records. He named his 2006 bestseller The Audacity of Hope after a Wright sermon. Wright was going to give the invocation at Obama's presidential kickoff rally in Springfield in February 2007 up until somebody convinced Obama to disinvite Wright the night before.

Wright understood all this better than Obama. As Wright told the NYT in 2007 about why he was disinvited, when people find out I went to Libya with Farrakhan and met with Gadaffi ...

And yet, as David Plouffe has admitted, the Obama campaign staff was blindsided by Wright videos finally appearing in the MSM on Feb. 13, 2008. They were just lucky Wright was on a cruise at the moment. When he got back and went on his media tour six weeks later, he made Obama's famous race speech look like a pack of lies.

Ultimately, Wright supposedly spent the fall campaign in email hell in Africa, which sounds like smart planning on the part of the Obama braintrust ... finally.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Once again, how smart is Obama?

A novelist requests help from iSteve readers:

Exactly how smart is Obama? He is represented, by self and media lickers-and-kissers as "the smartest guy in the room." Yet as far as I can see, there's absolutely no documentation for this claim. 

Virtually everything he's been given has been donated willingly on the basis of what he is--pan racial, seemingly articulate and forthright exotic who wears clothes brilliantly and is highly charismatic--than what he's done. No grades, no scores, no actual accomplishments. So how smart is he? Is he really smart? He's articulate but he uses his charm in any circumstance where he's out-IQed, and if his charm fails, so does his confidence, and he lurches in gibberish, well documented. 

Has he ever thought anything through in a conscientious way?  Does he look under, through or behind the bromides that he so glibly produces on cue? There's no evidence of any of this.  He takes his time on making decisions, but to me that's more a sign of fear, even panic, as he knows he must commit and defend, as opposed to simply being Obama, and that scares him silly. He's not stupid; he's certainly well above average, but at the same time far below distinguished. He's smart enough to see nuances but he's not disciplined enough to discriminate between them, ignore the inappropriate ones, and lead on, as Bush (also no genius) was willing to do, and take the heat, as the heat quite clearly bothers him. (As well it should; he's never felt it before; he's always been beloved.)

Anyway, for me, this calculates out to about a 115. What do you think/ Love to see your ruminations on this one, and your reader's responses.

There is a remarkable paucity of publicly available analytical writing that's clearly by Obama rather than the product of a committee process. His first memoir is only modestly analytical (for example, in his decision to reject Louis Farrakhan's black nationalist capitalism because there is no money in it -- but most of the rest is devoted to establishing quandaries for himself rather than in solving them). His more analytic second memoir was read over by 28 insiders before going to the publisher, so who knows what we can say about what that book says about him.

To my mind, the place to start is with the eight lengthy final exam essay questions (and two answer memos) from Obama's "Racism and the Law" course at the  U. of Chicago Law School (for links to them see the bottom of Jodi Kantor's long 2008 blog post. 

I'm presuming that Obama mostly wrote them himself, that he didn't have a TA write them for him, and that he didn't crib them from some other professor in another city. I was living in Chicago reading the same newspapers as Obama at the same time, and his questions are clearly ripped from the Chicago headlines of the day.

They are nicely done. They don't represent original thought, but they do testify to Obama's nimble ability to understand and replicate various sides of fairly complex arguments. So, I'd say he's, oh, two standard deviations above the national average in verbal ability and verbal logic. Unfortunately, I don't know of much evidence at all relating to his quantitative ability.

They don't testify much, however, to Obama's ability to solve complex problems, which remains opaque. As I pointed out years ago, much of his appeal comes from his ability to project back to interlocutors: "I have understood you."

The ability to summarize your opponent's side of an argument at least as well as its partisans could do for themselves is, in terms of brainpower, nothing to be sneezed at. On the other hand, there isn't all that much evidence from Obama's writings of Obama coming to his own conclusions, other than, say, that Farrakhanism is an economic losing strategy and that he should thus stick to the left side of the mainstream (pp. 199-202 in Dreams). You don't have to be Richard Feynman to figure that out!

Alternatively, he may have figured out a lot of big things, but he's not telling anybody because he doesn't want them to know what conclusions he has reached.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama's War

Two weeks ago, Barack Obama started America's war with Libya. I can recall my amazement as I typed the title for my blog post: Are we at war with Libya?

As with so much about the President, his big picture reasons for starting Obama's War remain opaque.

Did he do it to flex the muscle of American power in front of a quaking world?

Or, did he do it to tie down the Gulliver of American power by setting the precedent that the terrifying Pentagon is now the errand boy of the United Nations in general and the enlightened Europeans in particular?

Or did he just not know he was sending America to war? Perhaps he has actually believed all the nonsense he has talked about how this isn't a war and, if you don't believe that, well, this isn't America's war?

And thus we come again to the question of who Obama really is: bleeding heart or cold-blooded power-seeker? And what attitude toward American power has Obama inherited (I mean, besides that he should be in charge of American power)?

When George W. Bush decided to finish his father's unfinished business with Saddam Hussein, well, it wasn't very good idea, but at least, from an commonplace understanding of the psychological dynamics of the Bush dynasty, you could see where he was coming from. The younger Bush's view was that his imposing father had wimped out and lost re-election by not taking out Saddam Hussein. 

But on the larger question of the goodness and usefulness of American power, it's clear the two Bonesmen were in agreement (although the elder held a more nuanced view of its limits). The Bushes are from the old hereditary ruling caste, The Good Shepherd good blood, good bone elite.

But, Obama's mother, father, and stepfather were part of such an exotic caste -- the CIA-affiliated international left -- that it's hard for anybody to get a handle on him. And the subjects that fascinate Obama most -- his race and inheritance -- are exactly those that most stultify thinking among almost everybody else.

That a man figured out how to exploit the softheadedness of America's reigning civic religion by making himself "a blank screen" for our fantasies, that he managed to make himself the most powerful man in the world, the man who can start a war on a whim without anybody else having much of an idea what his whims are, remains among the oddest and most under-reported stories of this century.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

NYT: Obama needs to share more

Matt Bai in the New York Times worries that poor President Obama isn't successfully bypassing the traditional media:

For Obama, Getting Message Out Online is a Challenge
Truly taking the presidency online would not only enable Mr. Obama to get his message to some voters without passing through the traditional news media.

Because the establishment media has always been so skeptical and unfriendly toward Obama that he needs to go around them to connect directly with the average voter.

Mr. Obama is probably the most talented writer to occupy the office in the television age; his political career was made possible, in large part, by the candid memoir he wrote as a younger man. 

"Candid" is about the last word that comes to mind for "Dreams from My Father." The book sold 11,000 copies in the nine years up until he became a superstar at the 2004 Democratic convention. It's sold millions of copies since then, although I doubt that millions of people have finished it. I doubt if his memoir was a net benefit to his political career at all. It didn't hurt much because it was written in such an opaque style as to be unquotable, but it didn't help much other than to reconfirm the "What a fine young gentleman" feelings that many people already felt for him after seeing him on TV.

So it is hard to understand why the president hasn’t tried to use that talent the way Mr. Kennedy capitalized on his personal charm. You can easily imagine Mr. Obama sitting in front of a keyboard at the end of a long day, briefly reflecting on the oddity of a personal encounter or on the meaning of some overlooked event, or perhaps describing what it is like to stand in the well of Congress and deliver the State of the Union address. It could be that in order to expand the reach and persuasiveness of the modern presidency, Mr. Obama simply needs to be his online self — not so much a blogger as a memoirist-in-chief, walking us through history in real time. 

Yeah, but that would cut into the vital time the President devotes to having a cig, watching ESPN SportsCenter, getting in a quick 18 holes, stepping out for a Lucky Strike, shooting hoops, taking a mental health break for a smoke, daydreaming, etc etc.

The idea that Obama wants to share his thoughts unfiltered and unvetted with the American public is ridiculously naive. It took him four years to get Dreams from My Father finished. He, in effect, stole part of a large advance by not delivering it to the original publisher. The manuscript for his second book was vetted by 28 experts before being sent to the publisher. Do you really think he wants to have to have more Beer Summits every time he accidentally reveals his inner feelings?

What he is good at is the occasional set piece oration that he's rigorously prepared for, like tonight's speech, where he gets to tap into all the good will in America toward eloquent black men. That, and being tongue-bathed by the press. In contrast, the more we see of him on a mundane basis, the more we notice that there's not all that much there.

Nigeria’s leader, Goodluck Jonathan, has been called the “Facebook president” for posting his own frequent meditations for a country of 44 million Internet users. 

Yeah, my spambox is already full of emails from Lea Abiba Mangou, Mbebe  John, Thompsons Ngowa, Hassim Uhuru, and Barack Obama, all asking for my help. I think Obama should definitely step up his online efforts. Like the Mineshaft Gap in Dr. Strangelove, Mr. President, you cannot afford to allow a Nigerian Spam Gap to emerge.

C'mon, the Real Obama didn't get elected President in 2008, that was the Fake Obama, a collective delusion. The Real Obama has no intention of running in 2012 as the Real Obama, either.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer