The first thought that occurred to me upon receiving a review copy of David Garrow’s hefty biography of our former president was, besides its weight (four pounds), how the jacket photograph perfectly expresses what is revealed in 1,084 pages of text. It was taken in 1990 while Obama was at Harvard Law School, three years after he had decided it was his “destiny” to be president of the United States. It features Barack, smug and smirking, holding up his chin with one hand while looking down his nose upon the person he is sizing up and simultaneously laughing at. It is the photograph of an ambitious and confident man. It is not the face of someone who has suffered because of the color of his skin, the texture of his hair, or the foreign sound of his name.
It is the chief merit of Garrow’s biography that the author himself is scarcely to be found here. There are no moralizing asides, no pronouncements. What we have is more like a dossier, assembled with meticulous care and presented with an almost clinical detachment. That makes the book readable. What makes it important is what it presages about our future. The book’s dominant theme is also its subject’s: It’s all about race.
So what was the making of Barack Obama? It involved, first, Obama himself, whose calculating ambition drove every decision from when he transferred from Occidental College in Los Angeles to Columbia University in order to make himself an American instead of this “cosmopolitan guy.” But not just a generic American: an African American. For Obama understood even then that being so identified would help him rise in the world. Not only would he benefit from preferential treatment, but he would have an ethnic political base upon which to build his political career. At Harvard Law, he described the remaining steps: two years at a corporate law firm; community work; political office; presidency. He revealed his plans to more than one person, including his girlfriend Sheila Miyoshi, whom he dumped because he thought marrying her would have wrecked his presidential ambitions. The child of a Dutch father and a Japanese mother, she was biracial and Eurasian, but in Obama’s eyes, and more importantly in the eyes of the black community in Chicago, she was white. “If I’m going out with a white woman I have no standing here,” he told a friend, referring to his political prospects in South Chicago. As another friend recalled, Barack knew he “wasn’t black enough to pull that off,” “to rise up” with a white wife. So he told Sheila that they would have to part; his “destiny” was more important than his love for her. Enter fellow law student Michelle Robinson, a bright woman who was, in her own words, “as black as it gets.”
The preferential treatment and deference accorded African-Americans in our culture is the second factor accounting for Obama’s rise. Garrow does not state this, nor perhaps does he even believe it, but he provides the evidence to convict America’s “admittedly racist culture” (Obama’s words) of being rather Afrocentric. Yet, just like his future wife, Michelle, young Barack had mastered the art of inflating his personal merits by exaggerating, or inventing, the many obstacles making for their nonrecognition. While Barack admitted that he had “undoubtedly benefitted from affirmative action during his academic career,” and even that it “may have” helped him get on the Law Review at Harvard, he denied that it had hindered him from becoming its president. His election proved that “affirmative action in no way tarnishes the accomplishments of those who are members of historically disadvantaged groups.” Notice how he masks his own boasting within a broader defense of a policy beneficial to his own group and indispensable to his own success. As to why he was elected president of that prestigious journal, Barack was elected because he was black. People said so. “I don’t think it’s that complex a story,” explained one editor: “We . . . wanted to elect the first black president,” make “history,” and “be famous for it.”
The third factor that landed Obama in the White House was the favoritism of the media. From the summer of 2004 when the press virtually anointed him the future president of the United States to his current pose as a kind of shadow president to the current usurper, the media have uttered scarcely a negative word about the man. It was the media that called him “a rising star” when he was running for the U.S. Senate from Illinois and was chosen by the Kerry campaign to be the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention. It was the media that began right then promoting him as “the first African-American president” (E.J. Dionne) and “the first black president” (Chris Matthews). Katie Couric “reported” the day after his celebrated Tuesday-night speech that “some are already saying he could be the first African-American president,” and we need not wonder who “some” was. Nor do we doubt what Obama’s winning cards were in his now inevitable presidential campaign.
That blacks and other “minorities” succeed in our culture despite, not because of, their skin color and the legal privileges accorded it is a zealously defended fiction. Readers might remember what happened when Geraldine Ferraro, a Clinton backer in the 2008 Democratic primary, stated the obvious: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.” She was canned. Obama himself entered the fray and denounced the comment as racially “divisive” as well as “patently absurd.” It may well have been divisive politically, as if politics were about anything else in America the Divided, but it was anything but absurd. The result proved that, in the politics of American victimhood, race trumps sex. By the way, Garrow ignores this campaign episode—no mention of it at all.
The fourth key element of Obama’s rise was the perception that he was, in the words of a white Law Review member, “a race-transcending guy.” Whether it was his mulatto features, his white mother, his lack of a black accent, or his “cool” unflappable personality, he was able to persuade millions of white voters, who otherwise would never have voted for him, that his presidency would be a racially neutral one. What’s more, many voted for him in the mistaken belief that they were performing a final act of expiation for decades of racial “injustice.” Of course, that is a debt which, in the eyes of its creditors, can never be repaid. And as for Obama’s election helping get the country “beyond race” and into the liberal fantasy land of color-blindness and multiracial harmony, the opposite happened. Especially during his second term, when he no longer needed to win white votes, Obama revealed his true colors. The blacks he appointed to his Cabinet (Eric Holder, Susan Rice, Jeh Johnson, Loretta Lynch) were just like him—of mixed race, arrogant, and seething with antiwhite resentment. When told by a female friend who had two half-black daughters that she wanted them to identify as “both” black and white, Barack disagreed. “You have to choose a side, you have to pick a side.”
It would be a mistake to think that Barack was choosing the black side when he married a black woman instead of a white one. Even before that he saw the world in binary terms, and he had no doubt which side he was on. In a letter written to Alex McNear, one of his white girlfriends (he had no black or brown ones), Barack revealed his leftist orientation: “There is a reason why western man has been able to subjugate [white] women and the dark races, Alex; the ideology they represent is backed by very real power.” It follows that, if “the dark races” hope to free themselves from subjugation, they must first acquire and then wield “very real power.” Barack did just that, and it is no surprise that the policy dearest to his heart (though of course unavowed) was the building of a nonwhite majority by nonenforcement of our immigration laws, ordering the Border Patrol to stand down, and bringing in as many refugees and migrants as possible.
Those who can remember the late 1980’s will remember the leftist chant that echoed across Ivy League colleges like Columbia and Harvard: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!” And it did go. Perhaps it had already gone. There is no evidence that Barack, in college or out, has ever read, aside from an essay and poem by T.S. Eliot, a single work of Western history, philosophy, or literature. Why would he have done so? Were such works not written by “dead white males,” to name the more sanguinary corollary to the chant made famous by Obama’s John the Baptist, Jesse Jackson?
Of course, none of the above would have mattered had Obama not mastered the arts of political dissimulation. In so many ways, he was like Bill Clinton, a gifted political huckster. The difference between his presidency and Clinton’s was that Obama’s opened the eyes of white Americans to what they can expect when they eventually do become a minority population in America: legal discrimination, double standards in federal law enforcement, negative quotas, cultural vilification, physical assault, political intimidation. In the end that may be Barack Obama’s greatest political legacy: President Donald J. Trump.
AP Photo/M. Spencer Green
[Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, by David J. Garrow (New York: HarperCollins) 1,472 pp., $45.00]
*Updated 9/27/17. The print version of this article gave an incorrect location for Occidental College.
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