Barack Obama has risen to the highest office in the land on a thin résumé—a pair of Ivy League degrees, some time spent as a “community organizer,” and short periods in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. Senate.  And then there are the books.  The President is the author of the best-selling Audacity of Hope (2006) and Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995).  Dreams depicts a sensitive and intelligent, if somewhat self-absorbed and brooding, young man.  Obama is famously the child of an African father (who abandoned him) and a white mother (who largely did so as well).  As the subtitle of Dreams of My Father implies, race was at the forefront of Obama’s dream.  His struggle for identity was not aided by growing up with his white grandparents among the open racial attitudes in Hawaii, where, he writes, “we said what we pleased” and “sat at the front of the proverbial bus.”  Reflecting on his atypical background, Obama writes,

Grow up in Compton and survival becomes a revolutionary act.  You get to college and your family is still back there rooting for you . . . But I hadn’t grown up in Compton, or Watts.  I had nothing to escape from except my own inner doubt.  I was more like the black students who had grown up in the suburbs, kids whose parents had already paid the price of escape.

This inner doubt apparently gnawed at the youthful Obama.

It is unlikely that more than a handful of people have studied Obama’s writing more closely than Steve Sailer, a quantitatively minded journalist, blogger, and columnist for the immigration-oriented VDare.com, which published his book.

Writing in The American Conservative two years ago, Sailer compared Obama to Tiger Woods.

Although the biracial Obama is frequently lumped with the multiracial golfer Tiger Woods as evidence of the socially healing power of interracial marriage, their attitudes are quite different.  Woods turned down Nike’s suggestion that because African-American celebrities are so popular today, he should identify himself solely as black.  He didn’t want to disown his mother.  Woods instead calls himself black and Thai, or, at times, “Caublinasian,” [sic; Woods uses the term Cablinasian] in tribute to his Caucasian, black, American Indian, and Asian ancestors.

In Half-Blood Prince Sailer continues the comparison, writing that “white Obama zealots are prone to assume that Obama is the Tiger Woods of politics: as the postracial product of a happy mixed race family, he must be the anti-Jesse Jackson.”  Before reading Sailer on the subject, that is exactly how I imagined Obama.

While Sailer has contributed some valuable insights into Obama’s background, America’s Half-Blood Prince is deeply flawed as a book.  It appears to be cobbled together from columns and blog posts, which is evident in endnotes that are more accurately described as hyperlinks.  Some of the links are actual source notes; but there are dozens, if not hundreds, of links to Amazon.com and convoluted URLs aimed at Google Books and Wikipedia entries for obscure events and figures.  The citations would have been far more useful if about half were eliminated and many others reconfigured as traditional notes.

Sailer also repeats and contradicts himself, especially regarding Obama’s literary talents.  Half-Blood Prince at one point refers to Obama as a “superb prose stylist” but later describes Dreams as “quite tedious and hard to finish.”  Sailer praises the “sheer intricacy of the prose style,” yet refers to the “sonorous flow of [Obama’s] prose”; later, he faults the author for “premeditated obscurantism,” while lauding him as a “self-consciously gifted writer.”  I read Dreams of My Father without developing any such complex opinion of Obama’s writing style.  The book was reasonably well written, but I certainly had no problem setting it down.  I still don’t know whether Sailer thinks Obama is a good writer.

Half-Blood Prince does illuminate Obama’s character, at least as the President portrays himself in Dreams.  Obama became obsessed at an early age with race and with the feeling that he wasn’t “black enough,” whatever that might mean.  (This is a topic that might make journalists uncomfortable, but Sailer ventures where journalists fear to tread.)  The major political consequence of this obsession, Sailer argues, was Obama’s decades-long relationship with the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., who enjoyed his 15 minutes of infamy during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign.  Brief clips of sermons in which Wright called for God to “damn America” and suggested that the attacks of September 11 were an example of America’s chickens coming home to roost were posted on YouTube.  Sailer notes that Obama didn’t choose Wright’s church haphazardly:

It must be especially exasperating to Wright that few in the white press have noticed that a very bright young man named Barack Obama fastidiously chose Wright, out of all the black ministers Obama had met during his community organizer years, precisely because Obama was impressed with Wright’s intellect and agreed with his politics.

Sailer devotes his final chapter, written before Election Day 2008, to pondering the likelihood of an Obama presidency.  He dissects at length Barack Obama’s views on affirmative action, a subject that has become supremely relevant owing to the President’s recent nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.  Sailer suggests that Obama’s interest in supporting his racial “team” may have faded, and that Obama may have evolved beyond the persona he projected in Dreams of My Father.  Perhaps ambition overwhelmed his youthful race obsession, or he may simply have grown up.  (The Sotomayor nomination may serve as evidence to the contrary.)  And Sailer argues that Obama will reserve the revelation of his true self for a second term:

In Obama, ambition and caution are yoked.  Becoming president is not his ultimate objective.  Becoming a two-term president is.  Republican Richard Nixon’s first Administration was one of the most liberal in American history.  There were hints at the beginning of his second term, before Watergate washed every bit of policy coherence away, that Nixon, having safely won re-election, intended to move toward his innate conservatism.  That analogy suggests that a second Obama administration might more truly reflect the real Obama.

This is a dubious prediction.  Certainly Obama has noticed that recent second presidential terms have been mired in scandal.  If he is to accomplish anything, he needs to act while he has the votes in Congress and the support of the public.  He cannot count on having those in four years.  Unless arrogance has already overwhelmed his intelligence (a possibility, to be sure), the President knows this.  In the case of those who succumb to arrogance, reality has a way of intruding on their best-laid plans.  Not even a “half-blood prince,” once hailed by Oprah as “The One,” is exempt from this law.

 

[America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance”, by Steve Sailer (Washington, CT: VDare Foundation) 292 pp., $29.95]