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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Ever since the 2008 campaign, many voters, and some journalists too, have
felt they know Barack Obama's life story. In fact, the story they know is
the one Obama told them.
Obama's first memoir, "Dreams from My Father," published in 1995, has become
the semi-official record of his life. But it is not the complete record of
his life. It's partially fictionalized, with composite characters that Obama
has always acknowledged were created to make the story read better. It
focuses on a few themes Obama wanted to present to the public about himself.
And, as with any memoir, it is told completely from Obama's point of view.
It's not a biography.
Next month the beginnings of an Obama biography will be published, by former
Washington Post reporter David Maraniss. Readers wanting to learn about
Obama's entire life will be disappointed to discover that Maraniss stops
when Obama is age 27, as he finishes work as a community organizer in
Chicago and heads to Harvard Law School. Obama's law school years, his
practice of law in Chicago, his campaigns and career as an Illinois state
senator, U.S. senator, presidential candidate -- none of that will be
covered.
Still, an excerpt of the Maraniss book published last week in Vanity Fair
reveals a portrait of Obama that might have enriched the voters'
understanding of him in the 2008 campaign, when many Americans were eager to
learn about this new, fresh face in politics.
The excerpt focuses on Obama's brief time in New York after his graduation
from Columbia University. The son of a Kenyan father and an American
expatriate mother, Obama emerges as a man questioning whether he viewed
himself, or wanted to be viewed by others, as an American. Not in a
citizenship sense -- Obama was born in the United States and that was that -
- but in the sense of how he saw the world and wanted to be seen by it.
Obama had a lot of Pakistani friends; Maraniss writes that if Obama and his
girlfriend socialized as a couple, "it was almost always with the Pakistanis
." Obama appeared to identify with his friends as fellow non-Americans. "For
years when Barack was around them, he seemed to share their attitudes as
sophisticated outsiders who looked at politics from an international
perspective," Maraniss writes. "He was one of them, in that sense."
But Obama was ambitious. Appalled by the "dirty deeds" of "Reagan and his
minions" (as he wrote in "Dreams from My Father"), Obama became increasingly
interested in, as Maraniss writes, "gaining power in order to change things
." He couldn't do that as an international guy hanging around with his
Pakistani friends; he needed to become an American.
So he did. One of those Pakistani friends, Beenu Mahmood, saw a major change
in Obama. Mahmood calls Obama "the most deliberate person I ever met in
terms of constructing his own identity," according to Maraniss. The time
after college, Mahmood says, "was an important period for him, first the
shift from not international but American, number one, and then not white,
but black."
Mahmood, Maraniss writes, "could see Obama slowly but carefully distancing
himself as a necessary step in establishing his political identity as an
American."
Years later, the picture of Obama as a young adult wondering whether or not
he was really an American was precisely the image that the Hillary Clinton
campaign wanted to impose on the middle-aged Obama. In internal memos, top
Clinton strategist Mark Penn questioned Obama's "lack of American roots,"
writing that "Obama's roots to basic American values and culture are at best
limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war
who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his
values."
Clinton didn't come out and say that during the campaign, but she did
everything she could to present herself as the all-American candidate in the
race. Her campaign didn't play Tom Petty's "American Girl" at all her
rallies for nothing.
In the general election, the contrast between Obama and John McCain was, of
course, even more stark. At the age Obama was wondering whether he was an
American or not, McCain, the son and grandson of U.S. Navy admirals, was a
newly-commissioned officer at Naval Air Station Pensacola, headed for a
noteworthy military career. It seems unlikely McCain spent much time musing
on whether he was an American.
In the end, as the Maraniss excerpt has it, Obama chose to become an
American in part because that's what he needed to be to accomplish his goals
. The story of what he did after that momentous decision will, unfortunately
, have to wait for another biography.
Byron York, The Examiner's chief political correspondent, can be contacted
at b***[email protected]. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday,
and his stories and blogposts appear on washingtonexaminer.com. |
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