CHAPTER FOUR: BARACK OBAMA
Barack Obama, by his own admission, is the ultimate political Rohrschach test.
"I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views," he observes. "As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them."
Such candid self-awareness abounds in Obama's two bestselling memoirs, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. If nothing else, the books have established the Illinois Democrat as certainly the best writer in the 2008 presidential campaign. Indeed, Obama might have been more circumspect in writing his first book, Dreams, if he had known at the time that he would one day run for president. The volume is filled with the racial angst of a young man haunted by his black father's abandonment of his white mother.
Americans tend to elect sunny, optimistic presidents who seem capable of uniting the nation. So it remains unclear whether Obama will be hurt by his brooding prose about "white people's scorn" and "all the traps that seem laid in a black man's soul." Perhaps voters will find something refreshing about a candidate who describes himself as "an American with the blood of Africa coursing through my veins." After all, as Obama points out, "Shortly after 2050, experts project, America will no longer be a majority white country."
Obama is equally frank about "my fierce ambitions" for the presidency. But as John Kerry and Al Gore discovered in the last two presidential contests, ambitions are not votes.
UNCONVENTIONAL BACKGROUND
In what has to be one of the biggest coincidences of the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, like Mitt Romney, is the great-grandson of a polygamist who had five wives.
Obama's busy forefather, also named Obama, was born in 1895, orphaned as a young boy, and grew up to become a farmer near Lake Victoria. His first wife died young, so Obama married her sister, Nyaoke, and, eventually, three other women, all of whom had children.
Nyaoke's fifth son was named Hussein Onyango Obama, who grew up to become a domestic servant for wealthy whites. This fact would one day disappoint his grandson, the presidential candidate, who had imagined his grandfather to be "an independent man, a man of his people, opposed to white rule." When Barack learned the truth during a 1988 visit to Kenya, it caused "ugly words to flash across my mind. Uncle Tom. Collaborator. House nigger."
During that same visit, Barack also learned that his grandfather, who died in 1979, had been fiercely devoted to Islam. His devotion was described by one of his surviving wives, Sarah, and recorded by Barack in Dreams.
"What your grandfather respected was strength. Discipline," Barack quoted the widow as telling him. "This is also why he rejected the Christian religion, I think. For a brief time, he converted, and even changed his name to Johnson. But he could not understand such ideas as mercy towards your enemies, or that this man Jesus could wash away a man's sins. To your grandfather, this was foolish sentiment, something to comfort women. And so he converted to Islam -- he thought its practices conformed more closely to his beliefs."
Onyango married at least four women, including Sarah, age 16, and Akumu, who gave birth to a son, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. Abandoned by his mother at age 9, the boy was raised by Sarah, who described her stepson as "wild and stubborn."
"My father grew up herding his father's goats and attending the local school, set up by the British colonial administration, where he had shown great promise," Obama Jr. wrote in Dreams.
By the time he was 23, Obama Sr. had a wife, Kezia, and son, Roy. When Kezia was pregnant with their second child, Obama Sr. abandoned the family in 1959 to move to the United States and accept a scholarship at the University of Hawaii. The following year, in a Russian language course, he met an 18-year-old white woman with the unusual name of Stanley Ann Dunham (her father, also named Stanley, had desperately wanted a boy). Dunham, who went by the name of Ann, was a liberal feminist from Kansas. She was also an atheist.
"Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones," her son later wrote. "For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness."
Unfazed by the fact that Obama Sr. already had a wife and children back in Africa, Dunham agreed to marry him. When news of the forthcoming nuptials reached Africa, the father of the groom fired off a letter to the father of the bride, "saying he didn't want his son marrying white," according to Obama Jr.'s account in Dreams. Dunham's parents, while taken aback, did not stop their daughter from marrying black.
"Like most white people at the time, they had never really given black people much thought," Obama Jr. wrote in Dreams. "Would you let your daughter marry one? The fact that my grandparents had answered yes to this question, no matter how grudgingly, remains an enduring puzzle to me."
And so, within a year of meeting Obama Sr., Dunham was married and pregnant.
"He was black as pitch, my mother white as milk," Obama Jr. wrote in Dreams. "In many parts of the South, my father could have been strung up from a tree for merely looking at my mother the wrong way; in the most sophisticated of northern cities, the hostile stares, the whispers, might have driven a woman in my mother's predicament into a back-alley abortion."
But she did not abort Barack Hussein Obama Jr., who was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961, into a decidedly non-religious household.
"Although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist," wrote Obama, who nonetheless cited Islam when explaining his own first name. "It means 'Blessed.' In Arabic. My grandfather was a Muslim."
Young Barack's Americanized moniker became Barry, which was often shortened by family members to Bar. His parents planned to move the family to Kenya after Obama Sr. finished his studies. But when Barry reached the tender age of two, his father left the family to accept another scholarship, this one at Harvard. He did not return to Hawaii, where his wife filed for divorce. Obama Sr. eventally married a white woman named Ruth and lived with her in Kenya, where he reclaimed his two children from his first wife, telling them that Ruth was now their mother. Obama Sr. went to work for Shell Oil Co. and prospered.
Obama Jr. later traced "the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy" to the fact that his father deserted him before "my own memories begin." He harbored a "fantasy of the Old Man's having taken my mother and me back with him to Kenya." He looked back on "a past that left me feeling exposed, even slightly ashamed," noting: "I was too young to realize that I was supposed to have a live-in father, just as I was too young to know that I needed a race."
Obama would long be troubled by his mixed-race identity and the fact his father had abandoned him. In fact, these two festering psychological wounds would come to define his very existence. He became acutely conscious of his own angst, even imagining that others could see the "tragedy" of "my troubled heart." He brooded over "the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds."
When Obama was six, his mother married another foreign student at the University of Hawaii, Lolo Soetoro of Indonesia, and the family moved to Jakarta. As a stranger in a strange land, young Barack found himself "puzzling out the meaning of the muezzin's call to evening prayer" and other mysteries. He became almost completely dependent on his new stepfather.
"It was to Lolo that I turned to for guidance and instruction," he recalled in Dreams.
Still, it took Obama "less than six months to learn Indonesia's language, its customs and its legends," he recalled. It was such a "rapid acculturation," Obama wrote, that he was soon participating in "the goose-stepping demonstrations my Indonesian Boy Scout troop performed in front of the president."
Even his diet changed.
"I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)," Obama wrote in Dreams. "Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share."
Although his mother was an atheist, young Obama was not shielded from religion. "In our household, the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf," he later recalled. He spent his first two years in Indonesia attending a Catholic school, then "spent two years at a Muslim school," he wrote.
The latter taught the Koran, Islam's holy book, along with subjects such as math and science. "The teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies," Obama recalled in Dreams.
'RACIAL OBSESSIONS'
As he grew older, Obama became more self-conscious about his race.
"I noticed that there was nobody like me in the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalogue," he wrote in Dreams. "And that Santa was a white man."
Obama's mother eventually gave birth to a girl, Maya, in Indonesia, although Ann's marriage to Lolo later failed and she returned to Honolulu with her two children. Barack began fifth grade at Punahou, which he described as "a prestigious prep school, an incubator for island elites." At Christmastime, Obama's missing father, Barack Obama Sr., visited the family for the first and only time. He had sired four more sons in Kenya, two by his first wife, Kezia, and two by his third, Ruth. But Ruth had just left Obama Sr., who now suggested a reunion with Ann. This suggestion was reje...
