Figuring Out Obama

Barack Obama has his legions, but something about him is not quite right. Is it because we do not know him, but we feel we know Hillary Clinton and we know John McCain? Until Obama's big keynote speech at the Democrat party convention in 2004, who even knew of this man? To figure out his family history takes an internet search. We have only the impressions he gives us to go on. And going back into history is the easiest way to find an explanation of how this man got here and who he is at heart. Barack Obama often looks far away, he often lets his wife tell him what to do, and he often turns to a strong, sort of black, minister to be his advisor or "father figure". What does happen to a child whose father disappears? In the past 50 years, this has become a fairly common occurence. But a child, particularly a boy, who is abandoned by a father, is a child who is bereft. A child who learns to live in a fantasy world where he invents the excuses for his missing father's behavior, and a child who learns to make up a pat story to explain it away- that is the psychological childhood of Barack Obama. Obama's father left- left for Harvard then left to go back to Africa. This little boy, who says he remembers one visit from a domineering black man, never could fill that void. And his mother picked up another man and had another family. I don't blame her- the world is hard for women. But his mother also was obviously in it for the shock value. She was the renegade- the trail blazer since high school- with a biracial child. But instead of staying there for her child, she again asked herself what other decisions she could make that could hurt her child but benefit herself. And she kept Obama away from America for years while she made herself happy. Obama cannot claim a knowledge of the America that children know. He did not grow up in America. He knows nothing of what a biracial child or any child would have experienced. His mother finally decided that she was better rid of her child and shipped him off to his white grandparents- who loved and cared for him. His grandmother, who was not a racist but honored her gift of fear when out on the street confronted by an angry street person, took care of "Barry". Later he would dishonor her, as if to disavow her whiteness and as if to make himself seem more like an american black. So now Barack is not just fatherless, but motherless as well. Most teen-agers would find great rage in that. Most children learn to be angry and destruction when abandoned by selfish parents who pursue their own agenda. But some children bury it. In their zeal to adjust and be worthy, they become overachievers. They succeed in spite of it all. And they look back into their childhood and make excuses and extol the virtues of the very parents who hurt them. But the abandoned child looks for role models and they find them. For Obama, the abandoning father became Rev Wright, and the selfish,abandoning mother became the wife, Michelle. What else could explain Obama's devotion to a man who insults and rails against the 50% of his DNA that is white, as was his mother and loving grandmother? What else could explain the controlling arrogance of Michelle Obama, in whose presence he silences and retreats like a small boy in the presence of a domineering mother? Why does Obama misspeak so much? How does he seem to understand so little when he is speaking extemporaneously? Perhaps it is the fact that, at his core, he is not an American. He may be an American citizen, but he was NEVER an America child. We learn a great deal from a childhood in America. We share a culture and an experience. Rich or poor, the average American child is exposed to more common experience in the past 40 years thanks to television, radio and even video games, etc. Obama was not here for any of that. He has educated himself in elite institutions and probably never understood the effects of affirmative action or white guilt until someone explained them to him. Even his teenaged years in Hawaii gave him an isolation from mainland culture. I wonder what he is thinking when he looks off into the distance over someone's shoulder when they are speaking. I wonder if he is looking for the praise from the dead father and mother whose absence he could never resolve? I do have great sympathy for Obama. Because I believe that when a boy's father abandons him, that boy is broken forever in ways that cannot be fixed. That he rejects and hates the white part of himself may be his homage to his father- his plea to say he forgives the man who left. I don't think he can be our president. I don't think he really has the strength.