Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia / Dinesh Sharma; pp. 94-95: Pak Saman revealed that Ann Dunham was a tough mother, at times bordering on being domineering. “At that age, Obama used to be really afraid of her,” he said. Ann Dunham was Pak Saman’s supervisor at the PPM, and when she needed someone to look after Barry, she selected him because he was a good worker and a loyal and trustworthy person . . .
Pak Saman also discussed Obama’s daily routine. In addition to waking him up at 4 a.m. to study English from an American correspondence school, Ann Dunham made sure that he had a fixed routine when he came home from school . . . He was forced to drink his milk and take extra tonics in the morning and evening, generally before and after school. He was not allowed to go out and play until he had finished all his homework. At times when he would slack off, Ann was known to spank him; Pak Saman attested to hearing him cry in the privacy of his room after he was physically punished for not finishing his homework.
A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother by Janny Scott; pp. 106-107: Ann had left her infant daughter, Maya, in Jakarta with a servant—a choice that startled [Elizabeth] Bryant, unaccustomed as she was to Indonesian child-rearing. She wondered, too, why Ann, with an Indonesian husband, would consider moving [back] to the United States. Over lunch, Barry [Barack Obama] sat at the dining table and listened intently but did not speak. When he asked to be excused, Ann directed him to ask the hostess for permission. Permission granted, he got down on the floor and played with Bryant’s son, who was thirteen months old. After lunch, the group took a walk near Gadjah Mada University, with Barry running ahead. A flock of Indonesian children began lobbing rocks in his direction, ducking behind a wall and shouting racial epithets. He seemed unfazed, dancing around as though playing dodgeball “with unseen players,” Bryant remembered. Ann did not seem visibly to react. Assuming she must not have understood the words, Bryant offered to intervene. “No, he’s okay,” she remembered Ann saying. “He’s used to it.”
“I’ll tell you what both of us felt,” Bryant told me. “We were floored that she’d bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks. It was unusually bad. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, they’re more racist than the U.S., by far.’” At the same time, she admired Ann for teaching her boy to be fearless. A child in Indonesia needed to be raised that way—for self-preservation, Bryant decided. Ann also seemed to be teaching Barry respect. He had all the politeness that Indonesian children displayed toward their parents. He seemed to be learning Indonesian ways.
Conciliator in Chief: Obama, His Family and His Presidency / Kenneth Fuchsman
The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama's Father, Sally H. Jacobs
Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia, Dinesh Sharma
Obama on the Couch, Justin A. Frank
A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, Janny Scott
THE OTHER BARACK
Barack Obama is another liberal President who campaigned against special interests, but who once in office did as much to strengthen as curtail the financial establishment. Montaigne captures essentials of Obama's psychology: "we are...double within ourselves, with the result that we do not believe what we believe, and we cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn". This self-division characterizes our current President and that of the American liberal political tradition . . .
Central to how the biracial Obama is double within himself is his identity as African-American. How this son of a black Kenyan man and a white American mother evolved to such a point requires examining Obama's life. Sally H. Jacobs' well-researched biography, The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama's Father, helps us sort through some myths surrounding the relationship of the President's parents. First, it is known that at the University of Hawaii in late September, 1960, 24 year old sophomore Barack Obama met 17 year old freshman Stanley Ann Dunham. About six weeks later, she was pregnant. In February, 1961, the couple married, and their son, Barack Jr. was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961. At the time, the new father also had another wife and two children in Kenya.
Jacobs has uncovered pertinent documents about the nature of the marital ties of Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham Obama. Obama Sr. told his University of Hawaii academic advisor in April, 1961 that although he and Ann Dunham had "married they do not live together" (quoted in Jacobs, p. 122). A later communication from his advisor from August 31, 1961 confirms that Obama lived by himself and his wife and infant resided with her parents. It also states that Obama's spouse will "go to Wash State University next semester" (quoted in Jacobs, p. 124). According to Honolulu Advertiser reporter, Will Hoover, the Dunhams lived in a large house that also had a cottage in the back that was big enough for a family of three. The city directory has a separate residence for the Kenyan father (Hoover email to Ken Fuchsman, July 1, 2009). If husband and wife did not reside together, it was not because of a lack of space. What is puzzling is why an 18 year old mother with an infant would plan to leave her husband and parents and move back to the state of Washington, where she had no close relatives.
Mrs. Obama and her six week old child did settle in Seattle and she began as an Extension/Evening student at the University of Washington on September 19, 1961, and then became a degree student in the spring quarter of 1962, which went until June 7, 1962 (Email to Ken Fuchsman from Tina Miller, University of Washington Assistant Registrar, December 14, 2011, Email to Ken Fuchsman from Robert Rhodes, U. of Washington Assistant Registrar, May 28, 2009).
In Seattle, extricated from the marital pair bond and the family support system, Ann and her infant son were alone together; her love was directed towards him. In retrospect, we can see that a pattern developed during this crucial first year of Barack Jr.'s life that continued for years. His teenage mother was extraordinarily devoted to her newborn child, glorified him, and at the same time relentlessly pursued her own educational and career dreams. She sometimes treated her son as an appendage to her ambitions and ideals. Barack grew up to be a person who has had enormous self-confidence, and yet felt bereft, uprooted, like an orphan and alone in the world. On one hand, he knew that his mother adored him, and on the other hand, that he was subordinate to her wishes and whims. From almost the beginning, it was just the two of them.
Barack Obama Sr. departed Hawaii on June 22, 1962 when his child was 10 months old; it is likely that the father did not see his son from September 1961 when Ann departed Hawaii for Seattle and his leaving for Cambridge. While he was still in Hawaii as a student, the President's father did not live with his son and they were separated by an ocean for most of that time. There is a certain poignancy in this, for as late as Father's Day, 2009, Barack Obama Jr. wrote: "My father left my family when I was 2 years old" (Obama, 2009). Obama's sensitivity to being abandoned stems, in part, from the absence of his father. What he does not seem to know is that this little family likely never lived in the same dwelling for any length of time, if at all. The story Ann told her son was that she and his father separated when Barack Sr. left for Harvard after he graduated from the University of Hawaii. The mother never revealed to her son that she had left her husband and parents to attend college in the state of Washington when her baby was barely six weeks old. She developed a cover story, a family myth, that appealed to her son, but covered up the reasons she abandoned spouse and parents. Ann Dunham Obama and Barack Obama Sr. were officially divorced in 1964.
There was some continuity in Obama Sr.'s behavior between Hawaii and Harvard. His advisor at the University of Hawaii was concerned about Obama's "playboy ways," particularly as he had a wife and children in Kenya (p. 110). At Harvard, Obama had been accepted into a doctoral program in economics and given full funding, but after two years Harvard pulled the financial plug. In Cambridge, there was once again concern about Obama Sr.'s behavior towards women, and Harvard told him to go back to Africa and finish his dissertation there. He never completed his academic work (pp. 158-160). Forced to return to Kenya, Obama Sr. did not mend his ways and ended up as an alcoholic who did not have the glorious career for which he had dreamed. He also continued to be involved with multiple women, and was physically abusive to his third wife and their children. Drunk, he was killed in an automobile accident at the age of 46 in 1982.
Obama Sr. also had an abusive father, and his own mother had left her husband because of this violence. There was a multi-generational legacy of domestic violence. Ann Obama had a taste of it when her husband was unhappy with a meal she cooked and he took the plate and threw it against the wall (Scott, 2011, pp. 92-93). For all the ache in our President's heart that he did not have a father present in his life, he was probably better off not living with an alcoholic, violent, abusive male parent. In Obama's case, his childhood loss was his long-term emotional gain.
BARACK OBAMA IN HAWAII AND INDONESIA
There was other physical abuse in Barack Jr.'s childhood, and this came from his mother and from others in Indonesia, where he lived from ages 6 to 10. But to back up for a minute. After attending the University of Washington, Ann Obama returned to Hawaii, and resumed her studies at the University in the spring of 1963 while living with her parents. Now her son was to get the multi-generational family support he had lacked earlier. Ann married an Indonesian, University of Hawaii student Lolo Soetoro, not long after she divorced Obama. Her second husband got recalled to his home country, and later Ann and six year-old Barry, as he was then called, followed.
Cross-cultural psychologist, Dinesh Sharma, writes about these periods of the President's life in Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia. Sharma reports that Barry's Indonesian classmates tied him to a tree and locked him in the toilet (p. 91). Other accounts have racist Indonesian children throwing rocks at Barry while his mother watched and did not interfere (Scott, 2011, p. 107). The young Barack, exposed to racism and discrimination, develops doubts about his idealistic mother's capacities. In Indonesia, he came to know all too painfully, as he writes in his autobiography, that the "world was violent, unpredictable and often cruel," and that his beloved mother's "knowledge of floods and exorcisms and cockfights left much to be desired" (Obama, 2004, pp. 37-38).
Three sources say that Ann beat her son. She herself told a friend she would spank Barry, and two others who lived with or near the family in Indonesia also speak of Ann as a "strict disciplinarian", who spanked her child. Barry would "cry in the privacy of his room after he was physically punished." This source said that "Obama used to be really afraid of her" (pp. 94-95, Sharma). Verbally as well as physically, Ann let her son know that he was to contain his emotions, and not be angry. It is likely that Obama's desire to both rebel and be conciliatory had roots in his relationship with his mother and in response to signals, including physical force, she sent him about his being assertive. It was also in Indonesia that his half-sister, Maya, was born shortly after his ninth birthday. Later, Maya would say of her upbringing: "We were not permitted to be rude, we were not permitted to be mean, we were not permitted to be arrogant" (Scott, 2011). Their sharp-tongued, visionary mother retained the right to be sarcastic, abrupt and violent which she did not permit to her children.
OBAMA ON THE COUCH
Justin Frank, a Washington D. C. psychoanalytic psychiatrist, has written Obama on the Couch . . . Frank recognizes that Ann Obama needed to disguise the family history when dealing with her son. For the notion of "the mother and son" being "left by the father," Frank writes, "is a fantasy" as the mother "was living in Seattle at the time of Barack Sr's departure." Frank says this is a "myth" that protects Obama from anger at his mother (p. 164).
Frank does not say this, but this myth also obscures the nature of the parental relationship. As Obama Sr. was a womanizer, he was likely not that seriously interested in Ann. He had been warned about his "playboy ways" by his University of Hawaii advisor before he had met Ann Dunham. His getting Ann pregnant could jeopardize his status at the University. If he impregnated a fellow student and did not marry her, he would be in trouble. On the other hand, as the University knew he had a wife and children in Kenya, if Obama then lived with Ann as husband and wife, that could open him to the charge of bigamy. It was that very issue that concerned Obama's academic advisor and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, who were considering deporting Obama. So he told the University he was divorced, and made sure he did not live with his second wife (Jacobs, p. 123). In 1962, on the resume he prepared for graduate schools, he listed a wife and two children back in Africa, but did not mention Ann and Barack Jr. (Jacobs, p. 128). However long it took Ann to recognize her first husband's motives, the President's mother, in all likelihood, did not want her son to know that for his father it was a marriage not of commitment, but of convenience.
Instead, as Frank recognizes, to her child, Ann idealized the man who was her husband in name only. He says, rather "than blame her husband...she went to great lengths to instill in her son a positive image of his absent father... She invented him in many ways, and he became an internal mythic figure inside which Barry could retreat when he faced disappointment, hurt, or rejection in the real world... Obama's mother made sure...that his father would remain a positive presence in his imagination, rather than a frustrating or abandoning one." On one hand, Frank sees this as helping "strengthen Obama's character" by sparing him from having a hated father and the self-criticism that can waken (Frank, 40). On the other, Frank writes, "His father's absence perpetuated a split that could not be healed, twisting Obama's unifying impulse...into a need that can never be satisfied" (p. 13). Still, another side of his mother's idealizing of his father, that Frank does not discuss, is that by hiding the truth and elevating his father in ways that were an illusion, it kept Barry from knowing the reality of his parents’ connection. It also set him up for disillusion once he did find out what his father was really like. To the extent that the younger Obama has adopted his mother's audacious tendency to idealize that which is more complicated, it has led him, at times, to expect more goodwill from political actors than circumstances warrant. Then again the false heightening of the absent father was an emotional resource and inspiration for Obama when he became alienated from his mother and her parents. It was the alternative that enabled him to develop his counter identity as an African-American.
Frank sees Obama's background as a challenge for him. He writes: "as a biracial child he was born with a fundamental division that he has been trying to heal for his entire life" (p. 13). As Frank writes, "biracial people feel their otherness on a regular basis... They are neither white nor black, but both white and black." They feel "the need to overcome" their uneasiness "by identifying with one race or another" (p. 16). In Obama's case, he chose the race that more reflected his appearance, and it was combined with a reaction against his white mother. Frank focuses on how Obama's suppressed rage and anger at both Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham Obama Soetero has much to do with Obama's character as an adult.
Frank writes that Obama "evades his anger at his father" for abandoning him "by living out his father's dreams... But this is an unrealistic, disingenuous response, because he never faced up to how hurtful his father was and how much rage he felt. This undermines his attempts to live up to his father's dreams" (p. 52). In relation to his mother, Obama has "deep unhealed rage at his mother. She was domineering, seductive, and abandoning" (p. 72). Later, Frank adds that Obama fears "directing his rage against the one person he most loved and depended upon: his mother... His refusal to acknowledge the depth of his rage at the woman upon whom he ultimately depended had led to serious difficulties managing confrontation" (p. 84). Frank does not mention here that Ann repeatedly signaled to her son that she could be angry and he could not. Obama often became accommodating and a conciliator to keep good relations with his mother, as he likely feared another abandonment.
Barack Obama and the Cycle of American Liberalism / Kenneth Fuchsman
Barack Obama occasionally sounds like Sigmund Freud. The father of psychoanalysis writes: "It seems as though the essence of success was to have got further than one's father, and as though to excel one's father was still something forbidden" (Freud, 1936, SE 22, p. 247). Obama's variation on this theme is: "Every man is trying to either live up to his father's expectations or to make up for his father's mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular malady as well as anything else" (Obama, 2006, p. 3) . . .
BARACK OBAMA'S LIFE AND IDENTITY
The twists and turns in Obama's search for identity show the personal roots of his political faith. Obama is likely the first man elected to the Presidency who was conceived outside of wedlock, and who, at the time of his birth, had a bigamist/polygynist father.
. . . Obama presents a more conventional view of his parents' relationship than actually occurred. In his memoir, he says that his mother and father were married in 1960 (Obama, 1995, p. 12). The actual date of the wedding was February 2, 1961 (Ripley, A., 2008) and Barack himself was born six months later on August 4, 1961. Obama admits: "I've never quite had the courage to explore" when "the marriage occurred" (Obama, 1995, p. 22). In 1995, he avoided looking at certain facts about his origins. By the time, he was running for President in 2008, he knew that his mother married when she was pregnant (Ripley, A., 2008). He had gained more courage in the intervening years.
Obama's father at the time of this marriage had a wife and two children in Kenya, though he untruthfully told his second wife that he was divorced. These are the messy beginnings of the life of our forty-fourth President. Obama told friends he grew up feeling like an orphan and writes of having a "sense of abandonment... as a boy" (Mendell, 2007, p. 19, Obama, 1995, p. 430). The actual occurrences of his childhood may have reinforced these feelings. Obama says his father left Hawaii in 1963 to attend Harvard, giving the impression that father, mother and son lived together for almost two years. This too is not accurate.
Obama Sr. graduated University of Hawaii in 1962 and left the state on June 22, 1962 to wind his way to Cambridge, when the son who bore his name was ten months old (Maraniss, 2008). Whether Barack's mother was in Hawaii at that time is uncertain. She is listed in the 1961-1962 Seattle Polk Directory as living in that city as Anna Obama. Under the name, Stanley Ann Dunham Obama, she was registered as a degree student at the nearby University of Washington in spring quarter of 1962, which went from March 26 to June 7, 1962 (Email to Ken Fuchsman from Robert Rhodes, U. of Washington Assistant Registrar, May 28, 2009). A variety of people remember Mrs. Obama having her young son with her at this time. (Martin, 2008, Maraniss, 2008).
These facts about President Obama's mother and father do not fit in with his portrayal of the family romance. Stanley Ann separated from her husband and parents when her baby was an infant and returned to the area where she attended high school. David Maraniss reports that Ann went to visit Barack Sr. in Cambridge at that time, but did not stay. In any case, Ann is back in Hawaii later in 1962 and divorces her husband in 1964. Our President's parents did not spend much time together after their son was born; Barack had less interaction with his father than his autobiography indicates. In all likelihood Barack was not informed about his mother's Seattle interlude. The family cover story was that Barack Sr. left his little family in Hawaii to attend Harvard and could not afford to take his wife and child with him.
Whatever prompted Ann to leave her husband and parents when a new mother is, at this point, unknown, but significant. In 1962, for a 19-year old married mother to live separately from her wedded husband would be unusual, for her to pick up and move with an infant far away from her parents and any other relative hints at some family disruption. His mother and maternal grandparents probably did not want him to know some things. In all likelihood out of guilt and/or shame, they concocted a story to cover up less pleasant realities. Obama's sense of abandonment had roots in his earliest years . . .
In his speeches, Obama often addresses the importance of a two family household. He writes: "Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and nine times more likely to drop out of school." They are also "more likely to have behavioral problems or run away from home" (Obama, 2008, pp. 78, 372-3).
. . . While he describes Ann as "the kindest, most generous spirit, I have ever known," "spiritually awakened" with an "abiding sense of wonder" and outraged "at poverty and injustice," his feelings about her as a son were certainly complicated (Obama, 1995, p. xii, Obama, 2006, p. 205). Much of his restlessness, idealism and self-discipline are derived from her parenting, lifestyle and ethical beliefs. For example, when they lived in Indonesia, five days a week she would awaken her son at four A.M. to study for three hours before he went to school. Obama writes: "I offered stiff resistance to this regimen, but in response to every strategy I concocted... she would patiently repeat her most powerful defense: 'This is no picnic for me either, buster'" (Obama, 1995, p. 48). While later in life, his recognition of this model of hard work and the centrality of education would reap many benefits for Obama, his mother's unsettled relationships and wanderlust contributed to his feeling like an orphan . . .
It was his remarkable grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who was the rock for the young Obama. By 1970, she was a Vice-President at the Bank of Hawaii, more financially successful than her salesman husband, Stanley. Obama says that his grandmother, was "the opposite of a dreamer . . . a very tough, sensible, no-nonsense person," who injected into him "a lot of that very midwestern, sort of traditional sense of prudence and hard work" (Purdum, 2008). It is from her, Obama declares, that "I get my practical streak.... That part of me that's hardheaded, I get from her. She's tough as nails" (Martz, et al, 2008). Her husband was devoted to his grandson but, according to Barack, Stanley Dunham was unstable, with an often violent temper and crude manners (Obama, 1995, p. 21). Stanley Dunham did not offer the positive male role model that was absent from Barry's life; yet his maternal grandparent's dwelling and his grandmother gave him what stable home base he had during his childhood. Given his ambivalence about what his mother did and did not provide and his ineffectual father substitutes, it is not surprising that he idealized his absent father. In this, he was aided and abetted by his mother. Despite the fact that Barack Sr. had not been much invested in their child, Ann Dunham built up her first husband in her son's eyes. Except for a two week period when Obama was about ten, his childhood experience of his father was primarily through the elevated image of Barack Sr. that Ann chose to present to her son.
Barack's feelings about his father are inextricably entwined with his relationship with his mother. As Obama's biographer David Mendell explains, with Obama Sr. absent and Barry being biracial, Ann was "worried" that her son "might fall prey to a lack of self-worth." So Ann tried to increase her son's knowledge of his racial heritage: of Martin Luther King Jr, Thurgood Marshall, Sidney Portier, Mahalia Jackson and the heroic actions of African-Americans. To build up "Barry's ego," she "talked up the positive traits of Obama's biological father" (Mendell, 2007, pp. 217, 34). His mother also told her son not to blame his father for deserting the family, that she divorced him (Obama, 1995, p. 125). The one time Barry met his father resulted in a family blow up with Obama Sr. bossing his son around against the wishes of his mother and grandparents. Soon after, Ann tells Barry not to be mad at his father: "he loves you very much" (Obama, 1995, p. 68). When his mother read the manuscript of Dreams from My Father, she would "defend the less flattering aspects of my father's character" (Obama, 1995, pp. xi-xii). Ann gave her ex-husband a free pass.
These actions of Ann to emphasize Barack's African-American heritage and to praise his imperious father had very complicated results for young Barry. It served to squelch whatever anger and sorrow the youngster had against his father. His mother was not going to hear it. He went along with her intentions and created this super ego image of his father. Obama writes of his father: "even in his absence his strong image had given me some bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to, or disappoint" (Obama, 1995, p. 129). This fantastic image of his father led him to idealize a man who was at best a deserting father; it also set him up for disappointment later.
. . . His adolescent identity search, Obama writes, included "a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America." He had no guide on how to do this. At school he began befriending others with a black background. Still, the reality of his teenage life was, as he writes, I slipped "back and forth between my black and white worlds . . . Still, the feeling that something wasn't right stayed with me" (Obama, 1995, p. 82). After finding out that his reliable grandmother had fear of blacks, he was upset: "The earth shook under my feet." I "knew for the first time that I was utterly alone" (Obama, 1995, p. 91). Obama was a youth desperately seeking a black identity, but inevitably caught between two worlds. He admits to a "constant, crippling fear that I didn't belong somehow... I would forever remain an outsider, with the rest of the world, black and white, always standing in judgment" (Obama, 1995, p, 111). During his adolescent maturational process, he did not have a facilitating environment; but one that in its mixed attitude towards race reinforced the young man's divisions.
. . . In his adolescence, he begins experimenting with drugs and often became confused and enraged. He writes: "I haven't always been on the winning side in my own life" (Obama, 2008, p. 59). In his first year at Occidental College in Los Angeles, he admits to being rebellious and angry, partying a lot and not studying much. One night he and his friends trashed their dorm room, the next day the cleaning lady got mad at them. Scolded by a friend at what he was imposing on this woman, Obama says that he received the "first lesson of growing up. The world doesn't just revolve around you . . . it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realize your true potential" (Obama, 2008, pp. 59-6).
. . . For Barack, his father fell from grace when in his early twenties Obama learned about his father's life from his half-sister from Kenya. In relationship to women, Obama Sr. continued the deception he had practiced with Ann Dunham. After divorcing Barack's mother, he married an American woman, Ruth Nidesand, he met while at Harvard. When he returned to Kenya in 1965, he brought with him his third wife, but still would sneak off and see his first wife, fathering additional children by both women. Eventually Ruth and Barack Sr. divorced. Altogether Barack Sr. fathered eight children with four different women. He was not a devoted husband and family man.
. . . The grand vision Ann Obama created for her son about his father was not the whole story. Instead of the hero, Barack now sees his deceased father as a "bitter drunk... abusive husband... defeated, lonely bureaucrat." These recognitions send him reeling: "To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost! . . . Whatever I do, it seems, I won't do much worse than he did" (Obama, 1995. pp. 220-221). He says: "Where once I'd felt the need to live up to his expectations, I felt I had to make up for his mistakes" (Obama, 1995, p. 227). Caught up in complicated Oedipal dilemmas, Barack created a counter-identity. His father was a negative example. In aspiring to avoid his father's negative example, Barack was implicitly reacting against the illusions about his father his mother had propagated. He was coming into his own by both affirming and rejecting the emotional legacy he had from both his mother and father.
. . . Obama's administration so far seems a combination of John Kennedy's rhetoric and charm with Lyndon Johnson's ambitious legislative agenda and legislative skills . . .
Freud, S. (1936) "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis," SE 22. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 237-248.
Marannis, D. (2008), "Though Obama Had to Leave to Find Himself, It Is Hawaii That Made His Rise Possible," Washington Post, August 22, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...082201679.html
Martin, J, (2008), "Obama's Mother Known Here as 'Uncommon,'" Seattle Times, April 8, 2008, http://seattletimes.com/html/politic..._obama08m.html
Martz, G, Redmond, L., Whitcraft, T., Netter, S. (2008) "Barack Obama: A Childhood of Loss and Love," ABC News, September 26, 2008, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2...5884729&page=1
Mendell, D. (2007) Obama: From Promise to Power
Obama, B. (1995) Dreams from My Father
Obama, B. (2006) The Audacity of Hope
Obama, B. (Maureen Harrison & Steve Gilbert, editors) (2007) Speeches 2002-2006
Obama, B. (compiled by Susan A. Jones (2008) The American Promise: Speeches 2007 + 2008
Purdum, T. (2008), "Raising Obama," Vanity Fair, March 2008, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/f...03/obama200803
Ripley, A. (2008), "The Story of Barack Obama's Mother," Time, April 9, 2008, http://www.seasite.niu.edu/flin/obamas_mother.htm
The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad by Tariq Ali (2010); pp. 57-58: . . . a massive intensification of aerial terror over Pakistan is under way. As the New York Times informed its readers, delicately describing the statistic as one “that the White House has not advertised”: “since Mr. Obama came to office, the Central Intelligence Agency has mounted more Predator drone strikes into Pakistan than during Mr. Bush’s eight years in office.” [David Sanger, “Obama Outlines a Vision of Might and Right,” New York Times, December 11, 2009.] These were justified in March 2009 by Harold Koh, a former dean of Yale Law School and a former director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for Human Rights, and now a senior lawyer attached to the State Department. The unmanned drone strikes supposedly targeting terrorists were lawful, he argued, because they were necessary to defend US national security. Most of those killed have been civilians, including men, women and children. In January 2010 the house and family of a journalist in Peshawar was destroyed by one such attack. Most liberal newspapers and TV networks obediently failed to report the event for fear of encouraging “anti-Americanism,” already at a peak in the country. Koh’s obscene speech defending the legality of drone attacks was delivered deadpan to the American Society for International Law in March 2010, where it received warm applause.*
* Chase Madar, “How Liberal Law Professors Kill,” Counterpunch, May 14-16, 2010. Madar noted: “From his throne at Yale Law, Koh inveighed against the unlawful use of torture, against the unlawful invasion of Iraq, against the unlawful detentions at Guantanamo. (He has argued that the US risks a permanent spot on the ‘axis of disobedience’ for its chronic flouting of international law.) If it had been W. intensifying the drone strikes in Central Asia, one can easily imagine Koh condemning this practice as yet another brazen violation of that same law.”
Blowback of the Drones (2010) by Gary Leupp
As of January 17, there had been ten drone attacks on Pakistan so far this year [2010]. There were forty-four in all of 2009. One attack in August killed Baitullah Mehsud, thirty-five-year-old leader of Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a local group inspired by the Taliban of Afghanistan and conjured into being by the US bombing of both countries.
Now the main target is Mehsud’s successor, Hakimullah Mehsud. If and when he is killed (along with some civilians, if precedent is followed), there will be another TTP leader, another main target for the drone strikes. And when he’s killed, another. Although the Afghan Taliban has officially distanced itself from Al Qaeda, offering last month to provide a “legal guarantee” that it would not intervene in foreign countries after resuming power, this is precisely the cycle of violence Al Qaeda wishes to encourage throughout the Muslim world.
It is doing so successfully from the Swat Valley to southern Yemen and has infinite potential to spread the jihad elsewhere if the US continues to swallow the bait.
Every expert on Pakistan notes that the drone strikes on the country have outraged public opinion and damaged the president, Asif Ali Zardari. Zardari, responding to mass demonstrations and protests by the legislature and newspaper editors, has repeatedly stated that “the U.S. actions should remain on the Afghan side of the border” (that is to say, the US should respect Pakistani sovereignty and international law).
He told a delegation of US legislators, including Sen. John McCain, that “drone attacks on Pakistani territory undermined the national consensus” against Islamist militants. McCain responded, “The drone strikes are part of an overall set of tactics which make up the strategy for victory and they have been very effective.” (That is to say: Our strategy for victory trumps your petty claim to national independence.)
Zardari told US special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke that the drone strikes were “a cause of great concern” and urged a policy review by the Obama administration. Asked by the press how the strikes were affecting relations between the US and Pakistan, Holbrooke was both coy and condescending. “I am limited in what I can talk about on this subject, but sometimes policies … have costs and benefits,” he said. In other words: Yes, our violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty is infuriating its people, a potential downside, but on the bright side, that violation has resulted in some militants’ deaths. The same logic as McCain.
Pakistani officials have been protesting the attacks for a long time. Speaking in parliament in November 2008, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani denounced the most recent attack, which had occurred at the Bannu district in the northwest. This was the first such attack outside the border tribal areas. “These attacks are adding to our problems,” he declared. “They are intolerable and we do not support them.” At that time Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi summoned the US ambassador to once again protest US violations of Pakistan’s sovereignty, and to declare that such attacks were not helping counter-terrorism efforts. During the same month the Pakistani Army held a training exercise in using surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft guns to shoot down drones. This was widely interpreted as a move to pressure the government to stand up to the US.
. . . Obama is in some ways (style, certainly) the antithesis of Bush. His smooth Cairo speech to the Muslim world in June 2009 was designed to counter the cowboy-outlaw image and portray the US as a respectful partner of Muslim nations, capable of self-reflection and self-criticism. He pointedly noted that the invasion of Iraq had been “a war of choice” (without however drawing the obvious conclusion that it was a war in violation of international law whose architects should be prosecuted). But the key passage in the dignified address was this one, which could have been penned by a Bush speechwriter:
Over seven years ago, the United States pursued Al Qaeda and the Taliban with broad international support. We did not go by choice, we went because of necessity. I am aware that some question or justify the events of 9/11. But let us be clear: Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day. The victims were innocent men, women and children from America and many other nations who had done nothing to harm anybody. And yet Al Qaeda chose to ruthlessly murder these people… These are not opinions to be debated; these are facts to be dealt with.
Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan . . . We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can. But that is not yet the case.
Here the candidate of “change” (champion of a system that does not change) trotted out the same old tired myth that launched a thousand others in the period since: the notion that Al Qaeda = the Taliban. That is surely an “opinion to be debated,” and if debated those conflating the two will be easily exposed as manipulative, fear-mongering deceivers. The US and its allies are not fighting those in Afghanistan who killed 3000 on 9/11 but Pashtun nationalists indignant that their country’s been invaded and occupied. US intelligence quietly confirms that Al Qaeda has been driven from Afghanistan and any presence now is “minor.” What the US faces now are new enemies that it multiplies each day through its behavior.
This is true in Pakistan too. Indeed, by its bombing of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border (the “Durand Line” legacy of British colonialism ignored by the Pashtuns who straddle it) the US played midwife to the birth of the Pakistani Taliban movement. US action has produced huge problems for the Pakistani state and its military, which officials show little understanding or empathy for.
From the point of view of the former, India occupying over half of Muslim Kashmir rather than their former Talib allies constitutes the primary threat to Pakistan’s national security. But the real issue is not the legitimacy of Pakistan’s claim to all of Kashmir or Indian counter-claims but the arrogance of a foreign power preaching to the Pakistanis where the real threats to themselves reside and demanding cooperation in confronting those threats. The Bush and Obama administrations have paid lip-service to the idea that “the Kashmir problem must be resolved,” much as Obama has insisted, in words, that Israeli settlers must be withdrawn from the occupied West Bank, where they remain comfortably.
But then officials blithely suggest that giant India, with which the US has signed an agreement to sell nuclear reactors and equipment and is developing a military alliance (indeed urging it to become a “superpower” to challenge China and dominate the Indian Ocean), is no problem. Pakistan, they insist, ought to redeploy tens of thousands of troops from Kashmir to the Afghan border. The message remains the same as it was during the Bush administration: You’re either for us or against us. Jump aboard our project; make our war your war and leave your other petty regional concerns (so difficult for Americans to understand) aside. And if with each missile we lob onto your sovereign territory without your permission and against your people’s will we exacerbate the problem we’ve created, join with us in suffering the consequences.
Or rather, bear the great bulk of those consequences yourselves! Over 7000 civilians dead (according to one report, 90 percent of the 700 killed by drone strikes in 2009 were civilians).
Three thousand soldiers and police killed, over 13,000 militants (reportedly) killed, three and a half million people displaced, puritanical Islamism on the rise throughout the country. Even if the US absorbed the entire $35 billion price tag for the war, the socio-economic results have been disastrous. Hence as Zardari rather timidly understates it: “a cause of great concern.” US attacks have indeed undermined any “national consensus” and instead produced deep fissures in Pakistani society (rather like the increasingly frequent drone attacks are doing in Yemen).
And the Obama administration, as Holbrooke’s dismissive remarks make clear, just doesn’t care. A very conventional president of an imperialist country with a savage history of wars against “communism” (i.e., to defend and expand capitalism), wars to expand empire, wars for control of resources and markets (which he defended in his Nobel Peace Prize speech as wars that “helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms”) Obama weighs “costs and benefits” and calculates that the suffering of the Pakistani people and the stresses imposed on the Islamabad government are worth the occasional announcement that we slew one militant per ten or so “collateral” civilians. (Perhaps 100 civilians per Baitullah Mehsud-quality hit.)
Obama’s much keener to fight the war in what his advisors call “Af-Pak” than was his bellicose predecessor. (Again: just twenty four drone attacks on Pakistan during the entire Bush administration, at least fifty four so far [in early 2010] since Obama took office.) It’s his war now, as key to his legacy as the health care reform bill. Reliant upon unmanned aerial vehicles and remote sensing to fire missiles at ground targets, it’s a war without US casualties and thus no apparent immediate risk. But rest assured, the repeated, naked, callous violation of a proud, populous, nuclear-armed Muslim nation’s sovereignty will produce some blowback over time.
You cannot deliberately cultivate hatred through your actions and expect it to just dry up and blow away. Human beings don’t operate that way. They react. Until there’s real change (not in the face on the system, but of the system itself) the cycle will continue.
Dinesh Sharma: When I met with several members of the Friends of Obama at the Besuki School, their stories about Obama’s childhood in Indonesia came alive through our conversation. Obama’s friends are also members of the alumni association of the Besuki School, 300 people who meet regularly at the school for various events and functions. At one such alumni meeting, I spoke with several former classmates of Obama, who knew him and remembered that “he was taller than most Indonesian children in his class.”
He was generally a naughty kid, according to his friends, and sometimes used to get into trouble because he would chase after girls. “One time we tied him to a tree and [another time] put him in the toilet and locked him up, just for the fun of it,” said one classmate. “He was a cute kid, very funny and different from all of us. He was a bit chubby and black so he stood out,” said another classmate. “He was mostly a good sport, although sometime he would get into altercations,” said another.
Ann Dunham was the main authority figure in Barry’s early years, a woman whose worldview by far exercised the strongest influence on Barry’s emerging mind. Although he had a stepfather who was a strong male role model, Barry’s personality, daily habits and behaviors, sense of right and wrong, and way of looking at things were indelibly shaped by his mother.
Slamet Januadi, one of Obama’s other boyhood friends, was the son of their landlord’s chauffeur. Slamet, who still lives in the same servant quarters next to the former Soetoro residence, confirmed that Ann Dunham was indeed a stern mother and a strict disciplinarian, although she encouraged Barry to play with children from all economic backgrounds, not to discriminate based on social status, and to get along with everybody.
. . . Kay Ikranagara, a colleague of Ann Dunham’s at the PPM who still lives in Jakarta, said, “I think Ann Soetoro always thought that her greatest contribution to the world would be Barack and Maya.” Ikranagara met Barry as a child and later when he was a senator. She remembered him as a “plump kid with big ears” who was an extrovert, very outgoing, and friendly with everyone because he had lived around different kinds of people and cultures. She believes this is the main reason why he truly has the ability to listen to people from all kinds of backgrounds.
Indonesian children have a lot of freedom to run around. People’s homes are generally open, and kids have fun running in and out of their neighbors’ homes and doing lots of mischievous things. Ikranagara recalled, “What my son Inno remembers is that Barry took him and his sister, Maya, up to the attic where they were not allowed to go. They were not allowed to touch the swords or keris [belonging to Lolo] up there. The swords are supposed to be full of all kinds of ghosts and spirits, but he took them up there. He touched the swords and did all kind of wicked things that an older boy would do.”
According to personality psychologist David Keirsey, who has worked with thousands of companies and many different organizations, including the U.S. military, Barack Obama is an idealist.* Obama’s specific personality type is an extraverted, intuitive, feeling, and perceptive type (ENFP) . . .
Obama prefers to perceive the world through its possibilities intuitively and translate these possibilities through interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships based on feelings. Because Obama is an extravert, all of this takes place in lively interaction with the outside world while his keen perceptive attitude guides him with a never-ending flow of alternatives to the changing social and electoral landscape.
As an idealist, Obama likes to champion big causes and is convinced that he can easily motivate people around him . . .
* Yoffe, Emily. 2008. “The Supervisor, the Champion and the Promoter.” Slate, February 20. http://www.slate.com/id/2184696/pagenum/2
. . . His peers [in school in Hawaii] often jokingly called [Obama] the “handsome dude.” He had a good sense of humor and often found the comical side of things; generally, he did not take things too seriously unless he felt he had to . . .
Always the consummate interpreter and synthesizer, Obama would take the bits of information often expressed as opinions by others in the heat of the discussion and integrate them into a larger whole. She [Obama's teacher] recalled that he always began his comments with a statement like, “It seems to me, what we are saying is . . .” and then he would move the discussion to a more integrated level and to a more relevant domain. She said she can still picture him sitting “in my classroom, slouched in his chair with his long slender legs stretched out, but attentively listening.”
. . . The power of words, imagery, and rhetoric are central to Obama’s persona; however, it also carries a danger, according to Keirsey. The idealist’s belief in “word magic” can be taken too far. The ancient idea that words can make things happen by simply saying it can lead to disillusionment among the listeners or the audience; this is indeed the basis of a critique of Obama’s leadership style.
Obama was often a catalyst during the open classroom discussions. He was a catalyst for moving the debate from a groupthink mindset to a higher level of abstraction. “Since he analyzed the situation first, rather than jumping in, he would often say things most students were not thinking about. It was a unique style of taking charge of the situation,” Nelson said, and she believes this is how he makes decisions. According to Keirsey, an idealistic leader like Obama can best be seen as a catalyst because he inspires those who encounter him to do their best.
In his autobiography, Obama . . . describe[s] his Javanese stepfather . . . One day when Lolo wanted to buy a rooster from a street vendor and take it home for dinner, Ann objected to her son’s witnessing the decapitation, but the stepfather insisted that Obama witness it . . . As Obama described it:
I watched the man set the bird down, pinning it gently under one knee and pulling its neck out across a narrow gutter. For a moment the bird struggled, beating its wings hard against the ground, a few feathers dancing up with the wind. Then it grew completely still. The man pulled the blade across the bird’s neck in a single smooth motion. Blood shot out in a long, crimson ribbon. . . Lolo rubbed his hand across my head and told me and my mother to go wash up before dinner. . . Later, lying alone beneath a mosquito net canopy, I listened to the crickets chirp under the moonlight and remembered the last twitch of life that I’d witnessed a few hours before.
OBAMA ON THE COUCH / Justin A. Frank, M.D.; pp. 17-22: His mother appeared to recognize the pitfalls of young Barry’s circumstances—aware that his black identity might be obscured by being surrounded by his white family—and provided him with many opportunities to keep his blackness as something to be prized and be aware of more often than when he looked in the mirror, promoting the contributions of black musicians to the arts, for example, and teaching her son that “to be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny,” he wrote in Dreams from My Father. But despite her efforts to shield her son, Obama in his later youth would become deeply aware of shame and its effect on African-American people. We see several episodes in Dreams from My Father. The usually socially adept Obama, in his desire to belong to a group, impulsively says embarrassing things—such as criticizing a Chicago community member whose blue contact lenses obscured her brown eyes, and by extension her racial identity. The shame and inhibition that follow such embarrassing interludes may be fleeting, but the feeling of not belonging is a recurring theme in Obama’s memoir. At a deeper level we see in Obama’s reaction to the blue contacts a projection of his fear of his own desire to belong being so great that it might obscure his essential black identity. He criticized her for wanting to do what he so desperately wished for himself, projecting that desire into her and turning it into something to criticize.
Earlier in Dreams from My Father, he vividly recounts a scene from his time in Indonesia, where his mother moved Barry at the age of six to live with her second husband, Lolo Soetoro. His mother got a job at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, where, in “the pure and heady breeze of privilege,” Barry waited in the library one afternoon while his mother did some work. After finishing his comic books and homework that “my mother made me bring,” he focuses on a collection of Life magazines:
“I thumbed through the glossy advertisements—Goodyear Tires and Dodge Fever, Zenith TV (‘Why not the best?’) and Campbell’s Soup (‘Mm-mm good!’), men in white turtlenecks pouring Seagram’s over ice as women in red miniskirts looked on admiringly—and felt vaguely reassured. When I came upon a news photograph, I tried to guess the subject of the story before reading the caption.”
When he comes to an image of “an older man in dark glasses and a raincoat walking down an empty road,” he is unable to guess what the photograph is about, his confusion compounded on the following page’s close-up shot of the same man’s hands. “They had a strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh. Turning back to the first picture, I now saw that the man’s crinkly hair, his heavy lips and broad, fleshy nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly hue.”
Deducing that the man in the photo “must be terribly sick,” Barry learns from the accompanying article that the subject of the photographs had undergone a chemical treatment to lighten his black complexion. “He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out,” he learns from the article. “But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.”
Barry’s response is immediate but remarkably short-lived:
I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page. Did my mother know about this? What about her boss—why was he so calm, reading through his reports a few feet down the hall? I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to show them what I had learned, to demand some explanation or assurance. But something held me back. As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear. By the time my mother came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the magazines were back in their proper place. The room, the air, was quiet as before.
When reporters researched the story during the presidential campaign, they couldn’t find any such article in Life or elsewhere, according to Obama’s biographer David Remnick. As a psychoanalyst, I’m less interested in the concrete existence of the story than in its meaning, although the possibility that Obama might have made it up merits comment. If anything, it underscores the fact that these ideas are important to him—most particularly his rage at discovering—at nine years old—that one race could evoke such extreme self-hatred in another. Clearly, a nine-year-old boy is not writing his memoir, so his rage as remembered is at least questionable. But how the story is constructed bears even further analysis.
In the telling of this story we see several themes that recur throughout the memoir (and the life it chronicles): the maintenance of quiet and calm, keeping fears to oneself; using both sleeping and waking dreams as metaphor as well as literal events; and the curiosity and hunger for knowledge and understanding that led him to analyze and invent stories for the pictures he saw in the magazine. That curiosity drives a striking progression from the innocence of a childhood filled with homework and comic books, where race isn’t an issue, to the wider adult world of automobile and liquor ads, with their presumably white models of grown-up happiness. Though we don’t know the races of the models in the ads, it is implied that the victims of violence he sees on other pages of the magazine are people of color—Japanese victims of retaliatory hatred and the black victim of internal self-hatred.
The experience introduced him to a “newfound fear,” the fear of self-destruction. The photograph implied to him that people want so much to assimilate that they will kill off parts of themselves in order to do so. Self-hatred is not just the result of trying to change and blend in; it can derive from the belief that it’s better to attack oneself than have someone else do it. In that scenario, the would-be victim identifies with the aggressor and internalizes the aggression, becoming a self-hating punisher instead of attacking someone else. Obama confronts this fact of black American life for the first time in the story of the skin-lightening treatment gone wrong and in the knowledge that there were thousands more like the man in the article. It was a vivid illustration that the black/white split he would become driven to heal can cause even worse, “irreversible” damage if addressed in the wrong way. This is a vital and painful lesson about the adult life before him, a far cry from his homework and comic books, to which he has an understandably visceral response.
Yet his response, though intense, passes quickly, and it’s revealing that we don’t see the internal process of self-regulation through which the distress is understood and released. Instead, the calm is located in the setting around him—the magazines in the right places, the quiet, still air. What’s important to Barry is that he present a calm veneer to his mother, as if he internalized the orderliness of the library. He has taken great pains to present himself this way ever since, as if being “no drama Obama” were second nature. We’re left to wonder if his calm exterior actually reflects a comparable internal state or instead seeks to obscure from the world its internal opposite. And if the calm is genuine, the question remains whether it was won by engaging in a variation of the assimilation he was reading about by killing off the fearful and furious parts of himself—a question made more relevant by his relative lack of outrage at some of the disasters he has faced during his presidency, from the BP oil spill to the Tucson murders.
The memory’s placement within Dreams from My Father also bears examination. His travels to the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta open the chapter that immediately follows his first mention of being aware of his father’s absence—musing about why his father might have abandoned the family at a time when he “was too young to realize that [he] was supposed to have a live-in father”—that closes the previous chapter. It is a swift and sudden example of what Obama as president would call “turning the page.” The juxtaposition implies a connection between the self-hatred in the magazine and his father’s departure—as if young Barry is looking for an excuse to justify his father’s decision to leave. More poignant is the possibility that the absence of a black mirroring parent could leave the boy vulnerable to the rage and confusion over black identity that the story reveals.
His response to that article is also a harbinger of further revulsion, this time at himself and his own discomfort at being an outsider, at not belonging. It was less than a year after reading the story that his mother uprooted Barry once more, moving him from Jakarta back to Hawaii to attend the prep school Punahou School, which would help prep him to be “American.” At that new school he had a fourth-grader’s version of the behavior that had given him stomach knots in the embassy in Indonesia. In his lifelong struggle to belong, at times he puts the need to escape his feelings of being an outsider ahead of empathy and friendship, never more poignantly than in the story of the scene with the only other black student in his grade at Punahou, the plump and friendless little girl to whom he gave the pseudonym Coretta. Barry initially avoids Coretta, but one day at recess they start interacting—teasing, laughing, and chasing each other until they fall to the ground together.
When I looked up, I saw a group of children, faceless before the glare of the sun, pointing down at us.
“Coretta has a boyfriend! Coretta has a boyfriend!”
The chants grew louder as a few more kids circled us.
“She’s not my g-girlfriend,” I stammered. I looked to Coretta for some assistance, but she just stood there looking down at the ground. “Coretta’s got a boyfriend! Why don’t you kiss her, mister boyfriend?”
“I’m not her boyfriend!” I shouted. I ran up to Coretta and gave her a slight shove; she staggered back and looked up at me, but still said nothing. “Leave me alone!” I shouted again.
At that point Coretta runs away, and recess is soon over. But afterward young Barry is “haunted by the look on Coretta’s face . . . her disappointment, and the accusation. I wanted to explain to her somehow that it had been nothing personal. . . . But I didn’t even know if that was true. I knew only that it was too late for explanations, that somehow I’d been tested and found wanting.”
This painful admission is really impressive for any politician to make in print—even if he’s talking about his younger self. He clearly defines what he did to Coretta as an act of betrayal and describes feeling shame. Still, he finds a way to conclude with a reversal: “A part of me felt trampled on, crushed, and I took refuge in the life that my grandparents led.” Though he is the one who humiliated her, his words indicate that he may have suddenly identified with her feelings of having been betrayed by himself, one part of himself trampling on another.
Obama wrote that he was jolted out of his shame and guilt a few months later by the news that his father was coming to visit from Kenya. It was the first and last time he’d see his father. His apprehension leading up to the visit gave way to bragging rights, as Barry told his classmates that his father was a prince.
Obama had already begun to feel, despite his unusual name and skin color, that he was no longer an outsider. His father’s talk to his fourth-grade class was “transformative,” he wrote, as measured by the look of satisfaction on even Coretta’s face—a look he recalls years later, right before making his own speaking debut at Occidental College. Years after the incident on the playground, Coretta remained a powerful symbol of the divide within himself that he had to heal or risk self-betrayal. She lives on as a shadow to such an extent that I think that we on the left have become Obama’s modern-day Coretta—as he turns his back on the deep connection we made in 2008.
pp. 63-79: In his 2010 best seller, Obama’s Wars, the veteran journalist and author Bob Woodward offers a blow-by-blow account of the decision-making process behind the 2009 resolution to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. In so doing, his book makes a key contribution to our knowledge of Obama’s thought process and our analysis of it. The tale Woodward tells—and it’s one that continues to repeat itself in Obama’s presidency—is one of costly compromise. As he deliberated between the various arguments about troop surges—the liberal contingent, led by Vice President Joe Biden, who wanted to limit the troop increase to 20,000, and the military leadership’s call, supported by Secretary of State Clinton, for 40,000 or more—Obama took months, called countless meetings, and considered multiple reports to conclude that the solution was essentially to split the difference.
But Woodward, and his sources who participated in the decision process, recognized that there was more than politics at play here, as the president often seemed motivated more by the pursuit of unity than anything else. “Grappling for consensus, [Obama] noted the general agreement on the difficulty of defeating the Taliban and the importance of protecting Afghans,” wrote Woodward. “ ‘The fact that we agree on these pillars of a strategy belies the notion of huge divisions among the team here and it provides a basis for moving forward,’ Obama said, overlooking substantial disagreements. Biden and chief counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, for example, were not on board.” Obama himself tells Woodward that he felt he needed to “get everybody in a room and make sure that everybody is singing from the same hymnal.” And when they did finally strike a compromise, Woodward noted, “in an unusual move, [Obama] said, ‘I want everybody to sign on to this—McChrystal, Petraeus, Gates, Mullen, Eikenberry, and Clinton. We should get this on paper and on the record.’ Even those sophisticated members of Obama’s inner circle of military advisors are so unused to metaphor coming from the White House that they responded as if there would be a signed contract, as if he wanted actual signatures on a document.” The military leaders had their own ideas about what was really going on in the mind of the son of two broken homes: “Clearly, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs concluded, the president had picked 30,000 in order to keep the family together,” reported Woodward. But just how much did Obama sacrifice to preserve family unity? Despite all of his efforts to build consensus and reach a compromise, Woodward concluded, “the military was getting almost everything.”
Obama was never able to reassemble his families of origin, which were twice disbanded through abandonment and divorce. But he subsequently developed a long history of striking compromises to heal fractures: mending a rift between benchwarmers and players on his high school basketball team; uniting opposing factions when presiding over the Harvard Law Review; helping the disenfranchised come together as a community organizer in Chicago; even naming as secretary of state his chief Democratic rival for the presidency. He attributes this penchant for getting along in a fractured world to dreams he inherited from his father, which he tried to make reality by helping disparate people appreciate what they had in common.
. . . Obama’s tenacious hold on his belief in the illusion of common ground indicates that it functions as an idée fixe, a guiding principle he clings to regardless of evidence to the contrary. In this respect, rather than the pragmatist that he presents himself as, he is truly an ideologue, albeit in pragmatist’s clothing. But the belief that we are fundamentally more united than divided serves as a blind spot for him, as well, undermining his efforts to foster a unity that could be realistically attained. Thus he courted Republican votes for health care reform for so long that he began to lose support among his Democratic base. And he closed his speech about the BP oil leak with a comment about fishermen of various religious backgrounds praying together—reducing the effectiveness of the speech’s understated and overdue attempt to connect with the populist anger toward the perpetrators of the disaster.
On a conscious level, Obama attributes this belief in the power of American unity to his parents, whom he cited in the 2004 convention keynote: “My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or ‘blessed,’ believing that in a tolerant America, your name is no barrier to success.” But unconsciously it’s not so simple, and though his trademark pursuit of unity and compromise is certainly linked to his parents, it’s not as straight-forward as a deliberate desire to enact the principles he attributes to the values he believes they once embodied.
As we now know, Obama’s parents’ love turned out to be as impermanent as it was improbable. There is little known, said, or written about what went wrong in their marriage. Obama omits a key detail in his account of the separation, never mentioning that his mother moved him from Honolulu to Seattle in his first year, leaving her husband behind in Hawaii months before he left for Harvard. The omission is revealing, as if he wants to minimize or deny how much there is known about the breakup, particularly if it implicates his mother. Nowhere is there any record of young Obama asking what made his father leave, and the passage in Dreams from My Father in which he comes the closest to wondering why he left—or at least suggesting that it might be natural to wonder—is typically couched in a discussion of larger cultural issues, including the belief in the united, tolerant nation of possibilities without barriers that he would so eloquently celebrate decades later. After relating vignettes of his grandfather discussing young Barry with racially unenlightened tourists—telling some that the black child they’re watching on the beach is the great-grandson of King Kamehameha while telling another of his mixed Kenyan/Kansan heritage and proudly proclaiming him as his own—Obama concluded that “race wasn’t something you really needed to worry about anymore” in the view of his grandfather, who assumed that “the rest of the world would be catching up soon” to the enlightened Eden of 1960s Hawaii.
There was only one problem: my father was missing. He had left paradise, and nothing that my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact. Their stories didn’t tell me why he had left. They couldn’t describe what it might have been like had he stayed. Like the janitor, Mr. Reed, or the black girl who churned up dust as she raced down a Texas road, my father became a prop in someone else’s narrative. An attractive prop—the alien figure with the heart of gold, the mysterious stranger who saves the town and wins the girl—but a prop nonetheless.
Looking back, Obama recognized that his father “may have been complicit in” the creation of this image, citing an article published at the time of his father’s graduation, which Barry discovered when he was in high school. Depicting his father as “guided and responsible, the model student, ambassador for his continent,” the article was as much a record of where Barry came from as the birth certificate and vaccination forms that he found it folded among. Obama Sr. claimed to have experienced no racial discrimination, though he sensed it occurring between ethnic groups. His summation of what the rest of the world can learn from Hawaii—involving “the willingness of races to work together toward common development, something he has found whites elsewhere too often unwilling to do”—provided young Barry a clear statement of an objective that would drive his political career.
Despite the dose of political DNA, however, what struck Barry most about the article is what was missing:
No mention is made of my mother or me, and I’m left to wonder whether the omission was intentional on my father’s part, in anticipation of his long departure. Perhaps the reporter failed to ask personal questions, intimidated by my father’s imperious manner; or perhaps it was an editorial decision, not part of the simple story that they were looking for. I wondered, too, whether the omission caused a fight between my parents.
I would not have known at the time, for 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. For an improbably short span it seems that my father fell under the same spell as my mother and her parents; and for the first six years of my life, even as that spell was broken and the worlds that they thought they’d left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been.
I’m struck more by what Barry left out than by what his father omitted. At its simplest level, the omission of mother and son from the article was because they weren’t there; according to the timelines offered by both David Remnick and Janny Scott, the separation had already taken place. Barack Sr.’s omission may even have been because his father forgot he was his father or that he had married Barry’s mother. Barry is the one who failed to acknowledge that separation, that having “left paradise.” It was he, the son, who was thrown out of the nuclear-family paradise by his parents’ separation, which Obama characterized as his father’s departure. He went on to say, in a way, that his mother didn’t give him what he needed: she didn’t give him his father. Instead she gave him a myth, a prop, and a romantic vision and narrative; she was either unable to keep the actual man around, to prevent him from his wanderlust, or unwilling to keep their young family together by moving to graduate school with her husband and infant son. Without engaging in the completely natural process of looking for an explanation of why his father left, Obama the memoirist did portray Obama the young abandoned son’s discovery of the article as raising questions around the edge of the larger issue of his father’s departure, wondering why he and his mother weren’t mentioned, whether his father knew at the time that he was never coming back, and whether the article (but, interestingly, not his departure) caused a parental fight (which presumably would not have been the first fight between them). Although those questions suggest that the issues were on his mind, he betrayed neither anger nor blame toward his father, whom he once again depicted as an almost passive object of larger cultural forces—concluding that he had fallen under “the same spell” that had removed his mother and grandparents from “the worlds that they thought they’d left behind” into a world of racial tolerance.
Later in the book, Obama returned to the question of his parents’ marriage, during his mother’s visit to New York after Barack had transferred from Occidental to Columbia. After having avoided her during most of her New York visit, he asks her directly about their marriage. It is at that moment that she tells Barack not to be angry at his father or blame him for leaving. In fact, it is the second time she has told him not to be angry at his father, the first time being when Barack was Barry. Then she said, “You shouldn’t be mad at your father, Bar. He loves you very much. He’s just a little stubborn sometimes.” She now admits that she divorced him, not vice versa—although she manages to add “bastard” to change what she had earlier said about him, that he was “a little stubborn.” Still, as an accommodator she always tries to protect her son’s view of his father, though he doesn’t offer any plausible explanations from her about why she divorced him. In fact, she may also be protecting herself from her son’s view of her. If that was the case, it worked, as he continued to write about her love for his father. He wrote about how her chin trembled whenever she talked about him—as though she were about to cry. And again he reassured the reader—and himself—that their love was real.
. . . But for all Obama’s description of his mother as a naïve woman, the recent biography of Stanley Ann Dunham by Janny Scott says otherwise. According to the people Scott interviewed on the subject of Ann’s relationship with men, there was always an erotic component—and there were intense affairs after Lolo, always with men of color. One younger man Ann is said to have described as looking like Mike Tyson. How much of her behavior was a repudiation of her own parents remains for others to assess. But Obama’s description of her in his interview with Scott was of someone taken advantage of because “there was a sweetness about her and a willingness to give people the benefit of the doubt, and a sort of generosity of spirit that at times was naïve.” He further said that she was at times “taken advantage of” because of those qualities. One can see that he might simply prefer to keep his mother as a naïve “poster child” for liberal causes than a woman who pursued erotic liaisons in far-off lands at the expense of raising her son. His sustained view of his mother and father as having a perfect black-and-white union of love may be used to bolster him against this other aspect of his mother’s life—and act as an added force behind his dreams of creating bipartisan harmony. He wrote, “What I heard from my mother that day, speaking about my father, was something that I suspect most Americans will never hear from the lips of those of another race, and so cannot be expected to believe might exist between black and white: the love of someone who knows your life in the round, a love that will survive disappointment.”
But if she were to blame for the breakup, then Barry would have had to redirect his anger at his own mother. The fact that he didn’t mention that she initiated the separation suggests that the anger he feels toward her is beyond either his consciousness or comfort level. But Ann’s divorce from Barack Obama, Sr., set into motion a series of dislocations that deepened the sense of instability in young Barry’s family life. First she met and married Lolo Soetoro, another University of Hawaii student from abroad; she and her son joined her new husband in his native Indonesia in 1967. The environment was decidedly more hostile to her child than Hawaii had been. Friends she met in Jakarta “were floored that she’d bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks,” her acquaintance Elizabeth Bryant, another American living in Jakarta at the time, told Janny Scott. Bryant recalled walking with Ann and Barry while Indonesian children were taunting and throwing rocks at the boy. When Bryant offered to intervene, Ann stopped her. “No, he’s O.K.,” Ann said. “He’s used to it.” Her seemingly casual reaction to her son having more than epithets thrown at him helps us further question his own inconsistent regard for the deep parental transference so many Americans feel about him and their desire that he pay closer attention to their severe plights—rather than giving speeches about the Middle East, which is rapidly becoming to American poor and homeless the national equivalent of the Indonesian villages that took Barry’s mother’s attention away from her son. This vignette helps us again think about why Barry never told his mother about the Life magazine article.
. . . His relationship to his mother, especially his denied rage, adds yet another layer to his passion for consensus building. We’ve seen how Obama’s compulsive need to heal splits is driven by his two central inner cracks, as it were, between his white and black selves, as well as the crack that kept running through his desire for an intact family. But at another level, his desire for consensus is more than an outgrowth of the need to heal—it is in itself a defense aimed at covering over his deep unhealed rage at his mother. She was domineering, seductive, and abandoning. No man could stand up to her; or at least Obama never saw his mother ever solve a problem with a man. Separations became solutions. Though he makes references to not wanting his parents’ restless, wandering lifestyle for himself or his family, Obama has never expressed any public anger toward his mother for uprooting or abandoning him and has conspicuously understated her role in that process. David Remnick, in his book The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, observes that “Obama is not always easy on Ann Dunham,” which he sees as “part of the drama of” Dreams from My Father: “his obvious love for a woman who is intelligent, idealistic, brave, and engaged with the world but also, at times, maddeningly naïve and frequently thousands of miles away.” By contrast, Obama’s father, who was a present absence and an angry self-indulgent phantom who interacted directly with Barry for only one month, was the “singular object of the narrator’s imaginings, at the center of a young man’s quest to claim a race and a history.”
Obama’s anger toward his mother definitely crops up in Dreams from My Father, most notably in an exchange that took place in Hawaii after she returned from her Indonesian fieldwork. When she confronts her son, now a high school senior, about an acquaintance’s arrest, he tries to explain to her “the role of luck in the world, the spin of the wheel,” and attempts to dismiss her with a smile and reassurances not to worry.
It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: people were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved—such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time. Except my mother hadn’t looked satisfied. She had just sat there, studying my eyes, her face as grim as a hearse.
“Don’t you think you’re being a little casual about your future?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean. One of your friends was just arrested for drug possession. Your grades are slipping. You haven’t even started on your college applications. Whenever I try to talk to you about it you act like I’m just this great big bother.”
When Barry tries to tell her he might not go away to college she cuts him off, telling him he can get into any school he wants to, as long as he puts in some effort:
“Remember what that’s like? Effort? Damn it, Bar, you can’t just sit around like some good-time Charlie, waiting for luck to see you through.”
“A good-time what?”
“A good-time Charlie. A loafer.”
I looked at her sitting there, so earnest, so certain of her son’s destiny. The idea that my survival depended on luck remained a heresy to her; she insisted on assigning responsibility somewhere—to herself, to Gramps and Toot, to me. I suddenly felt like puncturing that certainty of hers. Letting her know that her experiment with me had failed. Instead of shouting, I laughed. “A good-time Charlie, huh? Well, why not? Maybe that’s what I want out of life. I mean, look at Gramps. He didn’t even go to college.”
The comparison caught my mother by surprise. Her face went slack, her eyes wavered. It suddenly dawned on me, her greatest fear. “Is that what you’re worried about?” I asked. “That I’ll end up like Gramps?”
She shook her head quickly. “You’re already much better educated than your grandfather,” she said. But the certainty had finally drained from her voice. Instead of pushing the point, I stood up and left the room.
Though he stopped short of acknowledging it, Obama the memoirist may have recognized the anger he felt toward his mother as an adolescent and perhaps even as an adult. He described treating his mother, at that moment, the way he would treat any white woman—a remembered way of unconsciously equating all whites he must have been angry at with his mother when writing the scene years later. But he resisted any more explicit or conscious expression of anger—both in the actual exchange and in its retelling. Bitterly describing himself as her failed experiment, even silently, speaks volumes about the neglect he felt as a result of her other experiments—the anthropological fieldwork that she abandoned him to pursue and the two marriages that in their failure twice cost him familial stability and the presence of a father figure. Instead of confronting her, the high school senior Barry evaded the truth—something understandable in a teenager who didn’t want to make his feelings public and found it safer to hide them behind defensive contempt, and to leave the room to protect her from his fury.
Years later, he again evaded his feelings in the retelling, delinking himself from his genuine anger at her, but the anger comes through nonetheless, particularly in his choosing to follow the vignette with a postscript about his mother’s lifelong, skillful manipulation of guilt and the pride she takes in it. In the next section of the memoir, Obama returns to the late-night college scene from which he had been remembering the above exchange in flashback while listening to a Billie Holiday record after a party:
Billie had stopped singing. The silence felt oppressive, and I suddenly felt very sober. I rose from the couch, flipped the record, drank what was left in my glass, poured myself another. Upstairs, I could hear someone flushing a toilet, walking across a room. Another insomniac, probably, listening to his life tick away. That was the problem with booze and drugs, wasn’t it? At some point they couldn’t stop that ticking sound, the sound of certain emptiness. And that, I suppose, is what I’d been trying to tell my mother that day: that her faith in justice and rationality was misplaced, that we couldn’t overcome after all, that all the education and good intentions in the world couldn’t help plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.
Still, I’d felt bad after that particular episode; it was the one trick my mother always had up her sleeve, that way she had of making me feel guilty. She made no bones about it, either. “You can’t help it,” she told me once. “Slipped it into your baby food. Don’t worry, though,” she added, smiling like the Cheshire cat. “A healthy dose of guilt never hurt anybody. It’s what civilization was built on, guilt. A highly underrated emotion.”
Guilt means feeling bad for hating or hurting the person whom you love; when Obama’s mother jokes about putting guilt in his baby food, she is touching on something serious about controlling his anger at her. We relieve our guilt by disguising the anger we feel toward our loved ones. By manipulating his guilt, she played a role in his inability to find a way to express his anger toward his mother directly to her.
On close examination of the text, there is clear evidence that Obama did express anger at his mother—not directly but in the form of contempt for her emotional vulnerability. He wrote several times about her chin “trembling” whenever she talked about his father. His subtle use of contempt—not so subtle when read closely—is a way of obliquely and patronizingly expressing his anger at his mother without having to confront her directly.
Obama has spoken and written frequently and powerfully about the profound love and gratitude he felt for his mother, celebrating her values in the 2004 keynote address, attributing his success to the work ethic she instilled in him through 4 A.M. preschool tutoring sessions when he was in Indonesia. But something must have damaged their relationship. Dunham’s biographer Janny Scott wrote that his mother, “for whom a letter in Jakarta from her son in the United States could raise her spirits for a full day, surely wondered about her place in his life. On rare occasions, she indicated as much—painfully, wistfully—to close friends.” Indeed, between her alternately abandoning him and then pressuring him when she was present, he had obvious reasons to be angry with her. And some of his anger toward his father and in response to the serial dissolutions of his families was likely displaced onto her. He was a little clearer about both his resentment toward her and his discomfort expressing it when speaking to Scott, who asked him about the “serial displacements” of his childhood. The “critical distance” that Scott noted is made clear in his likely unconsciously referring to himself in the third person:
“I think that was harder on a 10-year-old boy than he’d care to admit at the time,” Obama said, sitting in a chair in the Oval Office and speaking about his mother with a mix of affection and critical distance. “When we were separated again during high school, at that point I was old enough to say, ‘This is my choice, my decision.’ But being a parent now and looking back at that, I could see—you know what?—that would be hard on a kid.”
But the positive maternal input made it harder for him to express his own rage at her, so instead he mocked her in public and defied her in secret by drinking and smoking and by studying only hard enough to get by. And in failing to fully express her own rage at having been abandoned by Obama’s father, she left young Barry without a model of confrontation or of resolving conflict. One form of protection from his powerful mother was to retreat into himself and then internally mock her by referring to himself as her “experiment.” He didn’t observe parental quarrels and thus could never establish an internal father who could protect him from his powerful mother. The seeds of accommodation were planted. Though she set limits on her son when he was young and tried less successfully to do the same when he was a teenager, she evaded conflict, choosing to induce guilt rather than express her rage.
Obama’s mother set no example for how to deal with conflict that young Barry could use to manage his unexpressed rage toward both his father and his mother. This difficulty he has standing up to attacks—not that he saw them as a child—continues to reverberate on a profound unconscious level today. Observers of Obama’s first two years in office have repeatedly wondered why he refrained from taking on the Republican opposition with the same vigor with which he pursued the Democratic presidential nomination and then the presidency. Then he stood up in his April 13, 2011, speech at George Washington University in favor of raising taxes where necessary and not exclusively cutting Medicare, but reforming it. Within the week he started making noises about standing up again, this time to eliminate tax breaks for big oil. But without a history of experiencing direct confrontation, that standing up to big oil was short-lived, as he still prefers to remain outside domestic fights and function as a community organizer helping others negotiate their battles. So he sat down again, deciding to increase drilling in Alaska and the mid-Atlantic, where our policy was to do no offshore drilling before 2018. Though he still speaks against oil tax exemptions, his actions do not.
Once president, on key issues from health reform to the stimulus, time and again he has sacrificed his agenda in the pursuit of Republican support that has continually failed to materialize. But rather than express his anger at Republicans or acknowledge the extent of their destructiveness, he has repeatedly evaded conflict with the opposition by moving his position closer to theirs without acknowledging that theirs wasn’t moving in return. Some may regard this as political compromise, but that falsely implies that he has received much in return. Others have dismissed it simply as political weakness, branding him the “conciliator in chief,” a term used by the MyDD blogger Charles Lemos, the pollster John Zogby, and others. But this quip overlooks the considerable strength he has demonstrated elsewhere in his political skill set. Instead, for a better explanation we must look to his unconscious motivations, where we find that he is more accurately labeled as the “accommodator in chief,” burdened by a psychological condition known as “pathological accommodation.”
Accommodation is something we all learn in childhood, one of five problem-solving methods identified by the mediation expert Kenneth W. Thomas in Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. In accommodation, one individual gives up what he or she needs in order to do what the other wants, a lose/win scenario. This is perhaps a step up from the lose/lose nonsolution of avoidance, in which the conflict is not acknowledged, but avoids the potential benefit of competition, in which there’s the possibility of being the winner and brings far less reward than the win/win scenarios of compromise and collaboration.
The term “pathological accommodation” is used to describe persistent accommodating behavior that continues in the absence of any evidence that it will be rewarded with even partial victory or satisfaction. Rather than the pursuit of competition, collaboration, or compromise, pathological accommodation is a preemptive negotiation against the self, a self-inflicted strike against one’s own needs and values that are sacrificed to preserve another person or relationship. It expresses a deep unconscious need to protect the self against inner chaos and disintegration in the face of the overwhelming anxiety and mental anguish that the individual—again unconsciously—anticipates in response to a threat to that other person or relationship.
Pathological accommodation is closely associated with the work of Dr. Bernard Brandschaft, who in 1985 identified the condition in children who deny their own beliefs and needs in an attempt to please their parents. This is particularly powerful in the dynamic between a single parent and his or her child: the child of a broken home may defend against the pain of losing one parent—or the anticipated pain of losing the second parent—by taking on the belief system of the parent who remains. The child’s need to appease is most often driven by fears and results in extreme difficulty in directly confronting aggressors in adulthood.
Brandschaft’s is a fairly recent construct, but it builds upon other terms that have been used previously for these similar psychic processes. In the 1930s, the psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch coined the term “as-if personality” to describe people who seem to be genuine but are in fact putting on a false front of which they themselves are not fully aware. Subsequently, the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described what he called the “false self,” which he felt arose from the child’s feeling a need to protect his mother from his own anger at her, thereby protecting himself from experiencing that anger by consigning it to his unconscious mental life. Both of these are consistent with what we observe in Obama, who appears to be unaware of the gap between what Deutsch would identify as the false front he presented as a candidate and the persona he has manifested as president. And the unexpected maternal anger that Winnicott cites is at the heart of the dynamic that Obama’s pathological accommodation seeks unconsciously to preserve: he defends against the symbolic loss of his mother that would occur if he truly acknowledged and felt his rage at her. He can’t even acknowledge that his mother may have set his parents’ separation in motion, let alone how he feels about it. This helps us understand the indirect put-downs he occasionally reveals in Dreams from My Father.
Brandschaft also wrote that the development of the child’s ability to question and stand up to authority is compromised by parents who selectively exclude family information—as Ann did about Barry’s father. We see Barry doing the same thing as he grows up, excluding expression of feelings from his mother—keeping himself separate.
p. 129: He wants change, argues for the audacity of hope, but shies away from the audacity of action. His first two years in office, he promised, then pulled back from change—sometimes suddenly and inexplicably—until he finally did what was necessary for action, as when he extended tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans to get things done in a flurry of activity in the lame-duck weeks of late 2010. He has become known for his caution even when advocating change.
Many observers recognized the December 2010 burst of productivity as reminiscent of the way Obama delays action until the eleventh hour and then pulls it out at the last minute, a pattern rendered with particular detail in Wolffe’s account of his writing of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. A derivative of magical thinking from childhood, this approach leads him to flirt repeatedly with the dangerous, unplanned part of change—how it will go and what will happen after you make it. The pattern is pervasive enough to take the form of a repetition compulsion, an unconscious drive to relive the trauma of his abandonment by pushing himself closer to the dangers of the unknown and then, at the last minute, choosing either a safer approach or, driven by the fantasy of saving the day, a dramatic compromise to get something passed. We all have core issues that we revisit over our lifetime, and Obama’s conflict about change is one of his. Each time he repeats this struggle, he is drawn to revisiting familiar conflicts yet hopes to achieve a different result—hence the term “repetition compulsion.” This approach-avoidance attitude helps reinforce his denial of his fear of change, thereby making him feel stronger.
Not surprisingly for an individual who has learned that he can exponentially expand his power by claiming to believe in the very change he fears, Obama maintains his power and sense of himself as a calm, fearless person by not revealing the anxiety he experiences.
Hopeless; p. ii: “Like all Presidents, Barack Obama lied his way into office and betrayed his constituency even before he took the oath. Like most presidents, he proceeded to tinker with the policies of his predecessor, and where he did meddle, he often moved toward even more reactionary, repressive positions. There has been no president in my lifetime less inclined to budge from the monstrous center of standard American policies, foreign and domestic, no president more callous in dismissing the needs of citizens or more eager in advancing the aims of corporate thugs and military bullies. This book is a fitting tombstone for whatever promise his election seemed to offer. Read it and then get back to work building the decent America and civilized world he’s done his best to prevent.”—Dave Marsh, author of Two Hearts: The Bruce Springsteen Story
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Where is his pondering (Ti) and easiness (in terms of Si)? It is not there. Too focused (Se/Ni).
Originally Posted by HERO
