How Barak Obama Invented Himself

Despite the fact that he had written two autobiographical books, most Americans really didn't know much about Barak Obama when he was elected President.   Most of the mainstream media seemed to play a cheerleading role more than an investigative role concerning Obama's candidacy.

 Here's an interview with the author of a new, somewhat hagiographic biography. There's a lot of information in the interview about how Obama invented a black identity for himself. Early on, he apparently presented himself as the head of a "Joshua generation", with the promise of leading blacks into the promised land.

Consider this interview (and perhaps the book) along with the following articles by another man with a white mother and a black father, just like the President.  Although he addresses Obama's relationships with blacks elsewhere, these articles focus on the President's relationship to whites:

Obama and our post-modern race problem:

The president always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol.

Barak the Good:

Well, suppose you were the first black president of the United States and, therefore, also the first black head-of-state in the entire history of Western Civilization. You represent a human first, something entirely new under the sun. There aren't even any myths that speak directly to your circumstance, no allegorical tales of ancient black kings who ruled over white kingdoms.

If anything, you may literally experience yourself as a myth in the making. . . .

Does this special burden explain Barack Obama's embrace of scale as vision (if I don't know what to do, I'll do big things)? I think it does to a degree. It means, for example, that a caretaker presidency is not an option for him. . . .

Of the two great societal goals — freedom and "the good" — freedom requires a conservatism, a discipline of principles over the good, limited government, and so on. No way to grandiosity here. But today's liberalism is focused on "the good" more than on freedom. And ideas of "the good" are often a license to transgress democratic principles in order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen suffering. The great political advantage of modern liberalism is its offer of license on the one hand and moral innocence — if not superiority — on the other. Liberalism lets you force people to buy health insurance and feel morally superior as you do it. Power and innocence at the same time.

This is an old formula for power, last used effectively on the presidential level by Lyndon Johnson. But Johnson's Great Society was grasping for moral authority after the civil rights movement. I doubt any white president could use it effectively today, and even ObamaCare passed by only a three vote margin in the House and with no Republican support at all. Worse, in the end, it passed not to bring the nation better health care but to pull a flailing Democratic presidency back from the brink. . . .

Mr. Obama's success has always been ephemeral because it was based on an illusion: that if we Americans could transcend race enough to elect a black president, we could transcend all manner of human banalities and be on our way to human perfectibility. A black president would put us in a higher human territory. And yet the poor man we elected to play out this fantasy is now torturing us with his need to reflect our grandiosity back to us. . . .

Of course, these views can't tell the whole story of Mr. Obama's rise to power, but the information at the links starts to add some pieces to a puzzle - how and why did he rise so fast, and then fall in popularity so fast?

UPDATE: From 2009, a former Democratic aide to Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, Brent Budowsky: Why is everyone saying "No" to President Obama?

Last Friday the president was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing. Don’t blame the president. He did not ask for it, and had the grace to say he did not deserve it.

The Nobel Prize gets to the heart of the matter of the Obama presidency. The prize was not awarded to President Obama, but to the idea of Obama. . . .

The president has described himself as a Rorschach in which others with divergent views project their views onto him. This is brilliant politics in a campaign but a disastrous approach to governing. Opponents become energized, supporters become depressed, power centers become disrespectful, and the president who tries to be many things to many people influences very few to do anything of substance for change. . . .

Shelby Steele was not correct in predicting that trying to be too many things to too many people would prevent Obama's election. But maybe he was right about the eventual ability of Obama to "win" on policy issues.

It seems to me that Mr. Budowsky, as late as October of 2009, still viewed the President as trying to be "too many things to too many people" on the domestic front. Fascinating how different his perspective was from mine. I noticed that the President immediately started playing to his progressive base after his election while treating Americans who disagreed with him as insignificant (dismissing Republicans in Congress with, "I won" during his first meeting with them, for example,) or as enemies. Unfortunately for him, his base was not as large as he might have thought it was. His sudden reversal of the promise to be a "healer" alienated many. His policy proposals have sometimes reflected what may have seemed to him to be political realities, at odds with his statements, twitter and blog communications with his liberal base, and Mr. Budowsky's article reflects disappointment from that camp. But by then, the President had just about stopped two-way communication with the "other side".

His tendency to defer actual work on policy to his staff and the Democratic Congress followed the pattern he had shown when he headed up the Harvard Law Review, where people who did the actual work recalled him as sort of a figurehead leader there, too - showing up to say a few inspiring words and to talk with people from time to time while others shouldered the burden of putting the publication together.

Our last election was one in which America would probably have done better if there were a ceremonial leader of America (sort of the equivalent of the Queen of England) in which role Obama would have been a natural, along with a working President.

It seems to me that the President was exceptionally good at image-making. He did not seem to understand the "governing" bit too well, though. Virginia Postrel on Obama's "glamour problem":

reason: You’ve called glamour a beautiful illusion. A lot of people would say that describes President Obama.

Postrel: Yes, President Obama is a very glamorous figure. Glamour is a particular form of illusion. It’s an illusion that tells a truth about the audience’s desires, and it requires mystery and distance. During the campaign people projected onto Barack Obama whatever they wanted in a president or even in a country. Lying is usually a bad thing, but they would project onto him that he was lying about his positions because he secretly agreed with them: “Anyone that smart has got to be a free trader at heart. He’s just saying this to pander to those idiots. He can’t really mean it.”

You’ve seen, as he’s taken office and tried to govern, this back and forth where he is consciously or unconsciously trying to maintain his glamour—which requires a kind of distance from the political process so that people can continue to see him as representing them, regardless of their contradictory views—while actually trying to be president, which means you have to decide what to do about Guantanamo. You have to decide what health care bill you’re going to back. You have to decide all these things, and you’re going to make somebody disillusioned. This morning I saw that the former editor of Harper’s is about to write a book, The Mendacity of Hope, attacking Obama from the left. That’s the power and the downside of glamour. . .