On The Radical Roots of Barack Obama

On the Radical Roots of Barack Obama (Rolling Stone) (+)

Mon Feb 12, 2007 at 14:12:01 PM PST


(Mission to Win the Heart and Mind of Gottlieb: Phase III--In a recent comment on this thread MLW's very own beloved Gottlieb made the mistake of challenging me to "convince" him that Obama's "the Man."

Gottlieb wrote:

Look forward to more of your 'propaganda' about this man. I am looking to be convinced.

Therein lie the roots of Phase I of the Mission to Win the Heart and Mind of Gottlieb; Phase II continued here on a not altogether serious note.)

We now enter

Phase III: On the Radical Roots of Barack Obama, citing from an article titled "Destiny's Child" by Ben Wallace-Wells, Rolling Stone

"He's got the whole world in his hands, he's got the whole world in his hands."

He's got the whole world in his hands? What do I mean by that?

Rev. Jim Wallis is cited by Rolling Stone as saying, about Obama:

If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from just look at Jeremiah Wright.

Who is Jeremiah Wright you say? He is the pastor of Obama's church:

The Trinity United Church of Christ, the church that Barack Obama attends in Chicago, is at once vast and unprepossessing, a big structure a couple of blocks from the projects, in the long open sore of a ghetto on the city's far South Side. The church is a leftover vision from the Sixties of what a black nationalist future might look like. There's the testifying fervor of the black church, the Afrocentric Bible readings, even the odd dashiki. And there is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a sprawling, profane bear of a preacher, a kind of black ministerial institution, with his own radio shows and guest preaching gigs across the country. Wright takes the pulpit here one Sunday and solemnly, sonorously declares that he will recite ten essential facts about the United States. "Fact number one: We've got more black men in prison than there are in college," he intones. "Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!" There is thumping applause; Wright has a cadence and power that make Obama sound like John Kerry. Now the reverend begins to preach. "We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS. . . . We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. . . . We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. . . . We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!" The crowd whoops and amens as Wright builds to his climax: "And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS SHIT!"

As Rolling Stone continues:

This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr. Wright is not an incidental figure in Obama's life, or his politics. The senator "affirmed" his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a "sounding board" to "make sure I'm not losing myself in the hype and hoopla." Both the title of Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright's sermons.

But, perhaps more importantly:

Obama wasn't born into Wright's world. His parents were atheists, an African bureaucrat and a white grad student, Jerry Falwell's nightmare vision of secular liberals come to life. Obama could have picked any church -- the spare, spiritual places in Hyde Park, the awesome pomp and procession of the cathedrals downtown. He could have picked a mosque, for that matter, or even a synagogue. Obama chose Trinity United. He picked Jeremiah Wright. Obama writes in his autobiography that on the day he chose this church, he felt the spirit of black memory and history moving through Wright, and "felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams."

He's got the whole world in his hands. By that I mean that this man--with his "from Honolulu to Harvard"-history has the kind of hands-on, first-hand experience that no presidential candidate in my memory has ever possessed:

Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961, back when the Hawaiian islands were still a wary and weird part of America, half military base, half pan-Pacific outpost. His own background was even more singular and chancy: Obama's father was a Muslim from Kenya, the son of a farmer, who grew up tending his father's goats and who, through an almost impossible succession of luck, won a scholarship to the University of Hawaii. At the time, Barack's mother, Ann Dunham, was eighteen, a student at the university, the daughter of a blue-collar couple from Kansas. When Barack was two, his father left the family and returned to Kenya. Barack's mother remarried, moving with her son to her new husband's home in Indonesia.

To Barack, the country seemed exotic (he briefly owned a pet monkey named Tata) but also "unpredictable and often cruel." He recalls watching floods swamp the countryside and seeing the "desperation" of poor farm families who "scrambled to rescue their goats and their hens even as chunks of their huts washed away." (In January, the conservative Washington Times alleged that Obama had attended a hyper-religious Islamic madrassah as a child in Indonesia -- a charge that the senator has denied.)

Obama spent four years in Jakarta before moving back to Honolulu, where he lived with his grandparents and won a scholarship to the private Punahou Academy, the place in Hawaii where all the Ivy League-bound kids go. (In his autobiography, he notes that when he hung out with a black friend, they together comprised "almost half" of the African-American population of Punahou.) He cops to "experimentation" as a teen, saying he smoked weed and even did "a little blow." He played basketball -- "with a consuming passion that would always exceed my limited talent." Even today, his friends say, Obama talks a mean game. "He's a bit of a trash-talker," says Butts. "You see that competitive side of him come out when he's playing Scrabble or basketball."

After graduating from Columbia University, Obama spent four years as a street-level organizer in Chicago, where he met and worked with Wright, before attending Harvard Law School, where he was made the first black president of the law review. Winning the position required political savvy: "He was able to work with conservatives as well as liberals," recalls his friend Michael Froman, now an executive at Citigroup. Laurence Tribe, the renowned constitutional scholar, considers Obama one of his two best students ever: "He had a very powerful ability to synthesize diverse sources of information." When Obama returned to Chicago, he turned down big-money firms to take a job with a small civil rights practice, filing housing discrimination suits on behalf of low-income residents and teaching constitutional law on the side. He had thought he might enter politics since before he left for law school, and eventually he did, winning a seat in the state Senate at the age of thirty-seven.

Neither the "world out there," nor the real-world reality of these, our very own "mean streets" of urban America is an abstraction to Barack Obama. He has lived it. And these experiences shape his worldview. They shape his thinking, and are the bedrock of his thinking.

It has become fashionable, given Obama's charisma and compassion, to compare him to Robert F. Kennedy, whose 1968 campaign for the presidency achieved near-rock-star status. But Obama is not Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy grew up studying how to use America's power, and in his forties he began to venture out and notice its imperfections. Barack Obama came up in a study of those flaws, and now, thrust into a position of power in his forties, is trying to figure out what to do with it.

Samantha Power is part of a generation of thinkers who, like Obama, came of age after the Cold War. They worry about the problems created by globalization and believe that the most important issues America will confront in the future (terrorism, avian flu, global warming, bioweapons, the disease and nihilism that grow from concentrated poverty) will emanate from neglected and failed states (Afghanistan, the Congo, Sierra Leone). According to Susan Rice, a Brookings Institution scholar who serves as an informal adviser to Obama, their ideas come from the "profound conviction that we are interconnected, that poverty and conflict and health problems and autocracy and environmental degradation in faraway places have the potential to come back and bite us in the behind, and that we ignore such places and such people at our peril.

Over the past two years, Obama has come to adopt this worldview as his own. He came back fascinated from a quick trip to a U.S. project in Ethiopia, where American soldiers had parachuted in to help the victims of a flood: "By investing now," he said, "we avoid an Iraq or Afghanistan later." The foreign-policy initiatives he has fought for and passed have followed this model: He has secured money to fight avian flu, improve security in the Congo and safeguard Russian nuclear weapons. "My comment is not meant to be unkind to mainstream Democrats," says Lugar, "but it seems to me that Barack is studying issues that are very important for the country and for the world.

When Obama fails to act radically enough for anyone's taste, it's because his hands are by the contraints of Washington. But you can take it from me, Gottlieb, one thing I do know about folks here on the mean streets of my neighborhood: sooner or later, they figured out a way to get things done, even when their hands are tied.

This passage from the RS article is key in that regard:

"In Africa, you often see that the difference between a village where everybody eats and a village where people starve is government," he tells me. "One has a functioning government, and the other does not. Which is why it bothers me when I hear Grover Norquist or someone say that government is the enemy. They don't understand the fundamental role that government plays."

There are limitations to this view of the world, of course, and there are those who believe that for all his study, Obama has been too cautious on the big issues. When he was running for the Senate, Obama was an early and vocal opponent of the war in Iraq. "I think our foreign policy has been all bluster and saber-rattling and continued mistakes over the last several years," he says. But since he arrived in the Senate, many of those who hoped Obama would become a great liberal champion have been disappointed. He has voted with conservatives on tort reform and industry-friendly provisions in the bankruptcy bill, and the troop-pullout bill he introduced in January was a late and unremarkable entry in the debate over Iraq. "Those of us in the Chicago progressive community still believe in Barack Obama," says Joel Bleifuss, editor of the left-wing magazine In These Times. "But at the moment we're pretty much taking it on faith."

Rolling Stone has opened the floor for debate on the question: Does Obama have the stuff to get him to the White House?

I think he does. Question is: does America have the stuff to let him? Do we have the stuff to put him there?