[NOTE: I actually wrote the draft of this post a couple of days ago, before the news that forms the subject matter of this came out. But it has interesting resonances with it.]
An absurd question, you might say.
And by the way, I’m not referring to the issue of Obama’s actual birth. I’m talking about a person’s concept of him/herself, and his/her presentation to the world. As the offspring of a black father he didn’t know, a white mother and grandparents he did know, and raised in the American and yet somehow exotic culture of Hawaii and then the indisputably foreign culture of Indonesia and then back again, it would be quite understandable if Obama’s identity were unusually fluid, confusing, and mutable.
A large portion of Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father was about a quest for a more stable identity. But that identity was, as Byron York points out in this article, a story (or a “narrative”) shaped (or “constructed”, as the post-modernists would say) by Obama himself. David Maraniss’s new autobiography, which only deals with Obama’s life until the age of 27, sheds more objective light on the subject:
Obama had a lot of Pakistani friends; Maraniss writes that if Obama and his girlfriend socialized as a couple, “it was almost always with the Pakistanis.” Obama appeared to identify with his friends as fellow non-Americans. “For years when Barack was around them, he seemed to share their attitudes as sophisticated outsiders who looked at politics from an international perspective,” Maraniss writes. “He was one of them, in that sense.”
But Obama was ambitious. Appalled by the “dirty deeds” of “Reagan and his minions” (as he wrote in “Dreams from My Father”), Obama became increasingly interested in, as Maraniss writes, “gaining power in order to change things.” He couldn’t do that as an international guy hanging around with his Pakistani friends; he needed to become an American.
So he did. One of those Pakistani friends, Beenu Mahmood, saw a major change in Obama. Mahmood calls Obama “the most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his own identity,” according to Maraniss. The time after college, Mahmood says, “was an important period for him, first the shift from not international but American, number one, and then not white, but black.”
Mahmood, Maraniss writes, “could see Obama slowly but carefully distancing himself as a necessary step in establishing his political identity as an American.”…Obama chose to become an American in part because that’s what he needed to be to accomplish his goals.
For quite a while, Obama has reminded me at least a little bit of the F. Scott Fitzgerald character Jay Gatsby—that is, not in the details, but in the fact of being a self-constructed man. And this essay by York seems to me to be one of the most insightful things I’ve ever read about Obama. My gut feeling is that it has the ring of truth.
