The New Neo

Obama has written still another autobiography, this one about his presidency. Actually, it’s not a new book; it was published last November 17, although I don’t recall reading about it at the time.

The reviews quoted on Amazon are glowing: Obama “is as fine a writer as they come” and has “illuminated a pivotal moment in American history, and how America changed while also remaining unchanged” (according to the New York Times Book Review). There are almost 110,000 customer ratings/reviews and almost all of them are 5-star, a ratio that seems hard to believe for such a polarizing figure.

But perhaps it’s because only the most fervent of Obama fans would be willing to wade through all 768 pages of what is only volume one of a promised 2-volume set of tomes. I’m certainly not going to read either book. Just the excerpts set my teeth on edge, demonstrating Obama’s familiar fake profundity and affected “literary” style. And of course it’s self-serving – as most political memoirs are.

This recent review in the Claremont Review of Books seems on point:

“Our democracy,” Barack Obama writes in the first pages of his third autobiography, A Promised Land, “seems to be teetering on the brink of crisis—a crisis rooted in a fundamental contest between two opposing visions of what America is and what it should be.” One vision “appeal[s] to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.” It sees “a hopeful, generous, courageous America, an America that was open to everyone.” The other vision is as base as this one is noble. At its core is anger, fear, nativism, and racism.

These two visions, not surprisingly, align with our political divisions. On the side of the angels stand Obama, Democrats, and the millions of voters in 2008 who made the first-term U.S. senator his party’s nominee for the presidency and then elevated him to the nation’s highest office. On the other side stand Republicans (leaders and followers), Fox News, talk radio, and the Koch brothers. Despite his vows “to move past the tired Washington partisan divide,” “to change Washington and transcend partisan gridlock,” and “to end constant partisan rancor,” Obama’s aim throughout this 700-page first installment of his presidential memoirs appears to be nothing less than to delegitimize Republican and conservative opposition to a vast and growing welfare state.

Good old Obama – most divisive president in my lifetime. Obama good, opposition bad. Democrats good, Republicans bad. And Obama is the most objective person on earth to tell us about it.

Joseph M. Bessette, the author of the Claremont review, doesn’t seem to be an Obama-hater. He thinks the book is well-written, and the parts about Obama’s wife and daughters are “charming.”

Then there’s the subject of race and Obama’s presidential campaign. The Obama quotes in the following excerpt from the review bear his trademark stamp of pretending to be nobly above it all while defaming his opponents as racists, perhaps some of them secret racists but racists nevertheless:

Richard Nixon “had determined that a politics of white racial resentment was the surest path to Republican victory.” In the presidential campaign of 2008, Obama was not so much “running against Hillary Clinton or John Edwards or even the Republicans [as against] the implacable weight of the past; the inertia, fatalism, and fear it produced.” If his supporters could make him “an outsized symbol of hope, then the vague fears of detractors could just as readily congeal into hate.” Sarah Palin’s appeal to Republicans in 2008 “was a sign of things to come, a larger, darker reality in which partisan affiliation and political expedience would threaten to blot out everything.” A month before the election, she was “enthusiastically gassing [big crowds] with nativist bile.” Through her, “it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party—xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, and antipathy toward Black and brown folks—were finding their way to center stage.” Rick Santelli, whose “lengthy on-air rant [on CNBC] on our housing plan” helped to launch the Tea Party movement, together with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and House Republican leader John Boehner all understood “how easily that anger could be channeled, how useful fear could be in advancing their cause.”

Obama wonders aloud whether the Tea Party member who supports “states’ rights” does so “because he genuinely thought it was the best way to promote liberty, or because he continued to resent how federal intervention had led to an end to Jim Crow, desegregation, and rising Black political power.” And he wonders whether the “conservative activist [who] oppose[d] any expansion of the social welfare state” did so “because she believed it sapped individual initiative, or because she was convinced that it would benefit only brown people who’d just crossed the border?” Although Obama generously concedes that “I saw no way to sort out people’s motives,” he concludes that “[w]hatever my instincts might tell me, whatever truths the history books might suggest, I knew I wasn’t going to win over any voters labeling my opponents racist.” Translation: My instincts (and the truths of history) tell me that my opponents’ principled arguments are merely a cover for their racist attitudes, but it would be politically unwise to say so publicly.

And finally, though not exhaustively, on one occasion Obama sent Vice President Joe Biden to Capitol Hill to negotiate with McConnell about an extension of the George W. Bush tax cuts. Although the president could have negotiated directly, he was aware “that in McConnell’s mind, negotiations with the vice president didn’t inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of cooperating with (Black, Muslim socialist) Obama was bound to do.”

That’s enough of a reminder for me of the nature of the poison Obama kept injecting and re-injecting into his presidency and the body politic. He may not have used the exact word “racist” in labeling his opponents, but he let his supporters do it, and he often spoke in ways that strongly indicated that any criticism of him was racist. This began even during his 2008 campaign, and I chronicled it as it was happening, in posts such as this one and this one, for example.

It was destructive then and it’s destructive now. But it worked, didn’t it?