The Obama of 'Dreams from My Father,' a modern classic

[DeepModem Mom]

WP op-ed: The Obama of 'Dreams'
By David Ignatius
Thursday, January 17, 2008; Page A23

The promise of Barack Obama's presidential campaign was that it would transcend the old racial and ideological categories of American politics. Obama was sometimes described as "post-racial" or "the Tiger Woods of politics" -- someone who defied the usual dividing lines and, in that sense, could be a healer and a uniter.

The past week has illustrated that race is still a campaign issue. The flap about what the Clintons meant in their comments about Martin Luther King Jr. or an Obama "fairy tale" on Iraq is overdone, but the deeper question of Obama's racial identity is not. He is the first African American with a chance to win the presidency, and many blacks -- after initially holding him at a distance -- are now treating him as a symbol of racial pride and identity. Amid this heightened sensitivity, the jostling that's normal in a political campaign is taken as a sign of disrespect.

Fortunately, we have Obama to help disentangle the racial threads. I don't mean the candidate we see on the stump -- it's too late in the campaign for that -- but the one who wrote the book. Obama's first memoir, "Dreams From My Father," is one of the best political autobiographies I've read, and it deserves to be a modern classic on the subject of the moment -- race and identity.

Much of Obama's book is about his own search to understand his life as a mixed-race child of an African father and a white Kansan mother. He describes his early teenage struggles in "trying to raise myself to be a black man in America," shooting pool in the red-light district of Honolulu or learning to trash-talk on the basketball court. "I was living out a caricature of black male adolescence, itself a caricature of swaggering American manhood," he writes. The book is cited these days because of Obama's frank discussion of his use of drugs in the years when he was dealing with the absence of his father and his uncertain identity: "Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: The final, fatal role of the young, would-be black man." He was spared, he writes, in part because of a sense of guilt: "Slipped it into your baby food," his mother told him.

The book is so honest, and so funny and self-aware, that you come away thinking that Obama is that rare politician who genuinely understands who he is. You can't help but worry that once the packagers are done with him, this voice will be blunted. Certainly, by the time he wrote his second memoir, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama was more into speech-giving mode....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/16/AR2008011603446.html?nav=most_emailed

[aquart]

1. That's nice.

I see a man so worried about SC that he sent out attack dogs to find and distort any possible statement from his opponent or her supporters. Who then got his ass publicly whipped for trying to start a race war to get a few votes. So don't dare try to tell me he's a uniter not a divider. What he is is a piece of work.

But I'm glad he's self aware.

[David Zephyr]

2. Kick.

K&R.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

3. nice to see credit when it is due