Diversity Rules by Peter W. Wood

Author:Peter W. Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2019-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

OBAMA’S DIVERSITY

My exercise in pulling out some old clippings wasn’t entirely arbitrary. I picked a year in the midst of Barack Obama’s presidency – perhaps the most uneventful year. He had been re-elected in 2012, but dissatisfactions with his policies were mounting to the point where the Republicans took control of the Senate in November 2014. Republicans already controlled the House. After November, the Republican majority was the largest it had been since 1929–31. A Democratic president in this situation had little room for legislative maneuver, and President Obama in particular was not suited by temperament to work constructively with an opposition party. He governed mostly by regulatory fiat and international diplomacy.24 In many ways he was a figurehead president.25

As the first black president of the United States, Obama can be considered the personal fulfillment of the diversity doctrine. He brought to the presidency little record of political accomplishment or achievement in other walks of life. He was a handsome, well-spoken man known for his leftist allies and opaque background. Born from a short-lived marriage between his white mid-western mother and his black Kenyan father, he lived in Indonesia from age six to ten with his mother and his Indonesian step-father. At ten, he moved to Hawaii to be raised by his grandparents, who sent him to an elite private school.

Although Obama himself published two memoirs of his early years, and although several researchers and biographers have dug more deeply into his past, Obama’s beginnings remain surprisingly faint.26 He is a man who doesn’t seem to be from a particular place, although he does in fact have roots of a sort in Hawaii. Moreover, his family was also unsettled and footless. His earliest substantial connection with anyone outside his family appears to have been with the communist drifter Frank Marshall Davis. This detail is more perplexing than enlightening.

The vagueness of Obama’s beginnings is repeated in his adolescence and early manhood. In one sense we know very little about his college years, except for his involvement with the Democratic Socialists of America and with leftwing activist groups at Occidental College and Columbia University. But in another sense, we know a lot.

David Garrow’s massive biography, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, published after Obama left office, unrolls a vast amount of new detail, though much of it is trivial and hardly any of it defines Obama’s character in a positive way. We learn from Garrow, for example, that Obama spent Sunday, January 24, 1982, watching the Super Bowl with his friends Ron and Phil at 11 Cranberry Street in Brooklyn Heights. The fact seems to have no bearing on anything other than the mundaneness of his existence at the time. But Garrow also recounts Obama’s uneven embrace of radical politics. We learn, for example, that Obama “exaggerated his involvement” with the anti-apartheid divestment movement at Columbia University in 1983.27

And Garrow gives us glimpses of Obama’s aloof and occasionally cruel personality. We hear of one girlfriend who took offence at “all the artifice in his manner.

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