Obama ends trip on personal note (Japan Buddha-was there when he was 6)

President Obama reacquainted himself with a piece of his childhood on Sunday before heading back to Washington at the end of his nine-day, four-country trip across Asia.

He had stood in front of the imposing bronze statue, one of this country's most famous sites, as a 6-year-old boy. His mother had brought him there and then taken him for green tea ice cream, a memory he has reflected on fondly.

“It is wonderful to return to this great treasure of Japanese culture,” Obama wrote in a guest book at the temple. "Its beauty has stayed with me for many years."

The sacred statue of Amida Buddha is nestled in the hills around the Buddhist temple of K?tokuin. Dating to the 1200s, it’s roughly 40 feet tall and weighs about 100 tons.

Obama’s return to the site capped an overseas trip that was both business and personal.

From India to Indonesia to Japan, the president folded in stops that went beyond the state visits and global economic summits that brought him.

In Mumbai he visited a house where Mahatma Gandhi lived. Martin Luther King, Jr. had toured the home in 1959, signing the guest book just as Obama did last weekend. King and Gandhi are two of the president's biggest heroes.

In New Delhi, Obama walked the grounds of Humayun's Tomb. "Spectacular," he remarked as he left.

While he didn't stop at any of his childhood haunts in Jakarta, where he lived for four years, Obama said he found it "a little disorienting" to return to a modernized city he remembered for streets crowded with becaks and bemos when he moved there with his mother in 1967.

"I feel great affection for the people here,” he said at a news conference shortly after arriving. “The sights and the sounds and the memories all feel very familiar."

At the Great Buddha on Sunday, Obama told his guides about how he visited the statue with his mother when he was 6.

"I was this big," he said, holding his left hand at his waist to explain how small he was back then.

This time he gazed up at the statue, surrounded on three sides by low, tile-roof buildings, as president. He was shown around the site by the director of the Kotokuin Temple, Michiko Sato, and, Dr. Takao Sato, the temple’s 15th chief monk.

He sampled a green tea ice cream bar, like he had 43 years ago, and bought a pair of bracelets for his daughters at the gift shop.

Much of the town turned out to see the presidential motorcade wind through a small fishing village, past clusters of grocery stores and a group of surfers paddling around in the ocean.

Before he flew to Kamakura, Obama wrapped up the two-day summit of Asian Pacific leaders. He will host APEC in his home state of Hawaii next year.

Yes, and this chapter in the cretin's past and the press's pandering accessory to lies and revisionism deserves more elaboration:

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Excerpt:

In an observant piece, the Road to Bali, blogger Tom Maguire addresses the implicit media balance. He does so by calling attention to just one relevant question that the media might have profitably asked our president: did you take new bride Michelle to Bali with you in 1993?

In the course of asking that question, not terribly significant in and of itself, Maguire sheds light on a more substantive question: why have the media paid so little attention to how Barack Obama came to write the book that would make his reputation, his acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.

As source, Maguire turns to Draper, who has spent time with Michelle and Barack and written the most detailed account to date of the genesis of Dreams. Blinded by Obama’s light, however, Draper fails to see the gaping holes in how own story line.

As Draper tells the story, a February 1990 New York Times article telling how Harvard has elected Obama president of the Harvard Law Review attracted the attention of a young agent named Jane Dystel. Draper implies that Obama’s “irresistible” writing skills netted him the position, which is not at all true.

In fact, the election was a popularity contest held in racially charged environment. The culturally ambiguous Obama won on his race-healing talents, not on his literary ones. He would contribute only one leaden, unsigned case note to the HLR and has not written another legal article since.

According to Draper, on November 28, 1990, Poseidon Press, a Simon & Schuster imprint, issued “a six-figure contract” to Obama for a book tentatively titled Journeys in Black and White. In his recent book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of An American Marriage, Christopher Andersen specifies the amount at $150,000.

In the hope of recruiting Obama, the University of Chicago Law School offered him an office in the law school to use for finishing the book, and there he spent 1991 and 1992. Nearly two years passed, and Obama could not produce. “I just can’t get it down on paper,” Draper quotes an Obama confession to confidante Valerie Jarrett in 1992. “I’d much rather hang out with Michelle than focus on this.”

Although Draper would never say so, this represented a failure of character as much it did a failure of talent. Obama had pocketed $75,000 of that advance and promised in return a manuscript by June 15, 1992. He had more than eighteen months to complete a memoir, the easiest of all genres. It required minimal research, no footnotes, and a narrative that needed not be factual as long as it was plausible.

As a point of comparison, I was offered a contract in April 2005 to write a memoir with a deadline of September 1, 2005. In other words, I had four months to do what Obama could not do in eighteen. To complicate matters mine was to be a story of growing up in the age of Muhammad Ali. So, in addition to writing, I read roughly 30-40 books on boxing and related subjects during that period and watched scores of fight films and documentaries.

I set as a goal a thousand words a day, and I made the September 1 deadline. It would have helped a lot if I had ever learned to type, but to me missing the deadline was unthinkable if for no other reason that I, like Obama, had signed a contract and accepted an advance. Although Sucker Punch was my fourth published book, I can assure you that my advance was considerably less than that of the untested Obama.

In any case, the June 15, 1992 deadline came and went without a manuscript from Obama.

As Draper blithely notes, Obama had other things on his mind, namely his impending October 3rd marriage to Michelle. On October 20, 1992, according to Draper, Poseidon terminated Obama’s contract.

Andersen adds a detail that mythmaker Draper chooses to omit. Obama feared that Simon & Schuster would demand the $75,000 already advanced. Writes Andersen,

“But when Barack informed them that he had spent the money—and that he and his wife were still chipping away at their massive student loan debt—the publisher agreed not to press the issue.”

In other words, Obama asked for and received an undeserved bailout. A pattern was developing here.

The tenacious agent Jane Dystel managed to find another publisher, Times Books, and secured a smaller advance, $40,000.Draper tells us that Obama used the advance “to fulfill his outstanding financial obligation to Poseidon.” Andersen’s take sounds more credible.

“Now he’s got to produce,” writes Draper. “But how?” Although the sanctuary at the University of Chicago and a previous retreat to a friend’s Wisconsin farm had done no good, Obama hit upon the idea of going to Bali to unblock. (For Sucker Punch, I went to my cabin on Lake Erie).

As blogger Maguire notes, the pre-election myth, advanced by the New York Times and others, is that Michelle accompanied him. Wrote the Times on May 18, 2008, Obama “eventually retreated to Bali for several months with his wife, Michelle.”

A more recent and less romantic version, advanced by Draper and by the Times as well, is that Obama went by himself. “For a month,” writes Draper, “he is a lone figure pacing on the white sand and hammering on his laptop. . . . “

Andersen describes the Obamas as “drowning in debt” during this period. How either Barack or Michelle could have afforded to go to Bali during this period, for one month or three, remains something of a mystery.

Mysterious too is how the media could leave unresolved such glaring contradictions in the biography of the world’s most famous man.

Maguire highlights still another hole in the Draper narrative.

Incredibly, in a 5,000-word article on Obama’s development as a writer, Draper says nothing about what happened between early 1993 when Obama returned from Bali to June 1995 when Dreams was published. Draper leaves the impression that the month-long Bali high was just what Obama needed to fire his synapses.

Andersen is much more credible here. As he tells it, Bali proved no more helpful than any other retreat. At the urging of Michelle, the “hopelessly blocked” Obama finally turned to “friend and Hyde Park neighbor” Bill Ayers to help him.

Andersen’s details are specific. The Obamas were convinced of “Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer.” Barack particularly liked the novelistic style of To Teach, a 1993 book by Ayers. The key sentence in Andersen’s account is the one that follows: “[The Obama family] oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers.”

Adds Andersen, “Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Book.” Based on my own research, I would argue that Ayers actually wrote the book’s best sections.

Obama’s published efforts before Dreams show not a wisp of the skill on display in Dreams. Not surprisingly, Draper overlooks those early efforts.

With his man crush trumping his critical insights, Draper chooses not to relate the fate of plucky agent Dystel. That story was hard to miss. The proudly liberal but seriously disgusted publisher Peter Osnos went public three years ago.

According to Osnos, Obama dumped his devoted long time agent after Dreams took off and then signed a seven-figure deal with Crown, using only a by-the-hour attorney.

Ann Dunham at Tanaha, Bali 1990s

Who took the pictures ?

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