Just who is Barack Obama?

So who is Imam Sidney Sharif?
He is a member of the Nation of Islam

Esther Sharif

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:Hd67rAKQvr0J:www.azdem.org/article/541+%22esther+sharif%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=14&gl=us&client=news

Volunteers to help at the Democratic Convention

http://www.freedomsenemies.com/_more/obama.htm
Barak Obama is 50% Caucasian, 43.75% Arab, and only 6.25% Negro-African. He doesn’t have the lawful 12.5% Negro-African to legally claim to be African-American. Barak Obama is ARAB-AMERICAN.

http://www.masnet.org/prof_personality.asp?id=1508 http://www.bufford.politicalgateway.com/main/columns/read.html?col=737 http://www.themidnightsun.org/?p=1613 http://biz.yahoo.com/ibd/080115/issues.html?.v=1 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/01/08/wkenya308.xml http://kennethelamb.blogspot.com/2008/02/barak-obama-questions-about-ethnic.html http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_03_12/feature.html http://www.newswithviews.com/Ryter/jon212.htm http://barackobamacandidate.org/ http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2007/3/28/142319.shtml

From someone who returned to this Country on Feb 11 this year after vacationing in Egypt and Israel. “We were asked everywhere about the Presidential race in America. There was great interest. The Jews came up to us and asked us many questions. They said they do not want the Clintons again. They warned us that Obama is a Muslim, not a Christian. In Egypt, the Arabs said the same thing to us; they said Obama is Muslim and they are amazed that Americans would consider electing a Muslim President of America!!”

So who is Imam Sidney Sharif?
He is a member of the Nation of Islam

http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/legisnet90/summary/900SR0110.html

Senate Sponsors: OBAMA.

Short description: 11/1/97-ISLAMIC COMMUNITY DAY

Synopsis of Bill as introduced: Declares November 1, 1997 to be South Shore Islamic Community Center Day.

Last action on Bill: SESSION SINE DIE

Last action date: 99-01-12

Location: Senate

Amendments to Bill: AMENDMENTS ADOPTED: HOUSE - 0 SENATE - 0

END OF INQUIRY

90 SR0110
LRB9007260KBkbA

1 SENATE RESOLUTION

2 WHEREAS, Since 1995, the South Shore Islamic Community

3 Center, located at 2672 E. 75th Street, has worked to improve

4 life for the community of South Shore, and for the City of 5 Chicago as well; and

6 WHEREAS, Formally a tavern called the “Bird Cage”, the

7 home to the Community Center was purchased by Imam Sidney R.

8 Sharif and his wife Esther D. Sharif; with hard work and only

9 their money, the Sharif’s converted the building into a

10 valued part of the community; the City of Chicago razed two

11 buildings next to the Center, making the neighborhood feel

12 more comfortable for visitors to the Community Center; and

13 WHEREAS, The Center provides a safe and comfortable

14 atmosphere for prayer and meditation; the Center provides a

15 food giveaway each year; the Center sponsors a free summer

16 lunch program for needy children; and successfully sponsored

17 one of the most Safe Night city-wide celebrations in 1996, a

18 program helping families and friends with their children

19 celebrate the new year without drugs or alcohol; and

20 WHEREAS, The South Shore Islamic Community Center

21 sponsors programs that aid in the clean-up of the community;

22 the Center sponsors a community service program for youth

23 through the Juvenile Courts Probation department; they have

24 established the Youth for Community Awareness and Development

25 Team, or “Youth Cad”; they have sponsored educational trips

26 for children to various institutions throughout the Chicago

27 area, including DePaul University; and have made their

28 community more aware of gangs, drugs, and domestic violence

29 issues by setting up counseling in these areas; therefore, be

30 it

31 RESOLVED, BY THE SENATE OF THE NINETIETH GENERAL ASSEMBLY

32 OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that we salute the South Shore -2- LRB9007260KBkbA

1 Islamic Community Center for their great work in making their

2 community a better place to live; and be it further

3 RESOLVED, That we declare November 1, 1997 to be the

4 South Shore Islamic Community Center Day; and be it further

5 RESOLVED, That a suitable copy of this resolution be

6 presented to South Shore Islamic Community Center.

So who is Imam Sidney Sharif?
He is a member of the Nation of Islam

92nd ILLINOIS General Assembly: Last action date: AUG-16-2001

92nd General Assembly
Summary of SB0750

*****HALAL FOOD ACT*****

Full Text Bill Status
Senate Sponsors:
RADOGNO-WALSH,L-OBAMA-VIVERITO-SILVERSTEIN, SMITH, HENDON,
SHAW, MADIGAN,L, JONES,E, CRONIN, HALVORSON, TROTTER,
LAUZEN, O’MALLEY, PHILIP, CLAYBORNE, DEL VALLE, SHADID,
CULLERTON, DELEO, DONAHUE, PARKER, DEMUZIO,
BOMKE, SULLIVAN, DILLARD, LINK, WALSH,T AND GEO-KARIS.

House Sponsors:
DART-LYONS,EILEEN-KLINGLER-ZICKUS

Short description:
HALAL FOOD ACT

Synopsis of Bill as introduced:
Deletes everything. Creates the Halal Food Act. Contains only a
short title provision.
SENATE AMENDMENT NO. 1.
Adds reference to:
815 ILCS 505/2KK new
Deletes everything. Creates the Halal Food Act. (”Halal” food is
defined to mean food that is prepared under and maintained in strict
compliance with the laws of the Islamic religion.) Makes it a Class B
misdemeanor for any person to: make a statement that tends to
deceive or otherwise lead a reasonable individual to believe that a
non-halal food product is halal; falsely represent any food sold,
prepared, served, or offered for sale to be halal; remove or destroy
the original identification affixed to food commodities to indicate
they are halal; or engage in certain other conduct. Amends the
Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act. Provides
that a dealer who prepares, distributes, sells, or exposes
for sale any food represented to be halal shall disclose the basis
upon which that representation is made by posting the information
required by the Director of Agriculture in a conspicuous
place upon the premises at which the food is sold or exposed
for sale. Provides that a violation is an unlawful practice.

(snip....more at link)
http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/legisnet92/summary/920SB0750.html

So who is Imam Sidney Sharif?
He is a member of the Nation of Islam

Crime and Corrections: An Al-Islamic Perspective (Paperback)

by Sidney Rahim Sharif (Author), Sydney R. Sharif (Author)

No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
http://www.amazon.ca/Crime-Corrections-Sidney-Rahim-Sharif/dp/093578215X

So who is Imam Sidney Sharif?
He is a member of the Nation of Islam

In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam

http://books.google.com/books?id=Z9ufS6aXctQC&dq=+Imam+Sidney+Sharif&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0

“In the Name of Elijah Muhammad” tells the story of the Nation of Islam—its rise in northern inner-city ghettos during the Great Depression through its decline following the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975 to its rejuvenation under the leadership of Louis Farrakhan. Mattias Gardell sets this story within the context of African American social history, the legacy of black nationalism, and the long but hidden Islamic presence in North America. He presents with insight and balance a detailed view of one of the most controversial yet least explored organizations in the United States—and its current leader. Beginning with Master Farad Muhammad, believed to be God in Person, Gardell examines the origins of the Nation. His research on the period of Elijah Muhammad’s long leadership draws on previously unreleased FBI files that reveal a clear picture of the bureau’s attempts to neutralize the Nation of Islam. In addition, they shed new light on the circumstances surrounding the murder of Malcolm X. With the main part of the book focused on the fortunes of the Nation after Elijah Muhammad’s death, Gardell then turns to the figure of Minister Farrakhan. From his emergence as the dominant voice of the radical black Islamic community to his leadership of the Million Man March, Farrakhan has often been portrayed as a demagogue, bigot, racist, and anti-Semite. Gardell balances the media’s view of the Nation and Farrakhan with the Nation’s own views and with the perspectives of the black community in which the organization actively works. His investigation, based on field research, taped lectures, and interviews, leads to the fullest account yet of the Nation of Islam’s ideology and theology, and its complicated relations with mainstream Islam, the black church, the Jewish community, extremist white nationalists, and the urban culture of black American youth, particularly the hip-hop movement and gangs.

So who is Imam Sidney Sharif?
He is a member of the Nation of Islam

The African-American Image in Crisis: Al-Islam Or Hell By Sidney Rahim Sharif
http://books.google.com/books?id=jEG9AAAACAAJ&dq=sidney+rahim+sharif

So who is Imam Sidney Sharif?
He is a member of the Nation of Islam

Correct link to page with info on the Imam: http://books.google.com/books?id=Z9ufS6aXctQC&pg=PA107&lpg=PA107&dq=+Imam+Sidney+Sharif&source=web&ots=PzaHWTfRNP&sig=r-YFlsZ33cxL7sjJEs0lX6DOq8w&hl=en

Saturday, February 16, 2008
Obama: Arab American?
Kenneth Lamb, journalist of some note, posits an interesting argument to Obama Hussein’s roots on his blog, Reading Between the Lines
http://kennethelamb.blogspot.com/2008/02/barak-obama-questions-about-ethnic.html .

Please go here
http://kennethelamb.blogspot.com/2008/02/barak-obama-questions-about-ethnic.html

and read it all.Yes, it’s important. Add it to the troubling pot
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/muslim_in_the_white_house/index.html

of where Obama Hussein’s allegiances lie.
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/kenyas_killing_fields/index.html

Obama Hussein, descendant from Arab slave traders. Ouch. Spin that.

The thing is, the media and the Democrats are touting his “African American” background and using it to mine white liberal guilt (millions of white folks are voting for him to prove they are not racists!) So it stands to reason that we expose his actual descendancy from Arab slave traders - the worst practitioners of racism and human trafficking (even still, even now.) Hardly the “only man that can fix America’s soul”
http://stoptheaclu.com/archives/2008/02/16/obamassiah-mender-of-broken-souls/

as Michelle Barack
http://tinyurl.com/28n22m

keeps reminding us. BTW, there is nothing wrong with the American soul.

Brack Obama: Washington Post, Chicago Tribune investigations confirm autobiography lies; now asking: Is “African-American” a lie too
http://kennethelamb.blogspot.com/2008/02/barak-obama-questions-about-ethnic.html

Synopsis: The author opens citing the work of Mr. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post. Mr. Cohen’s columns about the “composites,” rearranged timelines, and complete fabrication of events in Sen. Obama’s autobiography are the basis for a further investigation into Mr. Obama’s claim to be “African-American.”

(NOTE: This IS NOT a rehash of the discredited discussion of either his education in Islamic schools, or any other ties to Islam. His religion, and education, outside of citing his Harvard attendance, play no role whatsoever in this article. THIS ARTICLE PRESENTS NEW, PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED documentation concerning his ethnic identity claims. It is based upon original research that the author openly invites for further inquiry and academic verification in his preface to Mr. Cohen.)

I disagree with Lamb on this. I think Obama’s time in Indonesia is seminal. Even when CNN attempted to “debunk” it -
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/22/obama.madrassa/

all they could do is discuss the level of religiosity - “I came here to Barack Obama’s elementary school in Jakarta looking for what some are calling an Islamic madrassa ... like the ones that teach hate and violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Vause said on the “Situation Room” Monday. “I’ve been to those madrassas in Pakistan ... this school is nothing like that.”

CNN acknowledged Obama lived in Indonesia as a child, from 1967 to 1971, with his mother and Muslim stepfather and has acknowledged attending a Muslim school, but “an aide said it was not a madrassa”.

Documentation of his actual ethnic background demonstrates Mr. Obama is not an “African-American” as defined in United States law. This research was initiated by a request from a daily news publication of international reputation in New York City.

The story then moves to documenting his father’s genealogy. This study indicates Sen. Obama is actually Arab-American. The significance of this is that “the soul and substance of Mr. Obama’s claim to fame” rest entirely on his being “the first” African-American to achieve whatever it is that Mr. Obama is claiming at the time. If Mr. Obama is not legally an African-American, then his claims collapse. While there may still be historic firsts, for example, being the first Arab-American to be the president of the Harvard Law Review, those claims are not the star-appeal of his entire political life, and the basis of his current celebrity star status. If he is not African-American, then he is not what has propelled him up the political ladder; he is not, as described by one journalist riding Mr. Obama’s campaign plane, what is currently capturing America’s “cult” attention.

The author includes a section that notes the double-standard Oprah Winfrey applied in her handling of Mr. Obama’s autobiographical fabrications vis a vis her reaction to much less in a book by another author she promoted. It calls upon her to explain her double-standards, and asks, reasonably under the circumstances, if her double-standards are racist.

Go read it all ................ there is a lot there to absorb,
http://kennethelamb.blogspot.com/2008/02/barak-obama-questions-about-ethnic.html

particularly his correspondence to Richard Cohen at WaPo.

January 10, 2008 Edition > Section: Opinion

The Kenya Connection
BY DANIEL JOHNSON
January 10, 2008
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/69273

As he reminded us again after losing narrowly to Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, Barack Obama likes to evoke Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.

We must all hope that, like King’s, Mr. Obama’s dream is “deeply rooted in the American dream.” But before giving him the keys to the White House, Americans might like to know a little more about the content of Mr. Obama’s dream.

Let me propose an unlikely place to start looking: Kenya. Even in the midst of the primaries, the horrific scenes from that country since the disputed election on December 27 will not have escaped most people. In particular, the burning of a church with up to 50 men, women, and children inside, while machete-armed mobs slaughter up to 600 more people, have evoked memories of the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Who is behind these massacres? The opposition leader, Raila Odinga, has had a good press in the West, after he accused the president, Mwai Kibaki, of rigging the election. But the victims of the recent violence have mostly been members of Mr. Kibaki’s tribe, the Kikuyu, while those who have gone berserk are supporters of Mr. Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement, which is dominated by the rival Luo tribe.

Whether Mr. Odinga has ordered his men to commit murder and arson is unclear. But his own background does not exactly suggest enthusiasm for democracy and the rule of law. Mr. Odinga’s father, Oginga Odinga, led the Communist opposition during the Cold War and Raila Odinga was educated in Communist East Germany.

In 1982 he was implicated in a failed coup against the then president Daniel Arap Moi. His eldest son is named after Fidel Castro and his daughter after Winnie Mandela.

Even more sinister has been Mr. Odinga’s electoral pact with the National Muslim Leaders’ Forum — a hardline Islamist organization that represents Kenya’s Muslim minority. According to this document, dated August 29, 2007, Mr. Odinga promised the Muslim leaders that, if elected, he would establish Sharia courts, not only in the northern and coastal regions where Kenyan Muslims are concentrated, but throughout the country.

He also promised to impose Muslim dress codes on women, ban alcohol and pork, indoctrinate children, ban Christian preaching, and dismiss the Commissioner of Police “who has allowed himself to be used by heathens and Zionists.”

In short, Mr. Odinga in effect offered to Islamize Kenya in return for Muslim votes, despite the fact that Muslims make up only 10% of the population, compared to the 80% who are Christian. Mr. Odinga himself is nominally an Anglican, yet he signed a document that refers to Islam throughout as “the one true religion” and denigrates Christians as “worshippers of the cross.”

Whether it is likely, as Mr. Odinga claims, that his party won the election with such a program, only to have it stolen by Mr. Kibaki, I cannot say. Nor am I qualified to speculate about why Mr. Odinga threw in his lot with the Islamists. It should certainly concern us that one of Africa’s most stable and pro-Western countries is apparently threatened with the same grim fate that has befallen other East African states, such as Sudan and Somalia.

What, you will be asking by now, what does any of this have to do with Barack Obama? Well, Mr. Obama’s father came from Kenya and his son is proud to call himself a Luo. His Kenyan relations boast that, even if they cannot get a Luo into the Kenyan presidential residence, they can look forward to a Luo in the White House.

Indeed, the connection may be even closer than a tribal one. Mr. Odinga even claims that Mr. Obama is his cousin, because the senator’s father was Mr. Odinga’s maternal uncle. Whether or not this true, the two men are friends and political allies.

In August 2006, Mr. Obama visited Kenya and spoke in support of Mr. Odinga’s candidacy at rallies in Nairobi. The Web site Atlas Shrugs has even posted a photograph of the two men side by side. More recently, Mr. Odinga says that Mr. Obama interrupted his campaigning in New Hampshire to have a telephone conversation with his African cousin about the constitutional crisis in Kenya.

What should Americans make of Mr. Obama’s Kenyan connection? If he has been putting tribal or family considerations above America’s national interest by supporting Mr. Odinga’s anti-Western candidacy, it raises serious questions about his judgement.

At the time of his visit in 2006, President Kibaki’s spokesman complained that Mr. Obama was behaving like a “stooge” of Mr. Odinga — which was at best undignified for a visiting American senator, and at worst unwarranted interference in the internal politics of another country.

Even more serious are the doubts raised by Mr. Obama’s attitude toward Islam, which has so far received much less scrutiny than might be expected in a post-September 11 presidential election.

If Mr. Obama did not know about Mr. Odinga’s electoral deal with the Kenyan Islamists when he offered his support, then he should have known. If he did know, then he is guilty of lending the prestige of his office to America’s enemies in the global war on terror. We need to know exactly what Mr. Obama knew about Mr. Odinga, and precisely when he knew it.

January 10, 2008 Edition

http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2008/01/odinga-obama-and-lack-of-courage.html
05 January 2008
Odinga, Obama and the lack of courage

I started looking at Kenya yesterday as Pamela
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/

sent out word for help on trying to substantiate some things writers had seen going on there
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/01/obama-islam-and.html

(and her most recent article here).
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/01/obamas-oginga-o.html

As my readers know I am not an: African specialist, Kenya specialist, up on the tribal politics of Africa, or even having it impinge upon my consciousness overmuch. Put me more in the ‘understanding the systems of organized crime and terrorism’ arena, with all sorts of other fun bits of technological weirdness thrown in. Or just weirdness as the case may be. Still, even with basic historical overview of Africa, I can’t say it has been in the forefront of my thoughts long or often.

Going from the colonial period, which was bad, to this period of kleptocracies, autocracies, totalitarian societies, tribal conflicts on a National scale, and the movement of drug runners, gun runners, organized crime and jihadis into the region is, in many ways, worse than mere imperial paternalism. But the political rule is that home grown despots are much more hated than far-off ones and ‘all politics is local’ thus making this as a better off deal than the previous period. If you trust in the inalienable rights of man, then you also trust that folks will come to a good end once they understand that they are the power in their lives, not the government.

Say, someone has let the folks there know of this concept, right?

So starting out on the pathway to enlightenment, which is less dark than totality but less light then the brightness of the sun doth shining upon solar reflecting mirrors, I put my ignorance to work for me and found the first name that I would never, ever think of when looking at Kenya. Really, there is no one I expected less to show up than Dick Morris (via opendemocracy.net). Mr. Schmoozer showing up in Kenya? WTF?

But, when Raila Odinga, the man who lost the election folks think he should have won, was looked at, things in the political landscape of Kenya suddenly came into focus as Dick Morris had, apparently, been helping out here and there for awhile now. So when you see things like Orange Democratic Movement (hearkening over the the Orange Revolution in Ukraine),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Revolution

a ‘million person march’ ala Louis Farrakhan’s march
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Man_March

and then other million person marches afterwards, and National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) hinting at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition/PUSH,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow/PUSH

things did start to fall into place. Dick Morris is a past master at playing on such themes and would avail himself of any indigenous views along similar lines and help to make such things more palatable to the US political palate. Mind you these Kenyan versions have zero connection to the things they try to lead one to, but that isn’t a worry if you are pushing talking points and not substance.

How Clintonian!

Now, popping back to the Open Democracy article, I will extract a small piece that let me get my bearings on how things went after the colonial period. It wasn’t in-depth, that would come later... much later... but for a start it gets some of the ‘lay of the land’ down:

The founding president Kenyatta was Kikuyu, and the Central province, the country’s breadbasket, has better infrastructure that most regions in the country. Quite unsurprisingly, Majimbo (federalism) came to the fore during the referendum and subsequent election campaigns, as the best arrangement to even the country’seconomic disparities.

It was rooted in earlier conflicts of the Moi era (1978 – 2002). Moi was from a minority tribe in the Rift Valley. This became an epicentre of politically instigated so-called “ethnic clashes” directed at migrant communities of Kikuyus and Luhyas, who were perceived as opposition supporters. The Moi regime orchestrated seasons of blood that recurred in election years between 1992 and 2002, pogroms that succeeded in scuttling the Kikuyu and Luhya vote as they were displaced during election time, while making a score for Majimbo proponents who believed (and possibly still do) its implementation includes expelling “foreign” tribes in their midst.

The 2005 constitutional review, which had been in abeyance for over a decade, provided a dress rehearsal for an ODM “people power” revolution. Its “Mt Kenya Mafia” sentiments were seen as a rebuttal against the conservative Kikuyu elite who had kept the country pretty much under their control. The ODM bigwigs followed a revolution manual where ethnicity was at the core of its propaganda machine. They were gearing up for the second phase of their propaganda war. This included whipping up ethnic animosities in which the Kikuyu were demonised, hiring pollsters to claim massive leads so as to demoralise and scuttle the rival vote while making constant claims of rigging to prepare the ground for rejecting the poll results if defeated.

Even in the referendum Odinga claimed a verdict in favour of the government would mean the contest had been rigged. In the event, the ODM won it resoundingly so claims of rigging did not arise. It was also seen as a vote-of-no confidence against the government, with Odinga temporarily asserting pressure on Kibaki to resign.
Actually all of the tribes in Kenya have been uprooted during the colonial era, some just made better of that than others, but everyone has a grievance. That is the sort of thing that happens when railroads and workers camps go in: native folks end up having to live elsewhere. The Moi regime would make that *worse* and displace poor tribesmen of various ethnicities to keep a tribal ruling elite in power. That’s right: elite Kikuyu would force their poor tribesmen to shift constantly so as not to vote against them.

What is coming in to replace that is ethnically divisive politics of the ‘ethnic people power’ concept to use as a bludgeon against other ethnicities in Kenya. This is not Philippine People Power, crossing tribes and ethnicities to unite against a corrupt regime, nor is it precisely the Orange Revolution which has some elements of this in the pro-/anti-Russia blocs. No this is the ‘People Power of the Balkans’ sort, used to perform ‘ethnic cleansing’ and disruption based on ethnic alignment. Also note the Clintonesque ‘pre-preparation’ of the election battle to stage it so that even in losing you can claim victory due to vote rigging while, if you win, you keep silent. That is a ‘double standard’ and if a vote has problems even if you *win* you are to look into those problems so that they do not repeat in future elections. So by pitting ethnicity against ethnicity, rich against the poor, and by claiming victory no matter if you actually win or not, you end up with things like: the 2000 election in the US, voting in Venezuela, Mexico, Ukraine, and other places where this is performed. Like Weimar Germany.

This is *not* a pathway to clean elections, democracy and civil government, but one to chaos and authoritarian government with ethnic hatred and demonization as its basis. If you don’t like the outcome of the last election and think it was rigged: demonstrate that problem and find ways to *fix it*. Playing divisive, power politics is not a long term help to you, your ideals or your Nation unless you are fixing yourself up to be a dictator. Then its a great way forward.

Onto Raila Odinga, the man behind the Orange Democratic Movement, National Rainbow Coalition, Million person march and instigator of the recent unrest due to losing a close election. Or maybe not, we will not know as Mr. Odinga does not want to go through the civil court system to work out problems with the election and, instead, looks towards marches and riots to cement his non-win victory. Back on 31 JUL 2007
http://www.eastandard.net/hm_news/news.php?articleid=1143972118

The Standard, in Kenya, looked at MP Odinga and had some of the following as their viewpoint:

Apart from meeting the top executives in the US, other events lined up included hosting Kenyans at black-tie dinners where a plate went for $100 (Sh7,300). Other dinners he attended drew about 300 people, mostly organised by his supporters, who paid between $40 (Sh3,000) and $70 (Sh5,200) a plate.

His biography, Raila Odinga: An Enigma in Kenyan Politics, launched locally in July is selling at $50 (Sh3,650). The MP then left an indelible mark on his audience that he would stop at nothing short of the presidency.

“Raila is not talking as if he is prepared to play second fiddle to anyone. He is talking as the person who has put his whole in the coming presidential elections, which makes him a danger to the ODM-Kenya coalition,” said Mr Maurice Mwangi of Maryland, who attended one of the dinners.

[..]

Raila’s list of local and foreign political friends — thought to be immensely wealthy — remains a closely guarded secret, for strategic reasons.

While still Energy minister, Raila re-established and nurtured his links with the Libyan Government of Col Muammar Gaddafi, where again he not only did good business in oil importation, but also got substantial material support during the 2002 General Election.

Besides supporting Raila’s political cause, the Libyans also played a key role in stabilising Raila in the oil business. Reliable sources say that Libyans bankrolled the Narc campaign with some $3 million (about Sh210 million), thanks to Raila’s good contacts in the oil-rich land of Gaddafi.

There is no doubt, therefore, that if Raila becomes the ODM-Kenya presidential candidate, he can once more count on massive financial support from the North African country.

Besides Libya, Raila enjoys good links with the South African Government of Mr Thabo Mbeki while in Nigeria, he is known to have strong links with Gen Olusegun Obasanjo, who was a long time close friend of Raila’s father, the late Jaramogi Oginga Odinga.

[..]

For Raila, the linkage between politics and business goes much deeper than petroleum business. It is significant that the Odinga family business, Spectre International Ltd, acquired the then state-owned Kisumu Molasses Plant soon after Raila started politically cooperating with Moi.

However, the Lang’ata MP has consistently argued that the acquisition of the molasses plant was purely a business deal, which had nothing to do with politics. But his critics point at the coincidence between the time his family acquired the parastatal and Raila’s shift of political alliance.

Former Commissioner of Lands Mr Sammy Mwaita offered to sell the 240 acres on which the Kisumu Molasses Plant is built to Spectre International on January 11, 2001 at a price of Sh3.6 million at a time when Raila started working closely with Moi. By June that year, he was Energy minister.

Acquisition of the molasses plant

Significantly, Spectre had applied for the same land in a letter of February 18, 1999, but the Government at the time had rejected the request. Titles were prepared in favour of Spectre on February 3, 2002 for a 99-year lease backdated to September 1, 2001.

When the Odinga family started the process that led to the acquisition of the molasses plant in 2001, Raila had already established good business contacts in South Africa. Energem Resources Incorporated, an international firm quoted on the Toronto Stock Exchange, had been looking for an investment opportunity in Kenya for a long time and the Kisumu Molasses Plant was just right.

Soon after taking over the plant from the Government, Raila struck a lucrative deal with Energem, whereby the Canadian firm bought 55 per cent of Kisumu Molasses plant.

The Canadians also ploughed in millions of dollars to rehabilitate the plant and it is today one of the country’s largest manufacturing concerns employing hundreds of people and producing at least 60,000 litres of industrial ethanol for local consumption and export

[..]

Back to his whirlwind tour: Raila visited Dubai on a business trip, where he attended the Dubai Grand Exhibition. Dubai is increasingly becoming a haven where big business deals in Asia are sealed, thus offering a fertile ground for the MP to oil his campaign machinery.

From Dubai, Raila headed to Seychelles for a holiday with his family. In January, Raila visited the UK to consult with experts on the way forward on constitution review.

It was after this that the National Democratic Institute (NDI) picked him as a member of a high-powered delegation to conduct a pre-election assessment in Nigeria. Here, NDI President Kenneth Wollack accompanied him. Incidentally, the NDI runs a political party finance initiative in some African countries and other parts of the world.

During his Nigeria visit, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) MP met President Obasanjo, a long time friend, who had been in office since 1999, but relinquished power this year.

The oil rich country is one of the key nations in Africa that the Lang’ata MP hopes would back his candidature. With a long list of oil magnates, Obasanjo could prove an invaluable ally.

Diaspora is an increasingly influential constituency

Earlier, Raila had been to Saudi Arabia and South Korea, the world’s 10th largest economy and one of the most technologically advanced. While in Seoul, Raila attended the International Peace Federation Conference and later used the opportunity to meet an influential religious leader of a church known to have millions of followers across the globe.

In May, Raila left for Germany, where he visited his former university, Magdeburg, on invitation. In June, Raila flew to the US, where he held talks with Senator Barack Obama, one of the candidates seeking the Democratic Party ticket to vie for the American presidency.

In July, Raila was in Australia for 10 days where he met businessmen and Kenyans living abroad. The visit also took him to Sydney, where he met more business executives and addressed Kenyans living in the city. The Diaspora is an increasingly influential constituency that observers argue the national political class can ignore at its own peril.
There is, apparently, corruption and personal profit being made by Raila Odinga by being a Member of Parliament, and then using those riches to further his political aspirations. Actually the political set-up in Kenya is so chaotic that none of the candidates standing for election for President is being backed by the parties that backed them for reform in 2002.
http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3564&Itemid=5821

In such an atmosphere it isn’t so much which party backs you as who you know that can give you backing in whatever party you wind up in, plus a good communications strategy.
http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3616&Itemid=5822

That, for Raila Odinga gets to be a pretty lengthy list, after his being in government and a MP for his district.

The list of his contacts that support him, just from the above, include:

Spectre International Ltd. - Odinga family business
Jaramogi Oginga Odinga - His father, deceased
Mohammar Kaddafy (or the spelling du jour)
Thabo Mbeki - South Africa
Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo - Nigeria
Energem Resources Incorporated - South Africa, Toronto Stock Exchange Listed
National Democratic Institute (NDI)
Kenneth Wollack - President NDI
Rev. Sun Myung Moon - Unification Church
http://www.peace-tour.org/tour2006/nation/kenya.php
( Unification Peace Tour 18 JUL 2006, Religion News Blog
http://www.religionnewsblog.com/15741/commanded-by-heaven-to-unite-the-world
26 AUG 2006, Lobbying Germany on behalf of Rev. Moon to end the entrance ban
http://www.vereinigungskirche.de/einreise/index.html
- open letter, signed )
http://www.vereinigungskirche.de/einreise/english/letters/openletter%20to%20Merkel.doc

Barack Obama - US Senator and Presidential candidate

And places with possible contacts:

Dubai
Australia
Germany
Saudi Arabia
South Korea

Quite the laundry list of individuals and organizations, isn’t it? Instead of tackling that directly, I’ll use the indirect approach so we can get an idea of Raila Odinga’s politics as of late, especially as it relates to the business world. One of the things that stands out is his opposition to privatize government corporations.
http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2707&Itemid=5813

Doing a quick check at the Business Daily Africa
http://www.bdafrica.com/

site one can find him opposing the privatization of Safaricom mobile phone (28 AUG 2007)
http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2707&Itemid=5813

and accused of being socialist and communist in favor of centralized economic management!

After that his committee would move to not accept
http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3699&Itemid=5813

the individuals nominated for the privitization positions. This would cause problems with small investors to the point where Mr. Odinga would need to allay fears
http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3674&Itemid=5812

by going to the stock exchange and allay the fears that he had caused by being seen as socialist/communist and centralizing in his outlook. You see it isn’t socialism its ‘controlled capitalism’!
http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4372&Itemid=5813

Yes government will just need to expand to exert this ‘control’
http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4706&Itemid=5813

... just like the problem of having good crops ruining the economy
http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4764&Itemid=5821

because oversupply drives prices down and government has to buy up far more than it expected which causes deficeit spending. People would just starve amidst all the food!

On the conspicuous consumption side there is his ‘first in Kenya’ Hummer,
http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2771&Itemid=5822

that really does set him apart from all the limousine politicians... nothing says ‘man of the people’ like a H3. This is driven, so to speak, by the candidate’s age and by this being his last chance to have any impact on Kenyan politics, as the next time around it is likely that the new, young professional class of Kenyans, especially in the Luo tribe, will displace the Odinga family dynasty.
http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3804&Itemid=5821

Not to speak of which many in what should be relatively safe districts feeling left out
http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4506&Itemid=5821

by the power-plays going on at the upper echelons of the parties involved.

There is, however, one very worrying part to all of this: the Memorandum of Understanding
http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4828&Itemid=5821

between Raila Odinga and the Moslems in Kenya
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/MOU_between_Raila_Odinga_and_Muslims.pdf

to turn Kenya into a Sharia based nation and start to get an idea of where the money comes from as it is money that is in the driver’s seat here. This starts with the corrupt politics of Raila Odinga (Source: ‘How Rich is Raila?’,
http://africanpress.wordpress.com/2007/04/26/how-rich-is-raila-the-odm-kenya-presidential-aspirant/
African Press International, 26 APR 2007):

How Raila acquired his billions.

Raila Odinga’s big break came in 2001 soon after he led his party, NDP, into a merger with KANU, the then ruling party. As Energy Minister in Moi’s government he was introduced to the family of Sheikh Abdukeder AlBakari, one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia with interests in petroleum drilling, petroleum exploration and export in the Middle East, Asia, USA and Africa.

Through the Saudi contacts,Raila was initiated into the lucrative world of oil business and soon enough he had joined the league of gig independent oil importers via his firm Pan African Petroleum Limited.

Industry sources say that one of the things that helped Raila make a quick buck in the oil business was a concessionary petroleum deal he struck with the Al Bakri Group where he was not only incorporated as a silent partner in the local arm of Al Bakri International but was also supplied with petroleum products from Saudi Arabia at subsidized prices which his firm would sell in the market at normal prices. That way,Raila was able to deftly beat the competition in oil business by occasional price undercutting.

While still Energy Minister,Raila re-established and nurtured his links with the Libyan government of Colonel Muammar Gadaffi where again he not only did good business in oil importation but also got substantial material support during the 2002 general elections.

Besides supporting Raila’s political causes, the Libyans also played a key role in stabilizing Raila in the oil business in a couple of ways. Industry sources say that between 2001 and 2002 when Raila served as Energy Minister,he received at least three consignments of petroleum products at very low prices which were later sold locally at market prices.

The overall turnover from the three Libyan consignments is reliably said to have been in the region of over half a billion shillings, a tidy sum of money in any language,enough to ensure that one crosses the Rubicon once and for all.

A. K. Al Bakri & Sons Holding
http://www.bakrienergy.com/

is the Saudi group headed by President & CEO Abdulkader Al Bakri, which has more outlets, subsidiaries and other companies than one can easily count. One of the prime contracts they would get
http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3007&Itemid=5822

is for the supply of jet fuel to Nairobi Airport, which allowed for undercutting of the competition there. This is the very same Abdulkader Al Bakri listed as a defendant in the First Amendment Complaint suit
http://www.september11terrorlitigation.com/pdf/Federal_Insurance_Company_First_Amended_Complaint.pdf

brought by various insurance companies against al Qaeda and associated organizations and individuals. Within that suit is mentioned documents (known as the Golden Chain document)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Chain

picked up by Bosnian police on a raid on a charitable front organization for al Qaeda in Sarajevo. One of the listed documents is the “Tareekh Osama” (”Osama’s History”) in which Abdulkader al Bakri aka Abdel Qader Bakri gets a prominent listing:

ABDEL QADER BAKRI (ABDULKADER [AL] BAKRI)
CEO, Bakri Group of Cos
CEO, Al Bakri International Power Co. Ltd (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
CEO, Al-Bakri Shipping Group (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
CEO, Alkhomasia Shipping and Maintenance Company Ltd (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
CEO, Red Sea Marine Services (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
CEO, Diners Club International (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
Bakri Group formed in April 2002 a JV with the Malaysian International Shipping
Corporation (MISC) to operate in Middle-East countries, including Yemen. MISC leased
super tanker MT Limburg when it was attacked on October 6, 2002, coming from Ra’s
Tannura (Saudi Arabia).
And then particular to one of the bin Laden brothers:

WAIL (WAEL HAMZA JULAIDAN)
Former Secretary General of the Muslim World League and Rabita Trust in Pakistan,
designated by the United States Treasury as SGDT
Receives donations from Suleiman Al Rashid, Abdulkader Bakri, Salahuddin Abduljawad,
Abdul Tahi Taher
So, when a man like Raila Odinga is linked with Abdulkader al Bakri, you are not making a minor connection, but one directly into al Qaeda. Such are the vagaries of making political bedfellows in other Nations.

Then there are some questions around the murder of Prof. Odhiambo Mbai in 2003, here seen by L. Muthoni Wanyeki in The East African on 22 SEP 2003:
http://www.nationaudio.com/News/EastAfrican/22092003/Opinion/Opinion2209200318.html

Murder or assassination? That was the question on everyone’s mind last week, following the fatal shooting of Prof Odhiambo Mbai.

About the fact that he was murdered, there is no doubt. I join other Kenyans in expressing my sympathies to members of his family as they struggle to come to terms with the loss. But was his murder an assassination?

If we define an assassination as a murder with a political motivation, the question that arises is what that motivation could have been.

Could his having chaired the devolution committee of the National Constitutional Conference be deemed sufficient motivation to classify his murder as an assassination? From comments made following his death, Prof Yash Pal Ghai apparently believes so. Particularly given that other members of Prof Mbai’s committee have since come forward with claims that they had received threats prior to his death.

[..]

Most importantly, however, is the fact that killing him no doubt would have an intimidating effect on members of his committee – particularly those who shared his own stand on devolution. But that effect has not stopped the committee from going on with its work. Nor has it stopped the NCC as a whole from convening. If anything, his death seems to have had the opposite effect – that of galvanising the NCC as a whole into appreciating the import and weight of its convocation.

It is for these reasons that I am presently loath to trace his murder to his involvement in the NCC. Although I could be – and willing to be – proved wrong.

Could his having been involved in the Liberal Democratic Party faction of National Rainbow Coalition then be deemed sufficient motivation to classify his murder as an assassination? Mirugi Kariuki’s warnings to Raila Odinga to recall the fate of Pio Gama Pinto, advisor to and ally of Oginga Odinga, lend some weight to this thesis – particularly as those warnings turned out to be unfortunately prophetic. And statements from many of the LDP aligned politicians show that they believe this thesis to be true.

What are the implications of assuming this thesis to be true? It is obvious that the National Alliance of Party Kenya faction of NARC seems to be increasingly intent on distancing Raila and LDP from the centre of power.

[..]

There is a possibility that the investigations will come up with answers that will satisfy Prof Mbai’s family’s need for justice. As well as our own need to understand what happened. So while we ignore the police’s admonition to refrain from crazy speculation, I will state only what cannot be disputed.

Whoever ordered this had ready and willing executioners for hire at hand. Thus, the bigger context is that of organised crime and insecurity. If there is anything that Prof Mbai’s untimely death pushes us to do, it is to address that context.
On 19 SEP 2003 Raila Odinga would absolve the government of all blame in the murder (The East African via Waybackmachine):
http://web.archive.org/web/20030920190522/http://www.eastandard.net/headlines/news19092003010.htm

Cabinet Minister Raila Odinga yesterday absolved the Government from blame in the murder of Prof Odhiambo Mbai but maintained that it was an assassination.

“Assassinations are not entirely the preserve of the Government and can be carried out by political opponents,” he said.

Raila said the basis of his statement when he visited Nairobi Hospital upon receiving the news of Mbai’s shooting was based on earlier remarks by some of the delegates who Mbai had confided in.

He said Mbai had told some of the delegates that he “had been warned to slow down or will be slowed down.”

“That was the basis of my statement at the time and I do not want to make any wild allegations or cast any aspersions. At times like this we have to maintain our cool,” he said.

Raila, however, maintained that Mbai’s killing was an attempt to try and intimidate delegates at the ongoing National Constitutional Conference.

He argued that if Mbai’s killers were ordinary thieves they would have gone ahead to accomplish their mission in the house but said it is interesting that nothing was stolen.

Raila appealed to delegates to maintain their cool as the Government tries to solve the murder mystery.

[..]

Raila took issue with one of the dailies on their story of Raila’s stand on the murder. He said the daily had tried to portray him in negative light on his stand over the murder. “This is very irresponsible and I will begin to fight back,” he said.

He described Mbai’s murder as “cowardly, uncalled for, barbaric and primitive” and hailed the slain lecturer as one of the leading lights in the review process.

“The Government is not involved and it is getting to the root of the matter. Every effort is being made to track the killers and the President has personally expressed concern at the killing and wants the killers swiftly brought to book,” he said.

Yes, he would absolve the government even though the police investigation was ongoing. Mind you this is the committee that would be drafting up changes to the constitution of Kenya. On 12 JAN 2004 The East African Standard would be reporting the following (source: Africa News Update):
http://www.afrika.no/Detailed/4615.html

Through what appeared to the casual observer as haphazard creation of districts, Moi had ensured that the majority of delegates to the national constitutional conference (the Bomas talks or circus depending on what side of the divide you are on) were from Kanu strongholds.

These were to ensure that the Constitution that would come out of the ongoing process, was a document that would see Moi’s cronies ride roughshod over others and probably fulfil the desire of the former president to rule for life in or outside State House.

And in their haste to see Moi out, the then opposition did not see the trap that had been laid for them by the former ruler.

Raila who has come to be credited with the distinction of bringing down the giant that was Moi and created a king out of Mwai Kibaki (when will Raila himself become the king?), knew then as he does now that the review process would be his surest vehicle to power.

And whether or not he was involved in the selection of the Bomas district delegates most of who are Kanu damu, he has utilised the review process to his best advantage.

[..]

So well has Raila tuned the chairman of the review process that Ghai had the audacity to come out with both guns blazing and the fire directed at the Government when the late head of the devolution committee at Bomas, Prof Odhiambo Mbai, was murdered.

It is not also lost on observers that the LDP wing of Narc has depicted their NAK colleagues especially those who come from the Mt Kenya region, as power hungry individuals (I am not sure they are not), who have no intention of sharing power with anybody else. Little wonder then, that the delegates will jeer at President Kibaki and cheer Raila.

Raila who for a while played the cat and mouse game with former President Moi inside Kanu, is now playing a similar game with the current regime. But this one has higher stakes - for while he wanted Moi to sort of hand over power to him, he now wants (and impatiently at that) to take over power from the group holding it albeit constitutionally.

[..]

But they did not reckon with the review process, especially the Bomas meeting and the influence the Langata MP would have there. Even if he shouts from the top of highest of mountains, any sane Kenyan will tell you Raila wants to be the Prime Minister of this country. This job as envisaged by Bomas will either give him the position he craves as the most powerful man in the country, or become the springboard he needs to leap to the presidency.

And therein lies his major partisan interest (they say that is what constitution-makings is all about) in the review process. And that is why the calls by their NAK counterparts to have the Bomas process abandoned and taken over by experts, is sending chills down the spines of loyal LDP leaders and followers.

But the review process especially Bomas and its chairman are giving the NAK power wielders sleepless nights too; so damning is their mission to stop the Bomas process that even the advisory services of shrewd former Safina leader and an erstwhile political enemy of Kibaki, Paul Muite are not enough. Checking the wrath of the Wanjikus at Bomas will require more muscle than can be flexed by the man whose bright political career was halted by the Goldenberg boss a few years ago.

This group has tasted power and at it rawest at that. They are surrounding a president who is not 100 per cent hands on because of a temporary health problem brought about by an accident just before last year’s General Election.

The President’s handlers know that with a powerful prime minister, they will not have much breathing space and if that premier is Odinga, they will most likely not even be anywhere near the seat of power.

This is hardball politics of the ‘old school’ which leads to much blood on the streets if it gets out of hand, which it has in Kenya. And Raila Odinga and his LDP faction of Narc, now the ODM, feels that it is ‘entitled’ to run Kenya. This is seen in a 2005 country report on Kenya at the World Bank:
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTAFRSUMESSD/Resources/1729402-1150389437293/EIU_Country_Profile_Kenya.pdf

It soon became clear that NARC was seriously divided between the largely pro- Kibaki NAK (the “original” opposition grouping) and the LDP, under its de facto leader, Mr Odinga, which had defected from KANU. The two factions profoundly disagree over the proposed new constitution, and in particular over whether Kenya should stick with a presidential style of government, as has been the case since independence-the NAK view-or switch to a primeministerial system, as favoured by the LDP. Kenya does not currently have a prime minister, but the final draft constitutional proposals that emerged from the National Constitutional Conference (held at Bomas, a town outside Nairobi) in March 2004 call for the creation of such a position, with strong executive powers. The LDP’s stance is partly motivated by the belief that it is “owed” the prime-ministership under the terms of the pre-election Memorandum of Understanding. The NAK opposed a powerful presidency during the Moi era, but is now keen to preserve Mr Kibaki’s authority. The Kibaki camp believes that having twin centres of power would be a recipe for conflict and confusion. Mr Kibaki had originally promised a new constitution within 100 days of being elected, but this was a forlorn hope and the deadline has been extended several times. Under the latest plan a new constitution is due by the end of 2005, although further delays are possible (see Constitution, institutions and administration).
Now are we starting to get an idea of what kind of individual Raila Odinga is?

Then there is Raila Odinga’s Memorandum of Understanding with the Moslems in Kenya to turn the Nation into an Islamic State.
http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/MOU_between_Raila_Odinga_and_Muslims.pdf

Here is an excerpt from that agreement (via Wikileaks)
http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Kenya

and thanks to Pamela where I am cribbing this from:
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/01/jihad-in-kenya.html

b) Within 6 months re-write the Constitution of Kenya to recognize Shariah as the only true law sanctioned by
the Holy Quran for Muslim declared regions.

c) With immediate effect dismiss the Commissioner of Police who has allowed himself to be used by heathens and Zionists to oppress the Kenyan Muslim community.

g) Within one year facilitate the establishment of a Shariah court in every Kenyan divisional headquarters. [Note: everywhere in Kenya, not just in “Muslim declared regions.”]
The entire document is really quite an eye-opener, but the import of it is most chilling, considering the connections to Al Bakri and Kaddafy. Add that in with suspicious assassins at hand and one really does start to wonder just what is up with Raila Odinga.

A quick recap on Raila Odinga:

-Son of a former leader Oginga Odinga
-Utilizing a position of power to enrich his family business
-Utilizing a position of power to get contacts with a Saudi backer of al Qaeda
-Utilizing a position of power to get contacts with the Libyan leader Mohammar Gaddafy
-Utilizing a position of power to assure himself of petty luxuries, junkets and spending time with the rich and powerful across the globe
-Seeking to influence the constitutional drafting committee to ensure that the Prime Minister under the revised constitution will be more powerful than the President
-Feeling “owed” the Prime Minister’s position
-Signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the Muslim population (roughly 10% of Kenyan’s are Muslim) to shift Kenya towards Islam and becoming an Islamic state.
-Utilizing his contacts to bring in political advisor Dick Morris
-And close association with US Senator Barack Obama

So, to sum it up: Mr. Odinga feels ‘entitled’ to be Prime Minister of Kenya so as to turn it into a Sharia law following Islamic State.

Given that one wonders why Barack Obama
http://cbs2chicago.com/topstories/Barack.Obama.Kenya.2.331658.html

decided to take sides in the Kenyan problems, beyond his heritage there and talks with Raila Odinga who considers Obama to be a friend. I don’t go for the ‘intuitive grasp’ concept of personal politics for foreign policy, as I didn’t with the current President and Putin. There are enough problems via the State Dept without those personal feelings adding into the mix.

That is, however, just me. YMMV.

But then Sen. Obama has had some problems with this ‘foreign policy’ concept, hasn’t he?

Take for example, Iran, as seen in an interview with the Chicago Tribune on 25 SEP 2004 (via Sourcewatch):
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Barack_Obama:_U.S._presidential_election%2C_2008/On_war_with_Iran

[T]he big question is going to be, if Iran is resistant to these pressures [to stop its nuclear program], including economic sanctions, which I hope will be imposed if they do not cooperate, at what point ... if any, are we going to take military action?

Another lovely site that no leftist should complain about, the World Socialist Web Site, gives a further look on that interview in a 01 OCT 2004 article:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/oct2004/obam-o01.shtml

In an interview with the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune published September 26, Democratic Senate candidate Barack Obama said he would favor the use of “surgical” missile strikes against Iran if it failed to bow to Washington’s demand that it eliminate its nuclear energy program. Obama also said that, in the event of a coup that removed the Musharraf regime in Pakistan, the US should attack that nation’s nuclear arsenal.
And here we get yet another place that Sen. Obama would use force: Pakistan!

Why, the man is a virtual *hawk*, no?

Then the WSWS gives us a bit more from the interview:

He said: “With the Soviet Union, you did get the sense that they were operating on a model that we could comprehend in terms of, they don’t want to be blown up, we don’t want to be blown up, so you do game theory and calculate ways to contain. I think there are certain elements within the Islamic world right now that don’t make those same calculations.”

In the case of Pakistan, the Senate hopeful added, “I think there are elements within Pakistan right now—if Musharraf is overthrown and they took over—I think we would have to consider going in and taking those bombs out, because I don’t think we can make the same assumptions about how they calculate risks.”
Yes! Contingent risk analysis, exactly right! Which is, BTW, one of the reasons it became repugnant to let Saddam Hussein let everyone think he still *had* chemical and possibly biological weapons AND consort with all sorts of terrorists from al Qaeda to the PLO to various other groups less savory around the world.

Yes this is the man who is for the ‘politics of change’.

One would have thought it would be change for the *better* not for supporting an individual who wish to take over their country to make it an Islamic State.

Not to throw out empty rhetoric of saber rattling unless you actually mean what you say and support those that wish to hold Iran and the Islamic extremists and terrorists accountable. If that is the case Sen. Obama should have been voting for a stronger military so that the US can be prepared for an uncertain future going from bad to worse as terrorists of the Islamic kind only see Empire in their future.

Instead it is platitudes and never backing up a tough idea with actual commitment to it.

He puts forward the ‘politics of hope’.

Hope is many things.

Hope is a feeling and a strong one.

Hope is an idea that by working a future can be built that is better, if you hold to keeping others accountable for their actions.

Hope, most notably, is a town in Arkansas.

What it is NOT, however, is a strategy nor a foreign policy.

Sen. Obama wishes to be President.

It is time for him to back up his words and disavow friends wishing to institute tyranny because they feel that is what they are ‘owed’ and it is their ‘right’ to kill their way to power on the bodies of the innocent that they inspire to riots and murder.

But that is not ‘politics of hope’ or ‘politics of change’: it is actually meaning what you say and backing it up so that you can demonstrate that you have some moral fiber or set of beliefs that go beyond the words you speak.

So far, he has not met that challenge to himself.

The next President will be a War President.

Choose wisely as your life depends upon it.

War is a blessing compared with national degradation.
-Andrew Jackson

By Kenneth E. Lamb

Sen. Obama’s autobiography is filled with “composite” characters, rearranged timelines, and fantasy events that never occurred. I read that twice in the Washington Post - read Richard Cohen’s columns of Jan. 1, 2008,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/31/AR2007123101662.html

and March 27, 2007,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/26/AR2007032601583.html

for yourself.

There are more articles
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-070325obama-youth-story,1,4006113.story

than that, by more authors
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=1f22d28c-ced2-4761-b350-77f3513928ac&k=52616

than just Mr. Cohen, but I wanted to get started by saying that what follows isn’t just something I’m pulling out of thin air. What follows is serious, documented, and not at all what those who want to write history about the election of the first so-called “African-American” president, want in the least to admit is true - and why its truth matters more than their desire to ignore the truth for the sake of their desire to write history.

While his shrill wife objects, the truth is that Sen. Obama’s life, as he wrote about himself in his autobiography, is, in fact, nothing but a fairy tale. Again, don’t take my word for it - read Mr. Cohen’s, and others, articles about it.
http://wichita.craigslist.org/pol/552957338.html

If what Mr. Cohen writes are truths, then what Mr. Obama wrote are lies. It’s just as simple as that.

Yet there is not one word from the “Last Bastions of Accuracy” that comprise our first-tier information enterprises about the complete lack of integrity Sen. Obama shows with his fictional life history. He lies, but his lies are swept under the rug by a groupthink mentality that is so desperate to regain leadership positions - as opposed to actual leadership programs to earn those leadership positions - that it ignores the truth that Sen. Obama lies - about himself, about his life, about his actions - and even about his racial composition.

I researched what follows for a NY daily of international reputation. It wasn’t what I thought I’d find. I documented it, presented it to the Washington Bureau Chief, but was hardly surprised that it never saw ink. As you’ll see for yourself, this is the political equivalent of a nuclear bomb.

I must pause very briefly to note usage of the word Negro in what follows: In all academic studies of race, the proper scientific word for the ethnic composition I discuss is Negro. For any who scream racist at its mention, I say take it up with the scientific community. It’s not my word, it’s theirs. I am using it in its proper scientific context.

Why is the fact that Mr. Obama is only 6.25% African Negro not reported?

Because to acknowledge it is to report this devastating truth about him: Mr. Obama is not legally African-American. It is impossible for him to be, in truth, America’s first African-American president.

Federal law requires that to claim a minority status, you must be at least 1/8 of the descriptor, but for the sake of this article, I’ve converted it to a decimal fraction for easier comprehension. You must be at least 12.5% of the racial component you claim for minority status. Mr. Obama, claiming to be African-American, is half the legal threshold.

Again, to let it sink in: Mr. Obama is not legally African-American. It is impossible for him to be, in truth, America’s first African-American president.

Yet claiming to be African-American is the soul and substance of his claim to fame. It is what he has used throughout his adult life to distinguish himself from other competitors. It is the ethnic identity he proclaims, and it is the ethnic identity he craves. Without it, he is just another mixed race Caucasian Arab with an African influence playing on his skin’s pigmentation.

But no matter what he craves, no matter what he has used to propel himself through life, no matter the racist presumption of seeing his skin and without question calling him black, the hard, cold, genetically inarguable reality remains: he is not an African-American.

Mr. Obama is 50% Caucasian, that from his mother. What those who want Mr. Obama to write history by becoming “America’s first African-American president” ignore is that his father was ethnically Arabic, with only 1 relative ethnically African Negro - a maternal great-grandparent (Sen. Obama’s great-great grandparent, thus the 6.25% ethnic contribution to the senator’s ethnic composition.).

That means that Mr. Obama is 50% Caucasian from his mother’s side. He is 43.75% Arabic, and 6.25% African Negro from his father’s side.

Put another way, his father could honestly claim African-American ethnic classification. He was the last generation able to do so.

Sen. Obama could honestly say, “My father was African-American.” Racist presumptions led an Ivy League admissions committee, and lazy “newspapers of record” factcheckers, to presume that if his father is African-American, then Sen. Obama must be African-American also.

But it doesn’t work that way. Racist presumptions coupled with sloppy vetting don’t turn a lie into the truth.

Sen. Obama is one generation too far removed from the ethnic African Negro input to make the same claim as his father, Harvard’s Admission’s stamp of approval notwithstanding.

As you can see for yourself, Sen. Obama’s African-American ethnic claim, when properly researched and documented, is a lie.

The question no one wants to answer - particularly Mr. Obama and his supporters, is, “Why do you think he has an Arabic name? Why does his father have an Arabic name? Why does every ancestor on his father’s side have an Arabic name?”

The answer is obvious: They have Arabic names because his father’s side of the family tree is Arabic.

Need proof? Research the Kenyan records for yourself. You will find that his father was officially classified as “Arab African” by the Kenyan government.

But in America’s current political climate, that truth is heresy; that truth is “an inconvenient truth.” It is the political equivalent in our time to what Galileo’s scientific pronouncements were in his time: it is true, but nobody wants to know the truth because the lie is so much more comforting.

That is why detractors of this truth will do everything to denounce it, except submit to the discipline of actually researching it.

There’s a reason for that: it proves he is not sufficiently Negro to earn classification under American law as an African-American.

For Sen. Obama, telling the truth means he will give up all the accolades about being the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, an accolade that relies on a sleight-of-hand in job titling that changed the name of the top job from Editor to President.

If stated in its absolute truth, Mr. Obama was the second person of color to run the Review. He was beat to the Review’s top spot by a true African-American about 60 years before Mr. Obama showed up for classes.

Again, a very inconvenient truth.

That is devastating in itself. The further effect is that Mr. Obama would have to convince Americans still reeling from 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, that now is the time for America’s first Arab-American president.

We all know what chance that has of succeeding.

Of course, that would only happen if Mr. Obama told the truth about his racial composition. To tell the truth means Mr. Obama will have to admit that which he has never been forced to admit before, even in the face of the massive lies of his autobiography: Mr. Obama’s entire projection of who he is, and what he is, is a lie.

Mr. Obama would have to say to the world: “I am not what I’ve told you I am. I lied to you in my autobiography when I told you I am black. I lied to the Admission Committee at Harvard so I could get in. I lied to my constituents in Chicago so I could get elected to the State Senate. I lied to my constituents in Illinois so I could get elected to the US Senate. I lied to my supporters across America so I could be President.

“I have lied all during my life to play the race card, and use it, cynically, to advance myself by playing upon the racist presumption of Americans to accept, without question, that anyone of color is African-American. I lied to you, and you blindly accepted it, because of your own racist presumptions about color, and ethnic identity. I looked African-American, and your racist presumptions told you to believe it.”

Even as you read this, the overwhelming majority of you will continue to believe it. Even as you know the truth, you will block the truth out of your mind, because you are bred to accept the racist presumption of color, and ethnic identity.

And so many of you reading this will create incredible mental gymnastics, telling yourself why the truth doesn’t matter. You will lie to yourself because you want to believe the lie, and then curse the American body politic for being built on lies.

You will do this all while failing to tell yourself the truth that it is your lies, as much as any other lies, that are killing the body. You will commit the very action that you curse as the cause of America’s demise, because you are jaded beyond recognizing in yourself the very same disease you so freely condemn in others.

Here is the truth about Mr. Obama’s name, and his father’s ancestors:

True Negro tribal members of western Kenya where his father was born have Christian names, not Arabic. His father’s decision to name him with an Arabic name is a matter of his father establishing his ethnic identity in Africa - it is done deliberately to separate him from the African tribes. He may live among them, but he is not one of them. His father’s message is that he is Arabic, not Negro.

Many will find these truths unsettling. I’m often asked, “But I thought his father was Kenyan. How could Mr. Obama not be African-American, how could his ethnic composition be so Arabic?”

The definitive clue to that answer is to look at his name, his father’s name, and the names of all his ancestors on his father’s side. They are all Arabic.

Researching his roots reveal that on his father’s side, he is descended from Arab slave traders. They operated under an extended grant from Queen Victoria, who gave them the right to continue the slave trade in exchange for helping the British defeat the Madhi Army in southern Sudan and the Upper Nile region. Funny how circular is history; now the British again face the Madhi Army, albeit this time Shiite, not Sunni, as in nineteenth century Sudan.

But telling America’s black community that while their ancestors were breaking the shackles of slavery, Mr. Obama’s ancestors were placing those shackles upon their wrists would hardly play as an Oprah Winfrey best-seller.

Being the son of a poor Kenyan goat-herder plays much better than being the son of a highly placed Arab-African who operated at the top of the Kenyan government following his education at Columbia. You see, even the way he portrays his father is a lie.

We need to linger for a moment on Ms. Winfrey, and her support for Mr. Obama. A very serious problem arises with Ms. Winfrey because of her double-standards: Does everyone remember how she went ballistic when a person whose book she endorsed turned out to be dishonest about what he said about his life in his book?

Of course you do. She pulled the plug on him and forced him into a highly publicized “Mea Culpa” of near groveling for her forgiveness. She publicly humiliated him, and would actually twist-up into contorted faces, visibly hot with anger.

Why then does Ms. Winfrey operate with a double standard for Mr. Obama? She knows his so-called autobiography is replete with “composites” - an Orwellian word for fictional characters that never existed but in Mr. Obama’s imagination, even though he addresses them in his autobiography as if they are real people. They aren’t; they are lies.

So are his timelines, chopped up and rearranged for Mr. Obama’s aggrandizement. And there are the complete lies about events he said specifically impacted his life - events that never occurred despite his writing that they did. They too are lies.

As I said, don’t take my word for it; read Mr. Cohen’s columns in the Washington Post for the details.

Why then does she not hold him to the same standards she held another author?

She doesn’t say, but the possibility that the reason is race-based is fair to ask. What Mr. Obama did is far beyond what the other author did. Why then, public humiliation for one, but campaign whistle-stops for the other?

Ms. Winfrey needs to tell us why. Her integrity is on the line.

Mr. Obama has struggled all his life trying to prove that he is black enough to be called black.

The truth is that if Mr. Obama is elected, his primary ethnic composition is Caucasian, but of course, that carries no cachet.

So if we look at his next predominant ethnic component, Mr. Obama would be America’s first Arab-American president. The truth is that his name says it all.

What amazes me more than anything else about Mr. Obama’s heritage is the unwillingness of anyone in the journalism profession to want to know the truth. While all this is easily documentable, it is so radioactive that no one wants to be on the receiving end of the racist charges that will bombard whoever broaches the truth.

It is another example of how America’s political system is further degenerating into fairy tales and lies. Torpedo boat attacks in Viet Nam, WMD’s in Iraq, Sen. Obama is African-American; we shamelessly lie to ourselves to rationalize whatever we want to believe.

But I wrote this tonight because I’m tired of reading about “integrity” written by those who have none themselves. They know Mr. Obama’s autobiography is filled with lies from start to finish, they know he lies about what his operatives do (the Apple advertisement knock-off against Hills immediately comes to mind), and for those who circulated my research, they know he is not legally black.

But for those longing for Camelot, for those who feel a good story trumps the truth, for those who are so jaded about others that they now live as those they profess to hate, for those who are terrorized by the racist attacks these truths bring, the integrity of Sen. Obama doesn’t matter.

Because their own integrity doesn’t matter to them either.

Why am I writing this? Maybe I just want a clear conscience, clear that the research I did didn’t get buried because the people who received it are afraid to tell the truth in the face of Sen. Obama’s frenzied celebrity status. I’ve been in the business since 1972 - 35 years - writing and researching for people like the NY Times, the Miami Herald, the St. Petersburg Times, The Jewish Information Network, so I know what it’s like on the newsroom floor right now. Nobody can dare speak against Sen. Obama without generating at least a flickering flame of doubt about his or her own sanity – not to mention the knee-jerk reaction that questioning him is indicative of some deep, dark, racist agenda spurring those questions on.

And truth? I ask as Pilate asked, “What is truth?” Who cares about truth? This is history; this is the first time ever in America – why let truth get in the way of chronicling history? (. . . I wrote facetiously.)

Maybe I just want to know that if he gets the presidency, he will get it honestly – if this is general knowledge, and he overcomes it. Maybe I’m just tired of presidents who lie to us; and in this case, I already know Mr. Obama will lie to us, just as he lied in his autobiography, and on so many other occasions documented by Mr. Cohen, by Michael Dobbs, the Washington Post’s factchecker, and so many others.

And maybe I’m tired of us lying to ourselves. Mr. Obama is what we’ve lied ourselves into believing he is.

Maybe by saying that I know he lied, and saying that we lied to ourselves, I will say after he is elected that nobody has any right to complain about him lying after he takes the oath of office, when everybody knew he lied about so many other things – when we lied to ourselves about so many other things, so very long before that.
-30-

The Mendacity of Hope
What We Want to Believe About Obama
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/31/AR2007123101662.html

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, January 1, 2008; Page A11

John Edwards lied about the cost of his haircuts. Fred Thompson lied about lobbying for a pro-choice outfit. John McCain insists that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.” Mitt Romney concocted the story about how his father marched with Martin Luther King Jr. And Rudy Giuliani is a one-man fib machine — everything from why he had to provide police protection for his then-mistress to the survivability rates for prostate cancer in Britain. Yet it is something Barack Obama said that bothers me most of all because Obama is a new kind of politician. He is supposed to be coolly authentic.

What concerns me is the lie or fib or misstatement — call it what you want — involved in Obama’s assertion that more young black men are in prison than in college. It is a shocking statistic — and it is wrong. But when The Post’s lonesome but formidable truth squad, Michael Dobbs, brought this to the attention of the Obama campaign, he not only got the brushoff but the assertion was later repeated.

You can appreciate the usefulness of this false claim. It says something compelling about the plight of young, black males that is essentially true — their condition amounts to a calamity and something has to be done. But this particular comparison is wrong, and Obama must know it by now. Ought to be true is not the same as true.

After all, it ought to be true that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It ought to be true that he had ties with Osama bin Laden. It ought to be true that aluminum tubes were intended for a nuclear weapons program, and it ought to be true, really, that none of this mattered since what mattered most of all was a larger truth: Hussein had to go and the Middle East had to be urban-renewed for the sake of democracy.

In a provocative recent essay for the New Republic’s Web site, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz coined the phrase “the delusional style in American punditry.” He applied it to Obama’s fans in the American press. His argument is that certain journalists are so enthralled by the sheer Obama-ness of Obama that they are willing to overlook everything they know about the fundamental value of experience.

In this regard, Wilentz cites a Boston Globe editorial that used Obama’s memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” to extol Obama’s real-life experiences. Wilentz is not persuaded. To him, the book is “not exactly a portrait of sterling honesty or authenticity.”

I and others have written that Obama — as he himself says in the introduction to this book — invented composite characters and altered chronology. But as the Chicago Tribune also reported, some of the events Obama passionately details seem not to have happened at all. Maybe his memory played tricks on him. Mine sure does.

But I am not running for president. And if I were, I’d pay particular attention to the truth — to the nagging facts that sometimes get in the way of a good story. After all, it is not only Iraq that has been destroyed in the past several years — so has whatever trust the American people still had in their government. I have been at this game a long time, but for sheer manipulation of the facts, for a fudging of the truth, for the occasional bald lie, the Bush administration takes the cake. Cheney and truth cannot be found in the same sentence.

So the cavalier dismissal of Dobbs, The Post’s truth-hunter, is troubling. Since he writes that the Obama campaign would not comment, it is reasonable to assume that it doesn’t give a damn — that this is a little matter and the candidate is engaged in something grand. The phony statistic is, in its way, like a composite. There’s a larger truth here, get it?

No. When John McCain sticks to his insistence that the Constitution established the United States as a “Christian nation,” I don’t like it, but I know McCain and I know his character. He has a record in public life going back, essentially, to 1967, when he was shot down over Vietnam and repeatedly tortured by his captors. Back in 2000, I might have gotten a bit “delusional” over him, but I had my reasons.

I am a bit enamored with Obama as well. But the man’s public record is thin and the glow from him is distracting and my intuition tells me that sometimes intuition is no substitute for experience. So, I’ll sit back and watch some more — and wait to see if Obama or anyone in his campaign calls back Dobbs and corrects the record. “Facts are stubborn things,” John Adams once said. So, to our regret, we keep learning the hard way.

Obama’s Back Story
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/26/AR2007032601583.html

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, March 27, 2007; Page A13

While I was whiling away my youth as an insurance investigator — yes, yes, Cohen of Claims — I met the lovely Penny, a wise and beautiful woman who utterly changed my life. She invited me to her family’s summer place at the beach. The old house had a screened-in porch, and it was there, my first morning, that I encountered her father. He was dressed in khaki shorts and sitting at his typewriter, completing yet another book. I decided then and there that he had precisely the life I wanted. He was a writer.

I tell you this story to suggest something about Barack Obama. In his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” he recounts a watershed moment of his own — a “revelation,” a “violent” awakening, an incident that “permanently altered” his “vision.” Twice he tells how as a 9-year-old he went to the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia (a country where his mother had taken him to live) and came across a Life magazine article about a black man who had tried to whiten his skin through some sort of chemical process. The result was a disaster.

“I felt my face and neck get hot,” Obama wrote. “My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page.”

The child had, for the first time, confronted racism and its hideous consequences.

Only there is no such issue of Life magazine. So says the Chicago Tribune, which has gone through the Obama memoir with commendable thoroughness. The newspaper conducted “more than 40 interviews with former classmates, teachers, friends and neighbors” from Obama’s youth and found both trivial and substantial differences between the stories Obama tells and those recalled by others. What emerges from the Tribune’s reporting is a man who seems much less fixated than he insists on finding his racial identity.

When the Tribune told Obama that Life magazine historians could find no such story, Obama suggested it might have been Ebony — “or it might have been . . . who knows what it was?” (The Tribune says Ebony’s archivists also could not come up with such an article.) Indeed, the memory of the event/non-event is so firmly planted in Obama’s mind that it seems to have become an emotional truth for him, far more powerful than an intellectual truth.

Two and two are four. That’s an intellectual truth for you. But America is a uniquely great country. That’s an emotional truth, and I’m far more likely to die for the latter than the former. So, I suspect, are you.

My own emotional truth concerns Penny and her father. Years later, when I reconnected with Penny, I mentioned that day on the porch and how much it meant to me. No such porch, she told me. I insisted otherwise and did not relent until she sent me a picture of the home. No porch. Still . . . I like the story my way.

In Obama’s case — and maybe my own — there might be something more than foggy memory at work. He may be manipulating the facts in order to wrap raw ambition in the gauze of a larger cause. Sheer ambition is no longer tolerated in American public life.

Obama was only 34 when his memoir was published, but he was already on his way, a successful packager of himself. He already knew, I suspect, that a public figure — he was already the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review — has to have both a cause and a back story: the PT-109 incident that changes a life, the rural poverty that has such an impact on a boy from Plains, the hope that comes to the man from Hope. No one can seem too ambitious, careerist. Only CEOs can seem to be out for themselves — that’s because if they do well, or so they insist, so do their shareholders.

This tendency to manipulate facts may bear watching in Obama. (After all, we hardly know him.) But while his book is a warning flag, it is also an astounding display of a supple, first-class mind — not merely a bright fellow, but an insightful one, and the single best piece of writing by a politician since John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage.”

JFK, of course, is the politician to whom Obama is most often compared — the wit, the physical grace, the eloquence, the youth. That’s understandable, but superficial. The politician who really understood that life should unwind like a movie — the arc, the reveal, the back story, etc. — was Ronald Reagan. He always starred in his own movie and so, it seems, does Obama.

cohenr@washpost.com

www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-070325obama-youth-story,1,4006113.story

chicagotribune.com
The not-so-simple story of Barack Obama’s youth
Shaped by different worlds, an outsider found ways to fit in
By Kirsten Scharnberg and Kim Barker

Tribune correspondents

March 25, 2007

HONOLULU

The life stories, when the presidential candidate tells them, have a common theme: the quest to belong.

A boy wants to find his place in a family where he is visibly different: chubby where others are thin, dark where others are light.

A youth living in a distant land searches and finds new friends, a new language and a heartbreaking lesson about his identity in the pages of an American magazine.

A young black man struggles for acceptance at an institution of privilege, where he finds himself growing so angry and disillusioned at the world around him that he turns to alcohol and drugs.

These have been the stories told about the first two character-shaping decades of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s life, a story line largely shaped by his own best-selling memoir, political speeches and interviews.

But the reality of Obama’s narrative is not that simple.

More than 40 interviews with former classmates, teachers, friends and neighbors in his childhood homes of Hawaii and Indonesia, as well as a review of public records, show the arc of Obama’s personal journey took him to places and situations far removed from the experience of most Americans.

At the same time, several of his oft-recited stories may not have happened in the way he has recounted them. Some seem to make Obama look better in the retelling, others appear to exaggerate his outward struggles over issues of race, or simply skim over some of the most painful, private moments of his life.

The handful of black students who attended Punahou School in Hawaii, for instance, say they struggled mightily with issues of race and racism there. But absent from those discussions, they say, was another student then known as Barry Obama.

In his best-selling autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama describes having heated conversations about racism with another black student, “Ray.” The real Ray, Keith Kakugawa, is half black and half Japanese. In an interview with the Tribune on Saturday, Kakugawa said he always considered himself mixed race, like so many of his friends in Hawaii, and was not an angry young black man.

He said he does recall long, soulful talks with the young Obama and that his friend confided his longing and loneliness. But those talks, Kakugawa said, were not about race. “Not even close,” he said, adding that Obama was dealing with “some inner turmoil” in those days.

“But it wasn’t a race thing,” he said. “Barry’s biggest struggles then were missing his parents. His biggest struggles were his feelings of abandonment. The idea that his biggest struggle was race is [bull].”

Then there’s the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial awakening at age 9. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, the Life article and the photographs don’t exist, say the magazine’s own historians.

Some of these discrepancies are typical of childhood memories — fuzzy in specifics, warped by age, shaped by writerly license. Others almost certainly illustrate how carefully the young man guarded the secret of his loneliness from even those who knew him best. And the accounts bear out much of Obama’s self-portrait as someone deeply affected by his father’s abandonment yet able to thrive in greatly disparate worlds.

Still, the story of his early years highlights how politics and autobiography are similar creatures: Each is shaped to serve a purpose.

In its reissue after he gave the keynote address at the Democratic convention in 2004, “Dreams from My Father” joined a long tradition of political memoirs that candidates have used to introduce themselves to the American people.

From his earliest moments on the national political stage, Obama has presented himself as having two unique qualifications: a fresh political face and an ability to bridge the gap between Americans of different races, faiths and circumstances. Among his supporters, his likability and credibility have only been boosted by his stories of being an outsider trying to fight his way in.

As much as he may have felt like an outsider at times, Obama rarely seemed to show it. Throughout his youth, as depicted in his first book, he always found ways to meld into even the most uninviting of communities. He learned to adapt to unfamiliar territory. And he frequently made peace—even allies—with the very people who angered him most.

Yet even Obama has acknowledged the limits of memoir. In a new introduction to the reissued edition of “Dreams,” he noted that the dangers of writing an autobiography included “the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer ... [and] selective lapses of memory.”

He added: “I can’t say that I’ve avoided all, or any, of these hazards successfully.”

Life without a father

It was a complicated time.

Hawaii had become a state only two years before Obama’s birth, and there were plenty of native Hawaiians still deeply unhappy about it. The U.S. military was expanding on the island of Oahu, home to the new capital of Honolulu. And a young, iconoclastic white woman who had defied the social mores of the day by marrying a dashing black man from Kenya was coping with the fact that her new husband essentially had abandoned her and their young child in 1963 to study at Harvard.

Oblivious to all of this was a perpetually smiling toddler the entire family called Barry. In snapshots, the boy is a portrait of childhood bliss. He played on the beach. He posed in lifeguard stands. He rode a bright blue tricycle with red, white and blue streamers dangling from the handlebars.

In the six weeks since Obama announced his intention to run for the White House, he routinely has suggested that his diverse background—raised for a time in the Third World, schooled at elite institutions and active in urban politics—makes him the best-suited candidate to speak to rich and poor, black and white, mainstream voters and those utterly disenchanted with the political system.

Not as well known is the fact that the many people who raised him were nearly as diverse as the places where he grew up. There was his mother, Ann, a brilliant but impulsive woman; his grandmother Madelyn, a deeply private and stoically pragmatic Midwesterner; his grandfather Stanley, a loving soul inclined toward tall tales and unrealistic dreams.

“Looking back now, I’d say he really is kind of the perfect combination of all of them,” said his half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng. “All of them were imperfect but all of them loved him fiercely, and I believe he took the best qualities from each of them.”

During her son’s earliest years, Obama’s mother, whose full name was Stanley Ann Dunham because her father desperately had wished for a boy, attended college at the University of Hawaii. Known as Ann throughout her adult life, she kept to herself. She became estranged from her husband, Barack Obama Sr., after his departure for Harvard and rarely saw the group of friends that they had made at the University of Hawaii.

One of those friends, Neil Abercrombie, then a graduate student in the sociology department, frequently would see young Obama around town with his grandfather Stanley, whom Obama called “Gramps.”

“Stanley loved that little boy,” said Abercrombie, now a Democratic congressman from Hawaii. “In the absence of his father, there was not a kinder, more understanding man than Stanley Dunham. He was loving and generous.”

A close friend of Obama’s from their teenage years, Greg Orme, spent so much time with Dunham that he, too, called him “Gramps.” Orme recalled that years later, at Obama’s wedding reception in Chicago, Obama brought the crowd to tears when he spoke of his recently deceased maternal grandfather and how he made a little boy with an absent father feel as though he was never alone.

Madelyn Dunham, a rising executive at the Bank of Hawaii during Obama’s Punahou days, was more reserved but seemed to love having her grandson’s friends over to play and hang out.

“Those were robust years full of energy and cacophony, and she loved all of it,” Soetoro-Ng said of her grandmother, who has lived alone since her husband died in 1992.

Ann and the boy lived with the Dunhams in Honolulu until Obama was 6. Then his young mother, now divorced, met and married an Indonesian student studying at the University of Hawaii.

In one family photo before the mother and son moved to Indonesia, Obama walks barefoot on Waikiki Beach, arms outstretched as though embracing the entire beautiful life around him. The sailboat the Manu Kai (bird of the sea, in English) is about to set sail behind him.

Obama, too, was about to journey far from these familiar shores.

Memories of a racial awakening?

Obama has told the story—one of the watershed moments of his racial awareness—time and again, in remarkable detail.

He is 9 years old, living in Indonesia, where he and his mother moved with her new husband, Lolo Soetoro, a few years earlier. One day while visiting his mother, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Obama passed time by looking through several issues of Life magazine. He came across an article that he later would describe as feeling like an “ambush attack.”

The article included photos of a black man who had destroyed his skin with powerful chemical lighteners that promised to make him white. Instead, the chemicals had peeled off much of his skin, leaving him sad and scarred, Obama recalled.

“I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation,” Obama wrote of the magazine photos in “Dreams.”

Yet no such Life issue exists, according to historians at the magazine. No such photos, no such article. When asked about the discrepancy, Obama said in a recent interview, “It might have been an Ebony or it might have been ... who knows what it was?” (At the request of the Tribune, archivists at Ebony searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama recalled.)

In fact, it is surprising, based on interviews with more than two dozen people who knew Obama during his nearly four years in Indonesia, that it would take a photograph in a magazine to make him conscious of the fact that some people might treat him differently in part because of the color of his skin.

Obama, who has talked and written so much about struggling to find a sense of belonging due to his mixed race, brushes over this time of his life in “Dreams.” He describes making friends easily, becoming fluent in Indonesian in just six months and melding quite easily into the very foreign fabric of Jakarta.

The reality was less tidy.

Obama and his mother joined her new husband, a kind man who later would become a detached heavy drinker and womanizer, family members in Indonesia say. Their Jakarta neighborhood resembled a village more than the bustling metropolis the city is today. Electricity had arrived only a couple of years earlier. Half the homes were old bamboo huts; half, including the Soetoro house, were nicer, with brick or concrete and red-tiled roofs.

Former playmates remember Obama as “Barry Soetoro,” or simply “Barry,” a chubby little boy very different from the gangly Obama people know today. All say he was teased more than any other kid in the neighborhood—primarily because he was bigger and had black features.

He was the only foreign child in the neighborhood. He also was one of the only neighborhood children whose parents enrolled him in a new Catholic school in an area populated almost entirely by Betawis, the old tribal landowning Jakarta natives who were very traditional Muslims. Some of the Betawi children threw rocks at the open Catholic classrooms, remembered Cecilia Sugini Hananto, who taught Obama in 2nd grade.

Teachers, former playmates and friends recall a boy who never fully grasped their language and who was very quiet as a result. But one word Obama learned quickly in his new home was curang, which means “cheater.”

When kids teased him, Obama yelled back, “Curang, curang!” When a friend gave him shrimp paste instead of chocolate, he yelled, “Curang, curang!”

Zulfan Adi was one of the neighborhood kids who teased Obama most mercilessly. He remembers one day when young Obama, a hopelessly upbeat boy who seemed oblivious to the fact that the older kids didn’t want him tagging along, followed a group of Adi’s friends to a nearby swamp.

“They held his hands and feet and said, `One, two, three,’ and threw him in the swamp,” recalled Adi, who still lives in the same house where he grew up. “Luckily he could swim. They only did it to Barry.”

The other kids would scrap with him sometimes, but because Obama was bigger and better-fed than many of them, he was hard to defeat.

“He was built like a bull. So we’d get three kids together to fight him,” recalled Yunaldi Askiar, 45, a former neighborhood friend. “But it was only playing.”

Obama has claimed on numerous occasions to have become fluent in Indonesian in six months. Yet those who knew him disputed that during recent interviews.

Israella Pareira Darmawan, Obama’s 1st-grade teacher, said she attempted to help him learn the Indonesian language by going over pronunciation and vowel sounds. He struggled greatly with the foreign language, she said, and with his studies as a result.

The teacher, who still lives in Obama’s old neighborhood, remembers that he always sat in the back corner of her classroom. “His friends called him `Negro,’

” Darmawan said. The term wasn’t considered a slur at the time in Indonesia.

Still, all of his teachers at the Catholic school recognized leadership qualities in him. “He would be very helpful with friends. He’d pick them up if they fell down,’’ Darmawan recalled. “He would protect the smaller ones.”

Third-grade teacher Fermina Katarina Sinaga, now 67, has perhaps the most telling story. In an essay about what he wanted to be when he grew up, Obama “wrote he wanted to be president,” Sinaga recalled. “He didn’t say what country he wanted to be president of. But he wanted to make everybody happy.”

When Obama was in 4th grade, the Soetoro family moved. Their new neighborhood was only 3 miles to the west, but a world away. Elite Dutch colonists once lived there; the Japanese moved in during their occupation of Indonesia in World War II. In the early 1970s, diplomats and Indonesian businessmen lived there in fancy gated houses with wide paved roads and sculpted bushes.

Obama never became terribly close with the children of the new school—this time a predominantly Muslim one—where he was enrolled. As he had at the old school, Obama sat in a back corner. He sketched decidedly American cartoon characters during class.

“He liked drawing Spider-Man and Batman,” said another friend, Widiyanto Hendro Cahyono, 46. “Barry liked to draw heroes.”

Then, one day about a year after he had arrived, Obama was gone.

“Suddenly we asked, `Where’s Barry?’

” remembered Ati Kisjanto, 45. “And we were told he had already moved away.”

Not one of `the brothers’

As much as young Obama stood out physically in the classrooms of Indonesia, so, too, did he at Punahou School, the elite private prep academy his mother moved him back to Hawaii to attend.

Obama, his mother and new baby sister, Maya, moved into a small apartment near the school’s sprawling, lush campus. And from the first day of 5th grade right up until his graduation in 1979, the young man was one of only a small number of black students at a school heavily populated by the children of Hawaii’s wealthy, most of them white and Asian.

Then and now, Punahou and Hawaii liked to see themselves as more diverse and colorblind than the rest of the nation. But the reality felt far different for the handful of African-Americans attending classes there.

Rik Smith, a black Punahou student two years older than Obama, remembers a Halloween when white students would dress as slaves, coming to school in tattered clothes with their faces painted black with shoe polish. “Like being black was a funny costume in and of itself,” recalled Smith, now a doctor who specializes in geriatrics in California.

“Punahou was an amazing school,” Smith said. “But it could be a lonely place. ... Those of us who were black did feel isolated—there’s no question about that.”

As a result, the handful of black students at Punahou informally banded together. “The brothers,” as Lewis Anthony Jr., an African-American in the class of 1977 put it, hung out together, often talking about issues involving race and civil rights. They sought out parties, especially at the military bases on the island, where African-Americans would be in attendance.

Obama, however, was not a part of that group, according to Anthony and Smith. Both of them seemed surprised to hear that in “Dreams”—which neither of them had read—Obama writes about routinely going to parties at Schofield Barracks and other military bases in order to hang out with “Ray,” who like Anthony and Smith was two years ahead of him in school.

“We’d all do things together, but Obama was never there,” Smith said, adding that they often brought along the few other black underclassmen. “I went to those parties up at Schofield but never saw him at any of them.”

Obama devotes many words in his book to exploring his outsider status at Punahou. But any struggles he was experiencing were obscured by the fact that he had a racially diverse group of friends—many of whom often would crowd into his grandparents’ apartment, near Punahou, after school let out.

One of those kids was Orme, a smart, respectful teenager from a white, middle-class family. Though Orme spent most afternoons with Obama and considered him one of his closest friends, he said Obama never brought up issues of race, never talked about feeling out of place at Punahou.

“He never verbalized any of that,” Orme said during a telephone interview from his home in Oregon. “He was a very provocative thinker. He would bring up worldly topics far beyond his years. But we never talked race.”

Whatever misgivings Obama had about Punahou, attending the school was largely his decision.

When his mother, a woman said to have been born with a keen sense of wanderlust, announced she was returning to Indonesia, Obama, then a teenager, asked to stay in Hawaii, according to Soetoro-Ng, 36, who still lives in Honolulu. Once again, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, who had been as much parents as grandparents throughout the young man’s life, said he could live with them.

“I don’t imagine the decision to let him stay behind was an easy one for anyone,” Soetoro-Ng said. “But he wanted to remain at Punahou. He had friends there, he was comfortable there, and to a kid his age, that’s all that mattered.”

One place Obama has said he found a sense of community was on the basketball court. A member of the varsity squad, though not a starter, Obama and his teammates brought Punahou the state championship in 1979, his senior year.

Adept at nailing long jump shots, Obama was called “Barry O’Bomber” by teammates. Alan Lum, who later would coach the basketball team at Punahou as well as teach elementary school there, recalled Obama as always being the first to confront coaches when he felt they were not fairly allotting playing time.

Obama wasn’t shy about advocating for himself and his fellow backup players, Lum said. “He’d go right up to the coach during a game and say, `Coach, we’re killing this team. Our second string should be playing more.’

“

But it was on the court in the off-season that Obama seemed to be even happier. Back then, Punahou was a completely open campus, with several basketball courts where 20-something men from Honolulu would come in the late afternoon for what often turned into flashy, highly competitive pickup sessions. Many of the men were black.

Orme would stay for the games.

“At the time, it was about basketball,” said Orme, who has remained friends with Obama over the years and who plays basketball with him almost every Christmas when the two return to Hawaii to visit family. “But looking back now I can see he was seeking more from those guys than that. He was probably studying them and learning from them. He was a younger black man looking for guidance.”

Old friend disputes memoir

Every senior graduating from Punahou gets to design a quarter-page in the yearbook. They compose notes to friends and family and include photos or quotes that best represent them.

On page 271 of the 1979 Oahuan, Obama’s entry reflects the crossroads he found himself at as he prepared for life beyond Hawaii. He thanked “Tut and Gramps,” his nicknames for Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, but didn’t mention his faraway mother.

He also thanked the “Choom Gang,” a reference to “chooming,” Hawaiian slang for smoking marijuana. Obama admits in “Dreams” that during high school he frequently smoked marijuana, drank alcohol, even used cocaine occasionally.

“Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man,” Obama wrote in “Dreams.”

In the book, Obama discusses race and racism at his high school with one other Punahou student, “Ray,’’ the young black man described in detail in “Dreams” as perpetually angry at the white world around him. “It’s their world, all right,” Ray supposedly shouts at Obama. “They own it and we in it. So just get the f-— outta my face.”

But Kakugawa, in the interview Saturday, said Obama’s recollection of that conversation was mistaken. “I did say we were playing in their world,” he explained, “but that had nothing to do with race. He knew that.”

Kakugawa explained that he had meant they were playing in the world of the elite people who populated and ran Punahou—famous Hawaiian families like the Doles, owners of the pineapple fortune, or the original developers of Waikiki, the tourist mecca. “It just wasn’t a race thing,” he reiterated again and again.

Obama confirmed in an interview earlier this month that the Ray character in “Dreams” actually is Kakugawa.

In another passage from the book, Ray complains that white Punahou girls don’t want to date black guys and that he and Obama don’t get enough playing time as athletes, speculating that they’d be “treated different if we was white. Or Japanese. Or Hawaiian. Or f——— Eskimo.”

But Kakugawa, a convicted drug felon, said Saturday that he had never been the “prototypical angry black guy” that Obama portrays. Because of his biracial heritage, he said, he was “like everyone in Hawaii, a mix of a lot of things.”

A close friend and track teammate of Kakugawa, John Hagar, also said he was surprised by Obama’s description of the character representing Kakugawa as an angry young black man. “I never picked up on that,” Hagar said. “He was just one of those perfect [ethnic] mixes of everything you see in Hawaii.”

Asked Saturday about Kakugawa’s recollections, the Obama campaign declined to make the senator available. But spokesman Bill Burton said Obama “stands by his recollections of these events as related in his book.”

“There’s no doubt that Keith’s story is tragic and sad,” Burton added.

While Obama rocketed to political prominence, his friend headed down the troubled road Obama had feared he was following. Since 1995, Kakugawa has spent more than 7 years in California prisons and months in Los Angeles County Jail on cocaine and auto theft charges.

Another story put forth in “Dreams” as one of Obama’s pivotal moments of racial awakening checks out essentially as he wrote it. Obama recounts taking two white friends, including Orme, to a party attended almost entirely by African-Americans.

According to the book, the characters representing Orme and the other friend asked to leave the party after just an hour, saying they felt out of place. The night, Obama later wrote, made him furious as he realized that whites held a “fundamental power” over blacks.

“One of us said that being the different guys in the room had awakened a little bit of empathy to what he must feel all the time at school. And he clearly didn’t appreciate that,” Orme said. “I never knew, until reading the book later, how much that night had upset him.”

As Obama’s senior year drew to a close, his mother sent him letters from afar, about life in Indonesia and her work there with non-profit groups doing economic development. She also sent advice about his future. College would be his next stop. She mixed encouragement to keep up his grades with laments about American politics.

“It is a shame we have to worry so much about [grade point], but you know what the college entrance competition is these days,” she wrote. “Did you know that in Thomas Jefferson’s day, and right up through the 1930s, anybody who had the price of tuition could go to Harvard? ... I don’t see that we are producing many Thomas Jeffersons nowadays. Instead we are producing Richard Nixons.”

In the spring of 1979, Obama’s mother and Maya, Barack’s younger half sister by almost nine years, flew to Hawaii for his high school graduation. If young Obama had struggled to find a place at Punahou, it was well hidden on this day as well. He laughed and posed for photos with friends.

With a trimmed Afro, Hawaiian flower leis around his neck, Obama was surrounded by the disparate people who shaped him. In one photo he hugs his beaming sister.

In a striking snapshot with his grandparents, Stanley smiles proudly while Madelyn hugs him fiercely, as though she doesn’t want to let him go forth into a world far from the remote island that for so long had been his home.

Kirsten Scharnberg reported from Honolulu and Kim Barker from Jakarta, Indonesia; Tribune staff reporter Ray Gibson contributed to this report.

kscharnberg@tribune.com

kbarker@tribune.com

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=1f22d28c-ced2-4761-b350-77f3513928ac&k=52616

The New Republic

The Delusional Style in American Punditry
by Sean Wilentz
Forget experience: Opinion-slingers are mooning over Barack Obama’s instincts. Don’t they remember how badly that worked out last time?
Post Date Wednesday, December 19, 2007

DISCUSS ARTICLE [105] | PRINT | EMAIL ARTICLE

Every now and then in American politics, normally balanced people get swept up by delusions of greatness about a presidential candidate, based on an emotional attachment to the candidate’s oratory or image. The youthful William Jennings Bryan brought down the house and swept up the nomination with his famous “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1896—only to be crushed by the dreary William McKinley in November.

Political journalists have never been immune to the delusional style. But editorialists and pundits are supposed to be skeptical experts, who at least try to appear as if they base their perceptions in facts and reality. Enthusiasm for a candidate because of his or her “intuitive sense of the world,” “intuitive understanding,” and discovery of “identity”—the favored terms in some recent press endorsements of Barack Obama—is presented as the product of such discerning, well-considered thinking. But it is in fact nothing more than enthusiasm, based on feelings and projections that are unattached to verifiable rational explanation or the public record.

In recent years, pundits from across the political spectrum—and not just in politics—have denigrated informed and reasoned decision-making in favor of hunches, snap judgments, instincts, and what the upscale middlebrow’s favorite trendspotter, Malcolm Gladwell, defends as “instant intuition.” The political pundits have praised candidates based on their projections about the candidates’ characters, personalities, and inner lives—and what they imagine about the candidates’ instincts. Possessed by a will to believe in somebody, the pundits intuit intuition. It is the delusional style in American punditry.

The style was particularly prominent during George W. Bush’s rise to the presidency. Although Bush had a thin record on domestic matters as governor of Texas, no record whatsoever on foreign policy, and things to hide about his past, none of it mattered. As president, he has asked the American people to trust him because of his faith in himself and his God-given instincts—what he calls his “gut.” For years, the Washington press corps was bowled over by such self-assurance. Having decided that the wonkish, reasonable Al Gore was boring and inauthentic, reporters covered Bush as a centered man with superb intuition.

Bush has governed in much the same way, with harrowing results. Shortly after the invasion of Baghdad in 2003, when Senator Joe Biden raised serious questions at a meeting in the Oval Office, Bush serenely pushed aside Biden’s concerns about rising sectarian violence, the disbanding of the Iraqi army, and the growing problems of winning the peace. “Mr. President,” Biden finally said, “How can you be so sure when you know you don’t know the facts?”

Bush stood up and placed his hand on the senator’s shoulder. “My instincts,” he said meaningfully. “My instincts.”

Biden, who had never been mesmerized by Bush’s manufactured mystique, was incredulous. “Mr. President,” he said, “Your instincts aren’t good enough.”

Yet today, after seven disastrous years of the Bush experience, otherwise rational editorialists and commentators are insisting that instincts basically are good enough—and are actually more important than what they consider prosaic credentials such as knowledge, experience, and sound policy proposals. The pundits have vaunted good vibes and gut-thinking as the crucial qualifications for the nation’s highest office. They have turned the delusional style into a rallying cry—in support, at least for the moment, of the candidacy of Barack Obama and his allegedly superior intuition.

The Boston Globe, in an ideal specimen of the delusional style, ran an editorial that endorsed Obama
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/12/15/for_the_democrats_barack_obama/

because he is biracial and grew up in “multi-ethnic cultures”—adequate substitutes, by the editorial’s lights, for serious background and expertise in foreign affairs. Obama, according to the Globe, has engaged in “a search for identity” and taken “a roots pilgrimage to Kenya,” all of which supposedly displays a “level of introspection, honesty, and maturity” that the newspaper longs for in a president. “Obama’s story is America’s story,” the Globe intoned—a sentence that comes as close as any distinguished newspaper ever has to perfect emptiness.

Let us hold aside that the book the Globe relied on in discovering these singular Obamaesque virtues, Dreams From My Father, contains composite characters and other fictionalized elements—not exactly a portrait of sterling honesty or authenticity. What is especially delusional is the Globe’s confidence that its own projections about Obama’s character and personality, as well as the mystical conclusions it draws from his ethnicity, are serious grounds for endorsing any candidate for any office, much less the presidency.

Fareed Zakaria, in his column for Newsweek,
http://www.newsweek.com/id/78157

likewise claims that in foreign affairs, his own specialty, “personal identity” is more important than “experience and expertise”—at least when it comes to Barack Obama. (It would be hard to imagine anyone granted a foreign affairs column at Newsweek on this basis.) Out of his own experiences as a foreigner and aspiring immigrant, Zakaria builds a case that Obama has “the perspective and judgment” that it takes to be president. “I know what it means not to be an American,” Zakaria emotes—supposedly just like his new hero. Quite apart from the dismaying prospects of this line as a Democratic campaign slogan, it is striking how Zakaria’s admiration for Obama is based in blind narcissism as well as utter projection.

The most interesting thing about David Brooks’ recent pro-Obama column in The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/opinion/18brooks.html

—along with Obama-friendly observations by Karl Rove
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/3/9/81603.shtml

and Rove’s former deputy Peter Wehner
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/12/riding_the_obama_wave.html

—is that they mark Obama as Republicans’ favorite Democratic candidate for president. But Brooks has also fallen into the delusional style. He likes Obama, he says, because of the senator’s “character and self-knowledge” which “matter more than even experience.” (Give Brooks credit for consistency; he said more or less the same thing in praise of George W. Bush in 2000.)

Brooks channels the late sociologist David Riesman to declare that Obama is a secure “inner-directed man,” who was “forged by the process of discovering his own identity.” Then, channeling Abraham Lincoln, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin, Brooks expostulates about Obama as a man with a tragic sense of life and acute powers of observation—relying chiefly, like the Globe, on Obama’s semi-fictional memoir. Brooks offers nothing about politics and knowledge and positions: it’s all about personality, character, and attitude—or what Brooks whips up about Obama’s personality, character, and attitude.

There are many possible explanations for this latest outbreak of the delusional style. An ever-intensifying cult of celebrity personality-worship, the more sentimental the better, may finally have overwhelmed precincts of political commentary. (Obama’s sidekick, Oprah Winfrey, is, after all, the reigning master of that cult.) Democrats may simply be so battered after what the Globe calls “seven desolating years” that they are looking for a man on a white horse to deliver them from despair—and so they have invented one.

There is also the troubling possibility that what a senior Bush official once cheerily described as the downfall of “reality-based” politics, including “reality-based” reporting, and commentary, has in fact come to pass, and that fantasy has taken over. Eight years ago, defiance of reality in favor of delusions about instinct helped bring the incumbent president to the White House. A catastrophic presidency ensued—directed largely on George W. Bush’s intuition. Today’s Obama-awed commentators, unchastened by that experience, describe breathlessly his “intuitive sense of the world.” No doubt if Obama falters, these pundits will someday find another intuitive child of destiny to call their own. What remains to be seen is if American voters will prove to be more skeptical—and more reality-based —than the pixilated experts.

Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and the author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (Norton).

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