Book Review PreviewBehind Obama’s Cool
In 2004, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois attended a White House event wearing the campaign pin of her state’s candidate for the United States Senate. When she saw President Bush do a double take at the one word on her pin, she assured him that it spelled “Obama,” not “Osama.” Bush shrugged: “I don’t know him.” She answered, “You will.” Not long after this, Barack Obama gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, and many people suddenly knew him. It happened so fast that he seemed to come out of nowhere. The truth was more intriguing — he had come out of everywhere.
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THE BRIDGE
The Life and Rise of Barack Obama
By David Remnick
Illustrated. 656 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $29.95
Related
Excerpt: ‘The Bridge’ (randomhouse.com)
Profile of David Remnick (April 5, 2010)
Michiko Kakutani’s Review of ‘The Bridge’ (April 6, 2010)
Audio
His multiple points of origin made him adaptable to any situation. What could have been a source of confusion or uncertain identity he meant to turn into an overwhelming advantage. As he told a Chicago Reader interviewer in 2000:
“My experience being able to walk into a public-housing development and turn around and walk into a corporate boardroom and communicate effectively in either venue means that I’m more likely to be able to build the kinds of coalitions and craft the sort of message that appeals to a broad range of people.”
David Remnick, in this exhaustively researched life of Obama before he became president, quotes many interviews in which Obama made the same or similar points. Accused of not being black enough, he could show that he has more direct ties to Africa than most African-Americans have. Suspected of not being American enough, he appealed to his mother’s Midwest origins and accent. Touring conservative little towns in southern Illinois, he could speak the language of the Kansan grandparents who raised him. He is a bit of a chameleon or shape-shifter, but he does not come across as insincere — that is the importance of his famous “cool.” He does not have the hot eagerness of the con man. Though his own background is out of the ordinary, he has the skill to submerge it in other people’s narratives, even those that seem distant from his own.
Remnick takes as the keynote of his book a saying by Congressman John Lewis, the civil rights hero of the Selma march: “Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma.” Remnick begins “The Bridge” with a set piece on the 2007 commemorations of the Selma march. Obama had just begun his presidential campaign, and he went to Selma to claim its civil rights legacy as his own. At the time, Hillary Clinton led him in support among blacks by three to one. Even Lewis would be on her side, at first. The Clintons had a long and excellent record with African-Americans. Obama was 3 years old at the time of the Selma march, and he was living in Hawaii, far from the civil rights turmoil of the ’60s.
In his first race for Congress, against the former Black Panther Bobby Rush, Obama was branded “not black enough.” He was not the descendant of American slaves. He had not participated in the civil rights struggle. He was not a militant activist. Nonetheless, Obama spoke at Brown Chapel in 2007, the launch site of the Selma march. Hillary Clinton was slow to make arrangements and had to settle for the less iconic First Baptist Church. She spoke well enough. Remnick is unfair to her, saying she dropped her g’s and gave a northern Illinois version of Southspeak, “channeling her inner Blanche DuBois.” In fact, Clinton is a natural mimic who “does the voices” when she tells a story — I have heard her become a Southern judge and a black woman preacher when describing one of her law cases. This got her into trouble when she “channeled” Tammy Wynette. Obama has the same gift. When he reads the audio version of “Dreams From My Father,” he speaks, in turn, like his Kenyan relatives, his Kansas relatives and the street kids he met in New York.
The difference between the two speeches that day in Selma lay less in delivery than in Obama’s way of making the events of his life story meld with those of his audience. He was laying claim to the black struggle as his own. He said: “My grandfather was a cook to the British in Kenya. Grew up in a small village and all his life, that’s all he was — a cook and a houseboy. And that’s what they called him, even when he was 60 years old. They called him a houseboy. They wouldn’t call him by his last name. Call him by his first name. Sound familiar?” Actually, Remnick shows that Obama’s grandfather was a respected village elder and property owner, who left his native town for Nairobi to cook for British colonials, and then traveled with British troops to Burma, bringing back their Western clothes and ways to his village.
In Selma, Obama claimed that his father was the beneficiary of the civil rights movement because it made the American government bring Kenyans, including his father, to the United States: “So the Kennedys decided we’re going to do an airlift. We’re going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country.” Remnick proves that the airlift was an idea for the improvement of Kenya, conceived and implemented by the Kenyan leader Tom Mboya, who came to America and raised funds from private sources, including Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. It was only after Obama’s father had flown in the first airlift that John Kennedy contributed to the airlift, also from private (not government) funds.
Obama, claiming to be the indirect beneficiary of the march at Selma, paid deep tribute to the heroes of that generation’s marchers, the Moses figures who took the people out from Egypt. He can claim only to belong to “the Joshua generation,” which inherited the promised land. Having maneuvered himself into solidarity with the veterans listening to him, Obama was praised that day by the Rev. Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for “baring his soul.” Hillary Clinton had been gently nudged toward the sidelines in Selma. The slow erosion of her black support had begun.
Obama is such a good storyteller that his biographer might well be intimidated by the thought of competing with his own version of his life. But Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, has many important additions and corrections to make to our reading of “Dreams From My Father.” Obama makes his mother sound naïve and rather simple in his book. Remnick shows that she was a smart and sophisticated scholar, whose studies for her doctorate were aided by her friend Alice Dewey, the granddaughter of John Dewey. Though Obama becomes disillusioned by the end of the book with his hard-drinking and bitter father, Remnick shows that another of Barack Sr.’s sons has even darker tales to tell of him — how this African son, Mark, gave up his father’s name out of memories of the way his mother screamed as her husband cruelly beat her.
Remnick notes that Obama’s pot smoking in high school was more a matter of belonging to a new crowd than of adolescent angst (as Obama paints it). And he finds interesting things about Obama’s friends at that time. One of them taped a bull session of students discussing the nature of time. Obama can be heard saying that “time is just a collection of human experiences combined so that they make a long, flowing stream of thought” — an observation strikingly like Augustine of Hippo’s definition of time as distentio animi, “the mind’s spanning action.” That this was not just an idle comment by a young man is confirmed when we find Obama later describing his memoir to Remnick as an effort for “a young person to pull strands of himself together into a coherent whole.”
Remnick rightly sees that memoir as a bildungsroman in the specifically black form of a “slave narrative,” a story of the rise from dependency to mature self-possession. In order to place himself in that tradition, Obama darkens the early part of the story and lightens the concluding sections. He trims the facts to fit the genre, just as he trimmed the events in his Selma speech to fit the black sermon format. Obama was not literally a slave in his youth, but he was in thrall to false images of his father, fostered by his mother’s protective loyalty to her husband. Since Obama comes to a later recognition of his father’s flaws, the story is crafted to show him shedding false idealism to become a pragmatic realist. The narrative protects him from claims that he is an ideologue or peddler of false hopes. The art with which the book is constructed to serve his deepest personal needs shows how ludicrous is the charge of Rush Limbaugh and others that he did not write it. (The ineffable Limbaugh thinks Bill Ayers may have written it.)
Remnick presents Obama as a perpetual outsider who wins acceptance in whatever new company he joins — in Hawaii, at Occidental College, then Columbia, then Harvard, in Chicago streets and churches, at the University of Chicago Law School, in the Illinois legislature, in the United States Senate. To do this, he had to allay the natural suspicions of any newcomer. Remnick sees how this was accomplished: “Conciliation was his default mode, the dominant strain of his political personality.” In interview after interview, people’s initial reaction to him is that he is always winning, always disarming — “cool,” intelligent and charming. A perfect example is the way he won election as the editor in chief of The Harvard Law Review. In a company of voting editors heatedly divided between left and right, he positioned himself in the center and won support from conservative editors along with liberals. Once in the editor’s office, he banned a more militant black ally of his from the masthead to preserve peace on The Review. Later, when he taught at the University of Chicago Law School, he won the respect of conservative professors there, including Richard Posner — “especially,” as Posner tells Remnick, “after one of my clerks, who had worked with him at The Harvard Law Review, told me that he wasn’t even all that liberal.”
For all Obama’s skills at ingratiation, Remnick grants that luck played a great role in his rise. He was never in a closely contested election until the presidential race of 2008, and the charges brought against him in that one were mainly trumped up — Remnick scrupulously sifts through the maximum use made of his minimal connections with Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. In the character test that the election became, Obama scored well above his opponents Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, John McCain and Sarah Palin. Finally, even the Clintons’ friend John Lewis swung over to Obama. Liberals urged Obama, who was too lawyerly in the campaign debates, to get more feisty. Not only was that against his conciliatory character, but it would have backfired dangerously. He knew the one thing he could not become was an angry black man. He had to be more restrained than anyone else in the race.
In this lengthy book, Remnick examines in detail every aspect of Obama’s life before his election as president. “The Bridge” concludes with his swearing in, at which Lewis plays a role to complement his part in the book’s opening. There is only a brief (five and a half pages) epilogue on the presidency. It devotes one sentence to the Afghan war, though — in keeping with Remnick’s racial emphasis throughout — it spends three paragraphs on the arrest of the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and the subsequent “beer summit” at the White House. Yet the book’s insights into Obama’s character will be very useful for understanding the man’s performance as president.
Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation. It had always worked. Why should he abandon, at this point, a method of such proved effectiveness? Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril. To disarm fears of change (the first African-American presidency is, in itself, a big jolt of change), Obama has stressed continuity. Though he first became known as a critic of the war in Iraq, he has kept aspects or offshoots of Bush’s war on terror — possible future “renditions” (kidnappings on foreign soil), trials of suspected terrorists in military tribunals, no investigations of torture, an expanded Afghan commitment, though he promised to avoid “a dumb war.” He appointed as his vice president and secretary of state people who voted for the Iraq war, and as secretary of defense and presiding generals people who conducted or defended that war.
To cope with the financial crisis, he turned to Messrs. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, who were involved in fomenting the crisis. To launch reform of medical care, he huddled with the American Medical Association, big pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms, and announced that his effort had their backing (the best position to be in for stabbing purposes, which they did month after month). All these things speak to Obama’s concern with continuity and placation. But continuity easily turns into inertia, as we found when Obama wasted the first year of his term, the optimum time for getting things done. He may have drunk his own Kool-Aid — believing that his election could of itself usher in a post-racial, post-partisan, post-red-state and blue-state era. That is a change no one should ever have believed in. The price of winningness can be losing; and that, in this scary time, is enough to break the heart of hope.
Garry Wills, professor emeritus of history at Northwestern University, is the author of “Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State.”
