A White President

The president, by his own actions, managed to get me interested in the birth issue. I wasn’t paying much attention until recently, for several reasons. First, I did not want to know the truth, if any, because of who is in his line of succession. Second, conservatives don’t need that kind of technical victory. We need a clear victory at the polls, one that carries a mandate. A demonstration of a violation of an fairly antiquated part of the Constitution would not carry a mandate. I think it’s antiquated because not many would object much to an amendment allowing a naturalized citizen to become president. Third, I thought, from the campaign onward, that President Obama was an impostor irrespective of the location of his birth. (More on this below.)

The president triggered my interest, of course, by releasing his “long” birth certificate. I was fascinated by the fact that he took this simple action two years late, and then, only when a rich and publicity-savvy man was nipping at his heels. What millions of rank-and-file doubters failed to do, a billionaire with a bouffant hairdo accomplished. How could I fail to become interested? Second, soon after the release of the document, technical analyses appeared on the Internet claiming to demonstrate that it was a fake. The demo I saw on YouTube today, for example, did not allege a subtle, accomplished forgery but a frankly artless fraud. I find it convincing but of course, the demonstration itself could be a forgery. I don’t have the knowledge to judge. I asked a friend of mine who is a good photographer, and a practical Photoshopper and, I suspect, a liberal. He did not have a clear-cut opinion.

Attempts to demonize the president have no traction. He is not the Devil, or even a minor demon, and he is not possessed by any demon. His policies and the lack thereof demonstrate common ignorance. I am familiar with this kind of ignorance because I was a university teacher for thirty years. There are the conventionally good students, 20% of the class if you are lucky. Those more or less do their assignments. Then you have the usually hopeless but sometimes improvisationally brilliant backbenchers. In between there are many students, today, probably a majority, who pretend to be getting an education. They thrive in most universities, even the pricey ones.  It’s been so for along time, certainly since the eighties. Such students will read the first chapter of the book, half of the second chapter and then, most of the last chapter right before the final exam. They come to class sometimes and borrow notes from their friends at other times. They end up less than completely ignorant of the subject matter. I would tell them to their faces, “Some of you are familiar with the tune but you don’t know the lyrics.” They would laugh knowingly and good-naturedly. “Busted but no big deal, right teach?”

Barack Obama is this familiar kind of impostor. He pretends to be President as those kids pretend to be students, with an intellectual baggage that is more than nothing but not enough to pass the exam without much guesswork. And that’s enough to explain his policies and to explain his absence of policies.

I say Barack Obama is an impostor for several reasons. The first reason concerns his African-ness. During the campaign, nearly all liberals, I would guess most centrists, and even quite a few conservatives became tickled like little girls at the prospect of an African-American President. Chris Mathew of MSNBC confessed on-air he had a tingle run down his leg a the thought. Two reasons for this. First, a large number of liberals experience identity envy. They find themselves boring. They would like to be something more interesting. Black, if possible, “part-Indian, “ anything, even “of French heritage” if need be. (I just had a farcical exchange on some else’s Facebook with a stranger who claimed such “French heritage.”) Second, whites in this country have a moral inheritance of shame regarding slavery, and later segregation, they have never dealt with completely. I argue about this with conservatives frequently. One of my friend affirms that hundreds of thousands of white Civil War dead should be enough. I don’t think so. It stopped the problem; it did not repair its consequences. Another essay, some day.

At any rate, there was the illusion that with an African-American in the White House, all would be forgiven, that the burden of collective guilt would vanish. The illusion was so strong that hardly anyone noticed when civil rights leaders and self-appointed African-American spokesmen like the talented extortionist Jessee Jackson muttered under their breath that Obama had no “slave blood” running in his veins. The comment should not be irrelevant for conservatives. We tend to believe in the primacy of the individual. When individuals are actively prevented from being individuals for a couple of centuries, we should not be surprised if the damage lasts in their descendants for more than a century. Recently, I heard someone, a conservative, compare his Irish immigrant ancestors’ plight to that of Africans brought here in chains. That’s stupid, of course, unless you choose not to think about it. African slaves were not immigrants.

Conservatives also typically think that good things -and therefore- bad things – come from families. If a group of people is prevented from forming normal families for several generations, we should not be surprised to find their current families defective. This, with all the devastating behavioral consequences conservative thinking itself would predict. That most African-Americans with slave ancestors are able to form normal families is what needs to be explained. It’s a serious project for the social sciences that has hardly been touched so far because those who should undertake it are wallowing in useless guilt (when they are not pretending to be somewhat black  themselves, or something else almost as interesting. Remember ex-Professor Ward Churchill?)

So, Barack Hussein Obama has no American slave blood in him and therefore, he could never have been a redeemer, even if he had tried. Instead, he is one of about half of Americans with African ancestors who are voluntary immigrants to this country or their descendants, same as General (ret.) Colin Powell, for example.(Correction:  I have been told that the figure “half” is erroneous. It might be; I can’t find the source. Yet I know I am extremely unlikely to have made it up. So, I keep it with this added word of caution.) Far from being a carrier of America’s real historical sins, Obama is a living testimony to how desirable, generous, and easy this society is. The miracle is not: “ I, a descendant of slaves could become President.” That’s an untested proposition. It’s that the son of a white hippie who consorted sexually with a drunken foreign exchange student could grow up with enough support to become a successful politician. That’s America’s greatness, worth celebrating.

Yet, Obama the man almost pulled off the imposture. Liberals still pretend not to notice that he is not an African-American, just an American of meaninglessly half-African parentage. Or else, they make themselves believe that the moral burden of American society is made up by half of the centuries of the procession of atrocities that was slavery plus one hundred years of legally enforced segregation, on the one hand, and by of half contemporary racism, on the other hand. That is laughable, of course. What anti-black racism, Barack Obama may have encountered growing up in white-minority Hawaii and in Indonesia, and even later at Harvard was more than compensated by lavish affirmative action programs. In fact, obviously based only on what I know of his life, if I had to bet, I would bet that Barack encountered not a single instance of anti-black racism. Instead, he grew up in a racially neutral world and in a world where institutional anti-racism reigned unchallenged. And that’s one of his problems, an acute personal problem for Barack, the man.

More surprising than the president’s discretion about his birth is the shroud around his undergraduate grades. As I never tire of saying: Who cares what grades he earned or did not earn, when he was twenty? At worst, he was a low-C student. That would have put him in the company of Georges W. Bush and of John Kerry, the Senator, both also graduates of Ivy League schools. It might even earn him the affection of the many former mediocre students among centrists, and even among conservatives: Well, that guy Obama is no elitist jerk. He is one of us. He had fun in college!

What Barack Obama’s grades would show if he ever unlocked them is that he was accepted at Harvard Law School as a pure affirmative action project, no ifs and buts. He was not rescued as an almost-OK applicant who needed a push of twenty or thirty qualifying points like so many other members of minorities. Incidentally, this conservative does not find the practice especially horrible because the admission process in any school of any university is so hap-hazard anyway. It’s not strictly merit-based, as many believe, because those who decide on such things don’t know how to put together a merit system. And yes, it’s possible that some unfamiliarity transpiring from the pages of minority applications trigger an unconscious negative bias in the decision makers that extra points make up for. Those who think the admission system of a particular school can be fair are just under-informed. The best that can be said is that admissions in American institutions of higher learning, considered together, give smart, hard-working people a fair chance. End of digression.

Barack Hussein Obama was admitted to Harvard Law School because of a brace of non-academic qualifications he had to offer. He was “well spoken and without a trace of Negro dialect” as his own Vice-President once famously declared. He was obviously not stupid, whatever his grades. He looked good. (He still does.) Anyone who think academics, and worse, academic bureaucrats, are not so frivolous as to take physical appearance under consideration has never eaves-dropped on an ordinary faculty-club conversation, by the way. He must have been interviewed and found to have good manners. (Thanks to his white, bank vice-president grandmother.) Even his exotic second name, “Hussein,” contributed a slight frisson to terminally bored admission officers. So here, was a catch: A handsome young man “of color” w ho could help fill the unspoken quota without the all-too-common disagreeable side-effects of admitting genuine African-Americans from disadvantaged backgrounds. (Slave blood often does not provide good manners.)

Everyone could have kept a discreet silence about what was this tiny non-event for the eighties, the admission to the prestigious Harvard Law School of one Barack Hussein Obama with bad grades. After all, he kept his end of the bargain. He was admitted to practice before the Illinois Supreme Court not long after graduation. (An old friend of mine who is a lawyer and a left-liberal assures me that’s the same as “passing” the bar exam. I take his word for it.) I have little to say about Mr  Obama’s high positions in the student-run Harvard Law Review. Those were elective positions requiring no special talent and where any presentable student with a black face would have made a good candidate. (See above.) The fact is that he published not a single article under his own pen, not even with fellow-students as co-authors, as is the practice.

President Barack Obama’s grades are under lock and key because he is a special kind of impostor. He does not want to end his career as a successful black man helped by silly affirmative action as there are so many (many of whom, like general Powell, are publicly appreciative of the help they received). Mr Obama cannot admit to having been helped to overcome his garden-variety bad grades as an undergraduate through racial preference because he wants to be an upper-class white.

This speculation makes his other concealment, the one that was in the news recently, fall into place. He was indeed born in Hawaii but there is some small thing in his long birth certificate, perhaps a name, perhaps a single initial, perhaps his date of birth, that would help a curious researcher follow the red thread of affirmative action throughout his young life. And then, he couldn’t look in the eye his neighbors in the towns where his family goes on vacation to establish his place as a successful white man: Martha’s Vineyard, Marbella, etc.

If you think about it, this piece probably makes more sense than anything you have heard on the subject. If I say so myself!