April 04, 2007
History with Barack Obama
There's an interesting article up over at the WaPo about Obama's book of personal recollections that apparently never happened.
"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.
It's not unusual for someone to remember something in strange ways, to associate a memory with an event that never occurred but was, instead, imagined. It doesn't delegitimize the memory; specifically what you took away from the experience. However, presenting something in a narrative to make yourself appear to be more than you are is pure old school politics, something I thought I'd never see from the self described change agent.
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.
That Obama wants to be President is undeniable. The question many have had is whether or not his campaign for a new kind of politics is real. Without that theme, what is Obama?
Posted by mcblogger at April 4, 2007 11:27 AM
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