Letters to the Editor
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Reflecting on Obama's "Dreams from My Father"
It now seems certain that Senator Obama will formally announce his candidacy on February 10th in Springfield, Illinois. Those of us who are considering opening our wallets and volunteering our time to his candidacy need to get to understand him better. One way might be to read his first book, "Dreams from My Father." I read it carefully last week.
I'll likely read "The Audacity of Hope" as well within the next few weeks, but I wanted to start with Barack Obama's memoir on his childhood and search for identity as a young adult. I guessed that the second book was written with political calculation foremost, but that the first was more likely written from the heart and therefore would be more revealing of the core of Obama's character.
"Dreams from My Father" did not disappoint. It covers Obama's journey from Hawaii, to Indonesia, to California, to New York, to Chicago, and finally to Kenya, the home of his father. Obama's prose is vigorous, candid, and vividly descriptive--of both people and places. He is an astute observer of character, that of others as well as of his own. He describes a childhood memory from an Indonesian village as vividly as the intrigue of a community meeting in a Chicago ward or a stay with relatives in a Kenyan village.
In the culminating pages of his search for identity, Obama sits in Kenya between the graves of his father and grandfather, men who lived extraordinary lives considering their time and place. He reflects on how both of them struggled with the crumbling of traditions and with adapting to the "dangerous power" posed by technology and modernity. He imagines telling his father:
"That this power could be absorbed only alongside a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn't new, that wasn't black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed in the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead--a faith in other people."
In an epilogue written after graduating from Harvard Law School, Obama pursues the same theme:
"'We hold these truths to be self-evident.' In those words, I hear the spirit of Douglass and Delany, as well as Jefferson and Lincoln; the struggles of Martin and Malcolm and unheralded marches to bring these words to life. I hear the voices of Japanese families interned behind barbed wire; young Russian Jews cutting patterns in Lower East Side sweatshops; dust-bowl farmers loading up their trucks with the remains of shattered lives. I hear the voices of the people in Altgeld Gardens, and the voices of those who stand outside this country's borders, the weary, hungry bands crossing the Rio Grande. I hear all of these voices clamoring for recognition, all of them asking the very same questions that have come to shape my life, the same questions that I sometimes, late at night, find myself asking the Old Man. What is our community, and how might that community be reconciled with our freedom? How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform more power into justice, mere sentiment into love? The answers I find in law books don't always satisfy me--for every 'Brown v. Board of Education' I find a score of cases where conscience is sacrificed to expedience or greed. And yet, in the conversation itself, in the joining of voices, I find myself modestly encouraged, believing that so long as the questions are still being asked, what binds us together might somehow, ultimately, prevail."
Can the American public accept someone like Obama as a legitimate presidential candidate? Once voters get to know him, I think that the answer will be yes. Intelligence, eloquence, political savvy, cultural awareness, a wealth of personal experience at all levels of American society, and an understanding of the outside world are not merely items that can be claimed and stapled to the end of a political resume'. Either you have them, or you don't. Obama has them.
Why do I care? I'm a long-time Republican who was happy to vote twice for Ronald Reagan (despite grave misgivings over the Iran-Contra blunder and staggering budget deficits). But I've always tried to be a live-and-let-live moderate, not a sanctimonious member of the intolerant religious right or a shill for Big Guns, Big Oil, and Big Pharma (today's G.O.P.). I eventually arrived the same political point as newly elected Senator Jim Webb from Virginia--also a former Reagan Republican. In fact, I volunteered as a foot soldier in Webb's campaign in 2006.
Of the potential Democratic candidates for the presidency for 2008, Barack Obama seems to me to be the one who would have the best chance of repairing the grave damage done by Rovian politics to our political discourse, by Bush's neocon foreign policy to America's standing in the world, and by Bush's big business bias to the well-being of American middle and working classes. And Obama has been opposed to the pointless invasion and occupation of Iraq since before the war.
The race issue would hurt Obama only in those places in which no Democratic presidential candidate would have a chance of winning anyway: Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia. Kentucky and Tennessee would likely be just out of reach as well. Utah and Idaho would be likely to remain "Red." Oklahoma would be a tough sell. But if Obama were to pick a strong swing-state running mate, such as Mark Warner from Virginia (or Evan Bayh of Indiana or Bill Richardson of New Mexico), the Democrats would put fully 41 states (yes, even Texas and Kansas) in play in 2008. The Republican candidate would have to be playing defense in many states that have recently been reliably "Red."
If you are a Democrat, an Independent, or a lapsed Republican like me, reading "Dreams from My Father" should give you a good grasp of what really makes Obama tick. And it's out in paperback, so it's cheap.