Skirkle #2, and to whomever else it may concern

[Kuya]

"In classes and seminars, I would dress up these impulses in the slogans and theories that I discovered in books, thinking – falsely – that the slogans meant something."


Obama ended his Tuesday press conference not with an attack on recalcitrant Republicans but with an assault on "sanctimonious" liberal purists who would never compromise on extending the Bush tax cuts. The extent of the beleaguered president's pique at the left wing of his own party seemed puzzling to many at a time when Obama needs all the supporters he can find.


Against this backdrop, Obama's impatience with ideologues is a striking motif of "Dreams from My Father." The quotation above is Obama's way of belittling his own tendency to over-intellectualize decisions like becoming a community organizer. But Obama is also constantly making little jabs at true believers who fall under the spell of abstract doctrine: "Two women, one black, one Asian, were selling Marxist literature and arguing with each other about Trotsky's place in history."


Even though it is unlikely to convince conservatives who fervently believe that the president is a dangerous left-winger, Obama certainly comes across as a liberal pragmatist in his autobiography. Toward the end of the book, long after Indonesia has disappeared from his life, Obama goes out of his way to praise Lolo as the embodiment of "practical people who knew life was too hard to judge each other's choices, too messy to live according to abstract ideals."


That passage, written in a completely different era and context, comes very close to describing Obama's governing style since his shellacking.

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/12...om-a-beleague/

[Kuya]

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/...ms-for-my.html

digby says he is a liberal who hates other liberals

[Kuya]

In other words, a political hipster

[Kuya]

It had to do, in part, with his father. At the time, Obama had just learned from his African half-sister what had happened to Barack Obama Sr., who abandoned him when he was two years old. After receiving his master's degree in economics from Harvard, the elder Obama had returned to Kenya, where he became a high-ranking government official. But, when he criticized Kenya's increasingly corrupt and authoritarian government, he lost his job and had to live from hand to mouth, depending on the goodwill of relatives while drinking heavily. Obama told Kellman that he feared ending up destitute and unhappy like his dad. "He wanted to marry and have children, and to have a stable income," Kellman recalls.

I noticed this because of the contrast with Obama's Indonesian stepfather Lolo, whom Obama describes in his memoir. Lolo, like Obama's father, had met Obama's mother at the University of Hawaii. And like Obama's father, he'd wanted to play a role in his country's post-colonialism independence. But he was forced to return to Indonesia after the 1965 coup by Suharto, and was lucky to survive.
And so unlike Obama's father, he eventually decided he couldn't fight the power: he got a job with an American oil company and deflected any attempts by Obama's mother to discuss the coup. (Interestingly, Obama honestly describes what happened, including the CIA's involvement and the post-coup massacre of "a few hundred thousand, maybe...half a million.")
Here's how Obama puts it in his book:

"Men take advantage of weakness in other men," [Lolo told Obama]. "They’re just like countries in that way. The strong man takes the weak man’s land. He makes the weak man work in his fields. If the weak man’s woman is pretty, the strong man will take her.” He paused to take another sip of water, then asked, “Which would you rather be?” I didn’t answer, and Lolo squinted up at the sky. “Better to be strong,” he said finally, rising to his feet. “If you can’t be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who’s strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always.” ...

Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse. In America, it had generally remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface of things; until you visited an Indian reservation or spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned. But here power was undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory. Power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know that his life wasn’t his own. That’s how things were; you couldn’t change it, you could just live by the rules, so simple once you learned them. And so Lolo had made his peace with power, learned the wisdom of forgetting...

She remembered what Lolo had told her once when her constant questioning had finally touched a nerve. “Guilt is a luxury only foreigners can afford,” he had said. “Like saying whatever pops into your head.” She didn’t know what it was like to lose everything, to wake up and feel her belly eating itself. She didn’t know how crowded and treacherous the path to security could be. Without absolute concentration, one could easily slip, tumble backward...

She looked out the window now and saw that Lolo and I had moved on, the grass flattened where the two of us had been. The sight made her shudder slightly, and she rose to her feet, filled with a sudden panic.

Power was taking her son.

http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/002530.html

[Kuya]

The conclusion that one might draw from that is of a man afraid to face those who he perceives to be stronger than he is for fear of losing too much.

[Kuya]

I think that, if i'm reading into these things correctly, Obama seems to think that idealism of the means is the same thing as idealism of the ends.

[Conrad]

So you think he perceives conservatives (or at least, Congressional Republicans) as being stronger, and that's why he, the President of the United States, won't fight them?

[Kuya]

According to what we just read, that would explain his behaviour. But naturally, do not assume this is the truth. But what we're trying to do here is figure out precisely what he is doing and we can do this based on his life experience, his professed beliefs, his actions, and what we can determine are his concrete interests.

[Kuya]

I previously, and still to some extent think he is a New Left liberal who believes in clintonian triangulation (but calls it pragmatism). And that he is a bit pedantic.