Barack Obama: Conservative, Pragmatist, Progressive
It is the last Sunday of the month meaning it’s time for our next President, making this weeks book Barack Obama: Conservative, Pragmatist, Progressive by Burton I. Kaufman.
Barack Hussain Obama Jr was born in Honolulu Hawaii on August 4, 1961 to Stanley Ann Dunham who went by Ann, and Barack Hussain Obama Sr. His father abandoned his mother shortly after Obama was born and he was raised first by his mother, then his mother and step-father in Indonesia, then by his grandparents in Hawaii.
This would lead to many interesting rumors about Obama during his political career, most infamously that he was not a US Citizen, but he most certainly was, as Hawaii became a state in 1959, and his mother was a US citizen, having been born in Kansas. And while his father was certainly from Kenya, Obama never sought or obtained citizenship with Kenya. Now, arguably he could be said to have dual citizenship with Kenya as per the Constitution of Kenya, article 14, A person is a citizen by birth if on the day of the person’s birth, whether or not the person is born in Kenya, either the mother or father of the person is a citizen…..OH….except that this version of the Kenyan Constitution was not adopted until 2010. So, Obama was legally able to be president of the United States. Just getting that out of the way early for all Obama lovers.
So, he was born in Hawaii, his mother divorced his father, although the legality of the marriage could be debated as Obama Sr. was already married when he “married” Ann. This is no fault of Ann’s, by the way, polygamy was legal in Kenya, and I’m not sure if she would have thought to ask if he was legally able to marry her in the United States. Regardless, they were legally divorced, and Ann was legally able to marry her second husband, Lolo Soertoro who was from Indonesia, in 1965. Ann and Obama would join Soertoro in Indonesia and Obama spent his formative years there, attending a variety of local schools, from the poorest to the best schools, before his mother, deciding he would not get the education she wanted for him in Indonesia, sent him to live with his grandparents in Hawaii, where he would be enrolled in and attend the prestigious Punahou School.
After graduating high school, he went to Occidental College in Los Angeles for a few years before transferring to Columbia University in New York. He was unquestionably smart and got good grades no matter where he went to school, Including Harvard Law, although that’s still a little in the future. He did travel between his Jr and Sr year at Columbia, visiting his mother and half-sister in Jakarta and friends of his from Occidental who were from Pakistan before returning to Columbia to finish his studies and then take a job with Business International Corporation, where he worked for I think a few years as a business analyst.
He eventually became bored with this line of work and sought a job with meaning, ultimately accepting a position as a community organizer with Jerry Kellman in Chicago, IL. Now, what the hell is a community organizer? Well, in his case helping residents of the Altgeld Gardens housing project get the improvements they needed from the city. Now….whether you love or hate the man, this is truly admirable work. He was literally in the trenches, helping those who NEEDED HELP, to navigate the mind-numbing bureaucracies that encroach upon all governmental organizations, and make life living hell for those of us living under the bootheels of that bureaucracy. And he was good enough at this job that he warranted a doubling of his salary I believe it was within a year.
Much has also been made about this connection to Kellman as Kellman was a disciple of Saul Alinsky, the author of Rules for Radicals. The author seems to believe that Obama never really went for Alinsky, believing that grassroots had its place, but real change could only be orchestrated in the halls of power, which is obviously the route that Obama went, as after three years as a community organizer, he decided to attend Harvard Law. Now, this is not as out there as it may seem, in addition to his already ivy league credentials with his attendance at Occidental and Columbia, his father, Obama Sr, was also a Harvard alumnus.
Between leaving Chicago and joining Harvard’s student body, Obama did go to both Europe and Kenya to visit his various ancestral lands, and while Europe left him cold, in Kenya he was embraced by his father’s family as sort of a prodigal son, and they loved that he was following his, who had passed away in 1982, to Harvard.
Now, at Harvard, Obama was older than the average student and quickly became the protégé of Harvard’s Constitutional professor Laurence Tribe, and president of Harvard Law Review, which was big news as he was the first African American to cross that threshold—of Harvard Law Review, not Harvard itself. It was while he was interning at a Chicago law firm between his first and second years that Obama met Michelle Robinson and the two formed an instant connection, which would culminate in marriage and two children.
Look, I know it’s popular internet memes to throw out jokes about their relationship and Michelle’s femininity…you may or may not have noticed that I don’t do that. I don’t attack the first ladies for what their husbands do, because history has shown that more often than not, they’re simply along for the ride. Except for Hilary. There is something seriously off about that lady. And I’m a big fan of the Hilary Kill Machine conspiracy theory. It’s one of my favorites.
After Harvard, Obama first entered local politics in Illinois, before making the jump to national politics as senator from Illinois in 2004. And his rise to prominence was truly meteoric. He went from being virtually known, to presidential nominee in FOUR YEARS. Talk about your dark horse candidates.
It is at this point that you gotta wonder about back door dealings. Now, hear me out. The way that Kaufman describes the build up to the primaries in 2008, and the caucus votes that were available to Hilary Clinton vs Obama….Hilary had the votes. 2008 SHOULD have been her year. And when you consider in 2016 MOST Democrats wanted Bernie Sanders to be the candidate, I genuinely believe Hilary was told by the Democrat power players that if she stepped back in 2008 to support Obama, she would get the unwavering support of the party power players in 2012 if Obama lost in 2008, and 2016 if he won in 2008. But this is purely speculation. An educated guess based on the last three years of reading about presidential elections and the behind the scenes maneuvering that picks the candidates for our country’s highest office every four years.
Now, there is no question Obama inherited a shit show from Bush 43. The financial meltdown that began in 2008 hit its stride in 2009 on a landslide to rock bottom housing prices in 2010. And here…. I’m going to put my sarcasta-pants on. See, the author, like the rest of the Obama fan club, seems to think the Affordable Care Act was a fantastic piece of legislation, promising affordable care to everyone, conflating insurance with actual medical care. Insurance, and health care, are two entirely separate industries.
Insurance is the middleman. The ones who take their cut before paying the doctors, who perform the health care. And if insurance doesn’t think you actually need the medical care your doctor says you do, insurance won’t pay anything….but they will still keep the money you paid them to pay your doctor with. And now, in the midst of the worst financial meltdown since 1929, Obama and a complicit congress passed a law mandating that everyone must buy this product of the middleman, who may or may not deliver on the product you bought and paid for, at the demand of the federal government. I will say, the spin doctoring from the left was truly astounding on this one, and to a large degree, highly effective.
I mean, if I thought it was so profoundly important that everyone have insurance against medical catastrophe, I’d incentivize health savings programs where in you receive tax deductions for the amount of money you report in a savings account specifically dedicated to medical expenses. And when viable medical expenses are paid from that account…meaning doctors bills and prescriptions, those expenses are also tax deductible. This doesn’t force anyone to buy a product they don’t want, but gives them the motivation to save something for future unexpected expenses of the medical kind. I LITERALLY just thought of this plan in the 2 minutes I took me to type this paragraph. So why didn’t Obama and his cronies come up with something similar?
Well, that’s easy…. crony corporatism. Bush had already authorized the bail out of AIG making it the largest government owned insurance agency. Obama was just doing his part to ensure it remained a viable company post government prop up.
The author tried many times to argue that Obama was conservative in values and pushed the entrepreneurial spirit of America but really, it felt like he was just trying to ret-con one of the largest expansions of government power since FDR to be a good, quality, conservative candidate, despite how the ACA expanded the deficit by trillions in two years, more than Bush’s entire 8 year presidency—a fact the author fully acknowledges in the book.
He goes over Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize and how even Obama was not sure how that jived with his expansion of the war in Afghanistan. Although Obama deserves full marks for taking out Osama bin Laden. Like unquestionably, that is the biggest ball that Bush dropped in favor of chasing non-existent WMD in Iraq, and Obama, with focus, was able to complete the task in 2 years. So, kudos there, it was well done, and Obama deserves all the praise for it.
Beyond the ACA, which was enormously expensive, and killing bin Laden, Obama does not appear to have done much. Like most presidents who lose the house of Representatives, he took that personally, which is dumb, but they all do, seeing it as a referendum on their leadership. Its because of that belief that when Republicans actually retained Congress during the midterm elections of 2002, Bush 43 felt that was a green light to go on with invading Iraq. America LOVED HIM! So, he could do nothing wrong and took us down a blind alley. In his mind.
Obama, when he lost the house in 2010, decided to push through something like 98 laws during the lame duck session between November 2010 and January 3, 2011 when the incoming Congress seated. And from this point on, he ruled by executive order, which is A-OK when Obama does it. But fascist when Trump does it? And vice versa…people who were outraged when Obama did it crow with delight when Trump does it, screaming about double standards, rather than acknowledging that this is NOT how the country should be led. In one of the most famous political tracts of all time, “Civil Disobedience,” or “Resistance to Civil Government” author Henry David Thorough made the argument “that government is best which governs least.” This is something which ALL our elected “leaders” could stand to be reminded of.
This book was short, with 280 pages of text and another 100 pages of notes and indices, a very brief overview of Obama’s life and political career. And the entire time I felt like the author was trying to polish a turd and sell it to me as a gold bar. And to be perfectly fair, I am heavily biased in this, I was not impressed with Obama when he was president, and I am not impressed with his post-presidential career. The author of course mentions the 2016 election, with nary an acknowledgement of the bizarre hypocrisy of Michelle Obama’s statement of They go low and we go high….then the author talks for pages about how Obama attacked Trump as a person, rather than his policies, and…as all presidents do….took it as an attack on his legacy when the US elected Trump with a landslide in the electoral college—not the popular vote, at least not in 2016, but all those flyover states Hilary ignored. Trump courted them and it paid dividends. The author talks VERY briefly about Hilary’s unlikability as a candidate, without addressing Obama’s culpability here. This is very basic, armchair, HIGH SCHOOL, psychology. By attacking Trump, rather than the issues, people who WERE worried about the issues and saw that Trump was at least making an effort to address said issues, whereas the democrats were only attacking Trump, started taking that personal like. Like, if Trumps worried about the issues, and so am I, and the Democrats are calling Trump fascist, they must think I’M fascist. I’m not fascist! Fuck those guys! And bam! Trump won in 2016…after Hilary called his supporters a basket of deplorables. And then history repeated itself in 2024.
The author hints broadly that the Tea Party movement were all racists, which is statistically impossible, given the broad scope of the movement, and intellectually lazy to not even consider the very valid concerns they raised, which is EXACTLY why Obama lost ground in his midterm elections, and Hilary ultimately lost in 2016. Kaufman said multiple times that BLM were purely peaceful protestors….I think we all remember how peaceful they are. He DID talk about Obama’s alternative to BLM, My Brothers Keeper (alliance), which, to be fair, is a much better organization…in my opinion.
I just…I was not looking forward to this book, because I WAS paying attention during the Obama presidency, and I was not impressed the first time I lived it. I learned nothing new on the rehash to change my opinions. He was a middling president who catapulted the national deficit to stratospheric new heights at a time when the nation could not afford any such new debt. But he was and is one hell of a public speaker.
