Mary,
Something more to think about: you may already have noted this but I think it worth repeating. I haven’t said it perfectly, but I think you’ll get my point.
Obama has no deep roots in our common American culture. His mother was a Margaret Mead wannabe who “married around” cross-culturally and spent her life wandering other countries, studying other cultures, and pursuing further education in Anthropology. Obama spent important formative years in Indonesia (as an outsider), also Pakistan, then was dumped on his grandparents in Hawaii, one of the most multicultural (and virulently anti-white) states in the union. He went to school in the Ivy League, hardly a bastion of American cultural values and identity, and then chose to live as an adult in heavily Black Chicago to establish a political base.
Even that is revealing. While his wife, Michelle, is thoroughly invested in Black culture, I don’t think Obama himself embraces it as part of his identity except for political convenience; it’s a sort of particular example of a higher intellectual model that is really his way of seeing the world. He could indeed sit through Reverend Wright for 20 years and think little of it, except as a typically angry voice of a particular ethnic Proletariat. He doesn’t internalize ANY culture.
Most presidents have had a solid grounding in the broad American culture growing up; thus, even where they haven’t had much exposure to various American subcultures, they are at least steeped in a general culture of hot dogs, baseball, hunting with dad, and free-ice-cream-for-kids on the 4th of July that provides a commonality of experience and identity with other Americans. As you point out, Obama strikes a pose on superior intellectual high ground to understand this country’s history, politics, and culture. Intellectually informed by an Ivy League, Leftist education, he thus interprets one strongly American subculture as emotionally-damaged whites “clinging” to guns due to “unemployment,” an economic “factor.”
You can see his belief in the superior clarity and understanding of detached intellectualism in the way he phrases much of what he says: “let me make one thing absolutely clear…” “we must think clearly about this…” (It shouldn’t surprise us that Biden is his VP, a pompous blowhard who thinks his IQ is higher than 90% of the people he meets.)
To me,then,Obama seems oddly insulated from any formative, specifically American cultural experience and identity that would seem to be basic in a leader of this country. He has replaced the gut-level cultural understanding that comes from such experience with an Olympian intellectual detachment that “understands” American culture better than it understands itself.
My question to you is: just how important is President Obama’s lack of a distinctively American cultural upbringing?
–DCK
