Or, to borrow Protein Wisdom’s headline, “The book belongs in the category of literature and memoir, not history and autobiography. The themes of the book control character and chronology.”
The book in question is Barack Obama’s autobiography, Dreams From My Father. David Maraniss’ new Obama bio strongly suggests that Obama’s book isn’t so much autobiography as self-invented, self-centered myth.
In Dreams, for instance, Obama writes of a friend named “Regina,” is a symbol of the authentic African-American experience that Obama hungers for (and which he would later find in Michelle Robinson). Maraniss discovers, however, that Regina was based on a student leader at Occidental College, Caroline Boss, who was white. Regina was the name of her working-class Swiss grandmother, who also seems to make a cameo in Dreams.
Maraniss also notices that Obama also entirely cut two white roommates, in Los Angeles and New York, from the narrative, and projected a racial incident onto New York girlfriend that he later told Maraniss had happened in Chicago.
Some of Maraniss’s most surprising debunking, though, comes in the area of family lore, where he disputes a long string of stories on three continents, though perhaps no more than most of us have picked up from garrulous grandparents and great uncles. And his corrections are, at times, a bit harsh.
Obama grandfather “Stanley [Dunham]‘s two defining stories were that he found his mother after her suicide and that he punched his principal and got expelled from El Dorado High. That second story seems to be in the same fictitious realm as the first,” Maraniss writes. As for Dunham’s tale of a 1935 car ride with Herbert Hoover, it’s a “preposterous…fabrication.”
As for a legacy of racism in his mother’s Kansas childhood, “Stanley was a teller of tales, and it appears that his grandson got these stories mostly from him,” Maraniss writes.
Across the ocean, the family story that Hussein Onyango, Obama’s paternal grandfather, had been whipped and tortured by the British is “unlikely”: “five people who had close connections to Hussein Onyango said they doubted the story or were certain that it did not happen,” Maraniss writes. The memory that the father of his Indonesian stepfather, Soewarno Martodihardjo, was killed by Dutch soldiers in the fight for independence is “a concocted myth in almost all respects.” In fact, Martodihardjo “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes, presumable suffering a heart attack.”
Most families exaggerate ancestors’ deeds. A more difficult category of correction comes in Maraniss’s treatment of Obama’s father and namesake. Barack Obama Sr., in this telling, quickly sheds whatever sympathy his intelligence and squandered promise should carry. He’s the son of a man, one relative told Maraniss, who is required to pay an extra dowry for one wife “because he was a bad person.”
He was also a domestic abuser.
“His father Hussein Onyango, was a man who hit women, and it turned out that Obama was no different,” Maraniss writes. “I thought he would kill me,” one ex-wife tells him; he also gave her sexually-transmitted diseases from extramarital relationships.
It’s in that context that Maraniss corrects a central element of Obama’s own biography, debunking a story that Obama’s mother may well have invented: That she and her son were abandoned in Hawaii in 1963.
“It was his mother who left Hawaii first, a year earlier than his father,” Maraniss writes, confirming a story that had first surfaced in the conservative blogosphere. He suggests that “spousal abuse” prompted her flight back to Seattle.
Every family has stories that have been passed around, but which no one can really verify and which do no real harm. But Obama set his family and self tales to book form and used them to create a false image of himself. That false image formed the identity on which he based his run for the presidency. We should have learned that Barack Obama is a family fabulist four years ago when he first sought the office in which he would do so much damage to the country. But the media was too caught up in hope and change to bother with vetting him.
Exit question: Do Maraniss’ revelations make it more or less likely that someone other than Obama actually wrote Dreams From My Father?
Ann Dunham lied about being abandoned. Barack Sr. lied about being divorced and about his father being tortured by the British. Stanley Dunham lied about meeting Herbert Hoover. His stepfather lied about his father’s death at the hands of the Dutch. Barry seems to have inherited his families’ propensities and I would say that makes it more likely that he wrote the book, not less.
what he said.
Take a look at the Democratic presidential candidates since Clinton. Now, Bubba was the king of fabulists, he would tell you a lie even if the truth would suit him better. Then what? Algore ran on the massive lie of global warming. Kerry ran on the massive lie that he was a patriot and a soldier. Obambus ran on the massive lie that he was an American in spirit or fact.
You know, BHO’s story with the corrections is far more poignant. The question is, why would BHO reject this far more human and universal story for a more constricted one?
How often over the years have we been told that the foundation of our American liberty is a free press? How tragic that we now see our freedom being usurped by the current president because of the initial, and ongoing, failings to vet him and to challenge him by our vaunted free press.
Most of what the public “knows” of Comrade Obama is nothing more than a fairly carefully contrived legend as that word has meaning in the espionage trade. He is a Red Diaper Baby, the scion of a communist family whose links as at least fellow travellers go back to the grandfather’s travels before WWII. It is not conincidence that much of his life is linked to towns in which Harry Bridges, last seen on the Kremlin Balcony with his comrades, has enormous influence. Only the most “progressive” Americans of the ’50s and early ’60s would have allowed their daughter’s behavior and associations. The Obama Sr. link itself may be mere legend to cover for Ms. Dunham’s association with the open communist, Frank Marshall Davis, and Davis may be far more than merely a “mentor.” It is clear that the Dunham family lived in a manner that their apparent means would not support and we have no idea how he got into prestige schools nor how his education was paid for. It is clear that by his time at Hahvud he had been established as an asset by Ayers and whomever ran him. At some point Ayers and Comrade Obama became linked to the Soros-headed cabal of international interests opposed to the United States’ role as a singular power. The Soros group knew enough on the Clintons to have HRC supplanted as the Democrat standard bearer and used their financial powers to manipulate the US and World economies both to the advantage of the Obama Campaign and to the detriment of the US’ status as a World Power. We didn’t have an election in 2008, but rather a coup d’etat and there is no reason to believe the Soros junta will accept the outcome of an honest election in 2012. In a sane world, Soros and those in league with him would long ago have died of a 9mm brain hemmorage.
I want to add this to your correct analysis:
Isn’t it ironic, that Maraniss stopped his book right at the time when obama entered college?
Could it be that he found out about obama entering college as ‘foreign student’ etc., knowing it would be a scandal? The obama college years are even more important, because it raises the questions like ‘what passport did obama travel to Pakisten’ in the 80′s? There is a lot more; I begin to believe that this author knows that obama would have tremendous problemslegally.
Maraniss said he would wrote another book and, he may well does so. It will be after obama has long been gone.
have written a book he didn’t read?