If You Really Want to Understand What This Race is About, Look at the Two Candidates' Fathers

The tinsel and tinny sound bites of the conventions pushes us to judge the presidential candidates on the most simple -- and simple-minded -- video-version of their biogs. But amidst all this, we seem to be ignoring the best guide we have to John McCain and Barack Obama's hearts. Both men have written strange, searching books about their fathers. It is in their pages that we can find the clearest -- and most haunting -- clues to their potential presidencies.

At first glance, these slabs of non-fiction -- Dreams From My Father by Obama, and Faith of My Fathers by McCain -- are strikingly similar. They both tell the autobiographical story of an insecure young man who flails around for an identity, and finds it by chasing the ghost of his absent father to a dangerous place far beyond the United States. Yet Obama ended up writing a complex story of colonised people -- while McCain wrote a simple celebration of the coloniser.

Barack Obama Snr was a Kenyan goatherd, born into a country ruled by British white supremacists. He had watched his own father move from job to job -- as chef or butler or servant -- because he would not allow white men to beat him when he made a mistake or got "uppity." He saw his father disappear for six months into a British Guantanamo, because he had been (falsely) accused of being part of the resistance. All around them, some 50,000 Kenyans were being slaughtered by the British in an attempt to put down the rebellion. A favoured tactic was bursting their eardrums. Obama was offered a way out when some American aid workers saw he was smart, and helped him apply to study in the U.S.

There, he met Ann Durham, a poor white girl from Kansas. They quickly got married, at a time when "miscegenation" was still illegal in half of all states, and had a baby. He abandoned them in Hawaii when the baby was two, and the younger Obama only met his father once again, fleetingly.

As he grew up, Obama writes: "I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant." He tried turning himself into "a caricature of black male adolescence." He tried living as a community organiser in Chicago. And -- when his father died in a car crash -- he tried to find it in Africa, by chasing his memory. But he discovered a father who had failed. Obama Snr. had left children strewn across the world. He had been blacklisted from the Kenyan government for speaking out against corruption; he sank into the bottle, and isolation.

It was in the slums of Kenya that Barack the son realised he was an American, tied inexorably to his country's freedoms and failings. There was no contradiction. He thought of his grandmothers -- one watching her home burned down by colonisers, another hurrying at 6.30am to catch the bus to work in a bank in Hawaii -- and understood: "They all asked the same thing of me, these grandmothers of mine."

The lens through which McCain views the world is radically different. He was born into military royalty, writing: "For two centuries, the men of my family were raised to go to war as officers in America's armed services." He writes of his "pride" in being descended from "the distinguished conqueror" Charlemagne.

McCain's father was mostly absent, away at sea. As a navy child, McCain writes, "you are taught to consider their absence not as a deprivation, but as an honour." But he hungrily sought out stories of his grandfather and father. They were both angry, hard-drinking men, often disciplined for starting fights: his grandfather even drank the alcohol used to fuel torpedoes on his submarine. Warring was all they knew. When the Second World War ended, his grandfather lamented: "I feel lost. I don't know what to do."

Sometimes their strict obedience to the military was put to great causes, like saving the world from Nazism. But just as often, it was used to crush democracy: in 1965, McCain's father led the invasion of the Dominican Republic to destroy the forces loyal to the elected leader and install a fascist thug. In his book, McCain calls this operation "a success".

While Obama's father and grandfather were being whipped and detained without charge, McCain was being taught to revere the people doing it. He writes of his father: "He was a great admirer of the British Empire, crediting it with keeping 'a relative measure of peace' in the world for 'someplace in the neighbourhood of two hundred years.'" This is a view his son holds to this day -- as we can see from the fact that his foreign policy adviser, Niall Ferguson, calls for the U.S. to pick up where Britain left off. He describes his own childhood in the wreckage of Obama's Snr's Kenya as "a magical time" where "scarcely anything had changed since the days of White Mischief".

But McCain feared he would never live up to his father. He too had become a fighting, drinking, bottom-of-the-class Navy brat always on the brink of being thrown out. Then, on one of his first air raids over Vietnam, he was shot down and captured by the Viet Cong. He was held and tortured. They offered to release him early, but US soldiers are told to insist on being released in the order they were captured. So he stayed for five years, and was tortured some more. In Hanoi, he writes, "I fell in love with my country". In its torture cells, he discovered he was worthy of "the faith of my fathers."

When he returned, his father told him the only problem with the war is it wasn't fought hard enough: Nixon and Kissinger should have bombed more civilians, with less restraint. (They killed 3 million.) His son still agrees: he is angry at the "utterly illogical restraints on the use of American power". McCain says of his predecessors: "I still aspire to live my life according to the terms of their approval." It's true. His father's reaction to failure in Vietnam was to urge bombing of Cambodia; his reaction to failure in Iraq is to sing "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."

I do not want to exaggerate the difference between Obama and McCain. The U.S. political system is hemmed in by vast blocks of corporate power and geopolitical pressures. Any president can only nudge this system by inches, in either the right or wrong direction -- but when a giant moves by a few inches, the effect is vast.

From his father, Obama learned to eschew "the confidence reserved for those born into imperial cultures" that they should rule the world their way, with "a steady unthinking application of force". He can imagine the mentality of the boy in Basra whose father has vanished into an occupiers' prison, because it happened to his father and grandfather too. McCain learned the opposite from his father: that the natives only ever learn "to behave themselves" at the end of a big stick. So now we have to ask: which ghostly father will America choose?

Comments

[billwetzel]

Well, to be fair, Mark Salter wrote McCain's book for him, so maybe we don't really know what McCain derived from his father exactly.

[ianrthorpe]

If your summary of Barak Obama's book is in any way accurate then the volume is as dishonest, bogus and phoney as its author. At the time of Barak Obama Snr's birth and throughout his life Kenyan villages were not being burned by the English (this may come as a surprise to American's but the colonial farmers really were not into destroying the homes and property of our loyal workers.

The villiage burnings, then as now, were being carried out by Mau Mau terrorists whose struggle was as much for supremacy over rival tribal groupings as for freedom from white rule.

Obama Snr. was not a "poor goatherd" but a peasant farmer, anyone who had goats in Kenya at that time was not poor. A Kenyan Muslim of the period had a very different mindset and a different perspective on life to modern, materialistic westerners. Barak Obama clearly does not, and probably does not want to undertand that.

It's probably too late to save Obama's catastrophic campaign, but a little respect for reality couldn't do any harm.

http://greenteeth.blog.co.uk/

[zann]

How helpful of you to sneer at everything American, depress Obama supporters, and call his campaign catastrophic and hopeless when he's still ahead.

[GrainOSand]

Save Obama's campaign? Who wants to do that? I am preparing popcorn for the coming catastrophe. This situation has nothing to do with presidential politics and everything to do with James Brown. We can either get on the good foot or get ready for the big payback -- got to get back -- revenge!

This is a mans' world (for now), but you had better know it would not be anything without a woman and the common sense and empathy women seem to possess in disproportionate amounts over men at times and then at other times not. Common sense and empathy is all that is called for in this election. People are spending time and energy analyzing every bit of data when the thirty-thousand foot view suffices to say, that the situation on the ground requires hope and change and not the failed policies and approaches of yesterday. We have seen McCain before, why are we zooming in on the details of that ugly picture of more of the same.

[foxfan]

So, what are you saying? McCain comes from a family that has always served the country and Obama's Dad was aided by an American and his son went on to serve America. They are both good men and both deserving of consideration to lead our nation.

[research]

Good for Obama to say McCain is a "good" man, but anyone for endless wars of aggression and profiteeri­ng...

IS NOT A GOOD human being.

[GrainOSand]

Look to the tree to determine the nature of the fruit and look to the fruit to see its distance from the tree, whether it learned anything from the tree about what to do, what not to do, how to be, and how not to be such that it is able to become its own tree with its own fruit or simply a weak facsimile of a tree long since dead, long since rotted out ideologically and otherwise.

Excellent treatment of an overlooked subject.

[Fremon]

Wonderful piece. The psychological underpinnings of the candidates now comes more into focus. From the tree the apple is created. And, McCain has the gaul to say Obama is an elitist. We really live in an Owellian world. Follow McCain into honorable wars and victory suits him to the detriment of the country. Wonder why with McCains background he was not suited to the military. Being an honorable prisoner of war has enlarged his mental approach to problems being solved by war and the military. We have seen enough of that limited thinking throughout the ages.

[queenru]

Very excellent post.

[orianna]

excellent way to compare the two possible presidenci­es.... absolutely why one choose DNC and one chooses GOP ... the bullies and the social conscious.­... compare to the Roman Empire, its strangehold on Judaic religious leaders and the new liberal views of one man who led the world to Christiani­ty... now, Christianity is used by the Empire and a new liberal voice is ringing in our ears... will we listen, or will be follow the path the Pharisees preach from the American pulpits in praise of their Roman Empire?

[Mia319]

Let's all start calling McCain McBush. Gets the real issue out there in one word, two syllables.

[CtJean]

I'm trying to get a comment entered but hufpo won't show it

about mc calling the O children b r a t s

he has an ad out belittling them

[tomjones44]

actually, i think that the humor in Mr Borowitz's article was lost on you.

McCain hasn't stooped to that level (yet).

[GoCards1978]

Excellent post. It's the perfect analogy for the candidates' world views.

[ConcernedAboutRFuture]

I really loved this piece Johann! Unfortunately, I have some McCain fan that keeps scrubbing my posts.

Very insightful­.... the the psyche of the hopeful...­..and the demented.

[DaOne]

While both men are "of the people", only Senator Obama has truly shown himself to be "for the people".

Obama_Biden 08

History is now!

[Zenobius]

Good post. But:

McCain's father was an admiral, well integrated into the US military elite. Obama's father was an outsider.

So McCain's deep belief in US military power and the US system, may be the logical result of accepting his father and his family's traditions­..

Obama's politics, to the extent that it comes from his relationship to his father, are harder to figure out.

As a former military kid myself, having your father away on military service is very different from having your father leave your mother. In one case, you're being based to sacrifice being with your father on behalf of your country. In the other case, your father has rejected your mother, and if he just disappears, you.

[mosh]

Hmmmm much more complicated than that. And isn't that the point of this article?

[martymartymarty]

This is brilliant! A chance to examine what each has learned - or NOT learned - from the example set by their fathers. It matters in so many ways, it is never what you are born into but what you *do* with what you are born into and for me the difference between the two cannot be more glaring. And alarming.

[mosh]

Look at their wives - who they chose to marry and why - that says it all.

[mosh]

Great piece. But do you really think voters don't know these candidates?

Without ever reading this piece, these candidates stand in stark relief. One is a war monger (however formed); the other is a populist appealing to a 'better' America.

And yet the polls are terribly, terribly close. The simple answer may be that Americans tend to relate to tales of empire building, to the concept that they are somehow a chosen people meant to lead (or subdue) the world in the name of democracy and freedom. And it seems that those on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder are the most susceptible to this tale - perhaps just being a member of the American Empire provides them the self-esteem otherwise lacking in their own lives.

Sorry about all the psycho-babble but it is baffling how voters continue to vote against their own self-interest or seem to identify most with those least like them - the affluent and privileged. Hard to explain why blue collar voters would support McCain unless they are living vicariously through his promise of empire building. I think they know McCain very well and like what they see.

[Fremon]

Mosh, what a great piece. Makes mine seem kind of puerile. Thanks. Love the psycho-babble as it is the only way to explain certain types of voters. May I use your thinking to further my conversation with many of these types?


?

[PATina]

Brilliant !!! Even moreso... this article describes the fundamental difference­... not just between the candidates­... but the difference between the Americans that support them.