Barack Obama, I thought you were different.
It turns out that at 22, you were just like, well any other 22-year-old man.
Obama was "sexually warm" but "emotionally cool" says Genevieve Cook, an early girlfriend in a much touted article in Vanity Fair.
As kiss and tells go, this excerpt from an upcoming book on Obama by David Maraniss is rather tame.
Think Harlequin romance with the TDH stranger -- Obama lounging around bare-chested in his blue and white sarong, his room a "warm private space pervaded by a mixture of smells that so strongly speak of his presence, his liveliness, his habits -- running sweat, Brut spray deodorant, smoking, eating raisins, sleeping, breathing."
But this is Harlequin romance for the intellectually inclined -- the shirtless Obama does not just lounge in that sarong. He solves the New York Times Sunday crossword. He also discusses Derrida and reserves more of his passion for a discussion on T. S. Eliot than on romance.
When his girlfriend says "I love you" his response is "Thank you."
The timing of this excerpt is obvious. The book is coming out in June and although it's about much more than Obama's early love life, "sexually warm" is what is going to heat up the sales. With the presidential election getting into full swing, Obama is also need of a little bit of makeover. The cool, cerebral, cosmopolitan image was so 2008. In the last few weeks we've been seeing glimpses of Obama 2012. He's an avenger, the one who smoked Osama bin Laden out of his Abbottabad lair. He's a jokester telling the press club he had lots of material but "I have to get the Secret Service home in time for their new curfew." Now it turns out he's also a lover. Almost all the media coverage focuses on that "sexual warmth."
The comments have been fairly uniform.
Waste of space. E-tainment voyeurism. Who... cares? A story about paint drying would be more interesting than this.
Come on people, you read the whole piece, didn't you? Would you have read it with such interest if it said "Obama's early New York days show his nascent middle of road politics"?
In fact, that's what really comes out in the Vanity Fair article. The bare-chested Obama or the Obama in a Luscious Ladies t-shirt is just a decoy meant to tease you into thinking there are juicier bits buried in there.
But this is really the portrait of a man who is very carefully and deliberately fashioning an identity for himself. He writes in a letter that he is "caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me." He is not really looking for a girlfriend. He is looking for an identity.
He needed to become black. At one point he tells Cook he feels like a racial "impostor" -- a man who looks black but grew up with white grandparents in Hawaii. "There was hardly a black bone in his body," she writes. Then he started carrying around a frayed copy of Ralph Ellison's famous book The Invisible Man. As a man who looks visibly black but feels white he is a different kind of invisible man. Cook wrote in her journal that "in his own quest to resolve his ambivalence about black and white, it became very, very clear to me that he needed to go black."
He needed to become American. When Obama came to New York, he was the cool outsider, a sort of immigrant-like figure, a man who had lived around the world and grew up on an island far away from the American heartland. In New York his best friends were party-hearty Pakistanis who taught him how to cook a mean ginger beef dish. "He knew the ways of different cultures better than he knew himself," writes Maraniss.
He needed to find his politics. Those who now moan that Obama betrayed the liberal left will find that he was always suspicious of what he saw as the excesses of the left. He did not think it was practical. Though he was bored with his job at Business International, its stated goal is not a bad summation of Obama's philosophy of life -- "to advance profitable corporate and economic growth in socially desirable ways." He did not like the radical rhetoric of the 1960s but was leery of the business world his Pakistani friends were embracing with gusto. He was the quintessential middle path guy.
In the process of that identity-crafting Obama does what all writers do. He uses people as means to an end. He selects stories to prove a point. So his own memoir has a story about his fight with his white girlfriend about race after watching a play about an angry black man. The unnamed girlfriend in the memoir sounds like Cook, but the play incident didn't happen with her. Obama has said that the "New York girlfriend" was a composite character. That's well and good, except the New York girlfriend is also a real woman and now the right wingers are jumping up and down saying he fabricated his life story. (And by extension his birth certificate.)
That's rubbish, but the birthers who are harping about his birth certificate are unwittingly on to something. Barack Obama is really not 100% American in the way other presidents have been. It's not about where he was born. He was a loner with scattered roots who didn't belong anywhere. His biography is not fabricated but his identity is constructed -- the talented Mr. Obama. The question is is he at home in it?
What the Vanity Fair excerpt shows is that he never felt assured of his place in America. That famous there are no red states, or blue states, only the United States speech in 2004 that catapulted him to national attention acquires a new poignancy in light of this portrait of the president as a young man. It turns out he was always looking for that common ground not for America's sake, but his own.
"The only way my life makes sense is if, regardless of culture, race, religion, tribe, there is this commonality, these essential human truths and passions and hopes and moral precepts that are universal."Yes, he also once wore a Luscious Ladies t-shirt and blue jeans and sat at the edge of the bed. Vanity Fair is excited about that. But juicy as that is, it will have little bearing on his presidential legacy. The identity stuff, however, can actually affect his policies.
This post is adapted from an article that originally appeared on Firstpost.com.
Follow Sandip Roy on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sandipr
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Wake up Carl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, because Americans are tired of your stupid as swift-boat, make Obama a one-termer bull-crap.
I say bring it on because America needs a good love story.
Obama 2012!!
Ar eyou kidding ?
After Obama, America is in need of a major makeover.
And I have to say, the way this article has described him, I have felt a little like he is said to feel at times. Many do feel connected culturally, socially and emotionally to one specific group. But many I think also often feel like an island, not quite fitting in with family or particular community. And maybe that's why some influential blacks, like Tavis Smiley, dislike the man. He hasn't shown that tribalism -- that fixation on one group alone that some others expect. It also shows me that he's more honest than I realized. I thought some of his middle of the road-ism was just being careful...too careful. But I see now, it's just who he is. Someone who sees no one as his family (except of course the obvious) and everyone as his family. I like him more for this. Thank you.
Spoken as one that do not have even an inkling of a clue. Although, President Obama came from biracial roots and was raised by his white maternal family, he is outwardly a black man. In a world where one skin tone is readily accessed, he had no choice but to make peace with his black side of his heritage...for he was forever being judged by that for it was the first thing that was noticed about him when he entered into a room. This is why your insensitive and blatant lack of knowledge to this dimension obscure your comprehension to WHY he would need to be identified with his black heritage for he was ALWAYS identified as such...in spite of the fact that he was raised by his white family. When he showed up with them....he still was seen as black automatically.
When he went to flag down a cab...the cab driver SAW his blackness and many times did not stop. It was wise of him to develop his identity with his black side....for he already knew his white side and yet...many times was not immediately identified as one that had white bloodline. It is really simple. If you were black and was raised by white...you would appreciate the need to have that identity crisis resolved. This does not take away from his white parents input for they are the ones that imparted to him the essence of who he is today...but he still needed to find that identity with his blackness for that was what he was going to be seen as at the end of the day.
Fanned & Faved
No one is buying your "story" Sandip
Obama wrote this "book" to give us the version of his past he wanted us to believe, well we don't
Oh em gee, can you imagine having every person you had a casual sexual relationship with writing books about it??? *gack*
Seems like he had a lot of love to give. She just wasn't the one who really
lit his fire. And hey, it happens, right? No big deal. Most of us have probably been there.
(Says the woman who has been married for 23 years to a boy who became infatuated with her in high school.)
And lucky you! Everyone deserves to be adored! I am so happy for you, I can't stop smiling. :-)
If we could only convince more people of that, eh? If only we could show everyone what real love looks like and feels like, and make them believe they deserve it, and convince them not to settle for anything less.
I
He didn't settle for something less.
He held out for his ideal.
President Obama has been true to the principles presented in the article. The author isn't bitter or snarky.
President Obama comes off as a fine guy - the man he still appears to be.
I, too, struggle with racial identity and identity as a whole, I struggle with understanding why I must choose, why there isn't a 'black bone' in my body, why I feel like such an imposter. And, by George, the President himself understands that. Wow.