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April 11, 2010

By Steve Sailer

Barack Obama is the most powerful man in
America. And David Remnick, editor of
The New Yorker, [Email
him] is one of the most powerful figures in American
journalism.

So, not surprisingly, reviewers of Remnick’s new
Presidential biography/doorstop, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,
have

prostrated themselves before Remnick with the same
shamelessness as the journalist himself does before the
politician in these 656 pages of humorless hagiography.
(Historian

Douglas Brinkley’s review of
The Bridge in the
L.A. Times is
particularly embarrassing.)[


"A
definitive chronicle of the growth and achievement of the
first black U.S. president by the prize-winning New Yorker
editor."
March 28, 2010]

A biography of

Santa Claus would be more hard-hitting than
The Bridge.
Remnick, who is certainly a bright fellow, makes himself
seem obtuse as he constantly offers insipid interpretations
of Obama’s choices.

The
Bridge
stands as a self-emasculated monument to the insidious costs
of

Access Journalism. Yes, Remnick scored a
lot of interviews.
The Bridge, for
examples, ends with Remnick reverently interviewing his
subject in the Oval Office about the meaning of his being in
the Oval Office.

Yet,

for what shall it profit a writer, if he shall gain the
whole world of access, and lose his own soul?

When you could speak truth to power, what
does it say about you that you choose to speak spin
for power?

The irony however, is that Remnick’s bland
and bloated tome lavishly confirms the interpretation of
Obama’s life I put forward in my own 2008 book,

America’s
Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and
Inheritance,”
a reader’s guide to the politician’s 1995 memoir
Dreams from My Father.  

David
Axelrod, Obama’s Karl Rove, sold him to a willfully gullible
press as the post-racial candidate with what Remnick quotes


West Wing writer Eli Attie as

calling “an
almost militant refusal to be defined by [race]”.
But Remnick’s book makes exhaustively if inadvertently clear
that, as Remnick

puts it, “race is
at the core of Obama’s story …” Remnick aptly quotes
Obama’s Harvard Law School professor
Charles
Ogletree as

saying of the white-raised, mixed-race man from
mixed-race Hawaii:
“Black identity was not given to him, he sought it”.

In contrast, the great frustration of
Obama’s life—epitomized by his soul-crushing defeat at the
hands of former Black Panther Bobby Rush in the 2000
Democratic primary for the

South Side of Chicago’s First Congressional District of
Illinois—was that he could never make himself quite
“Black Enough”
(as Remnick ironically entitles his chapter about Obama’s
loss) to become a major black leader.

Politics is fundamentally about whose side
you are on. The Bridge
marks a milestone: the Main Stream Media finally and
reluctantly beginning to admit they systematically misled
the electorate about what Obama’s autobiography has to say
about that crucial question.

Despite Obama’s hopeless struggle with
being black enough relative to other black politicians, he
was a natural at exploiting white people’s vast reservoir of
good will toward blacks—and desire to feel superior over
other whites—for his own personal advancement. He was the
one they’d been waiting for. As Eric Zorn, the liberal
Chicago Tribune columnist,

said about Obama’s campaigning among whites in 2004:

“Obama was somehow all about validating
you. … He was
radiating the sense that ‘You’re the kind of guy who can
accept a black guy as a senator.’ He made people feel better
about themselves for liking
him.”

Indeed, although I say it myself,
Remnick’s Bridge
reads much like my
America’s Half-Blood Prince—just with all the
interesting bits ruthlessly excised for the sake of message
control; and with vast, eye-glazing digressions from
Black
History Month interlarded.

Remember how, back in the 1980s under
elderly editor

William Shawn, The
New Yorker would run meandering, interminable articles?
Well, you can now relive those days. The Roman poet Juvenal
famously asked,

“Who watches the Watchmen?”
The Bridge’s 656
oversized pages raise the question,
“Who edits the Editor?”

The
“Bridge” of the title, as Remnick explains in his
23-page prologue, is the

one in Selma, Alabama where

Martin Luther King triumphed over Jim Crow in 1965.

Barack Obama wasn’t, technically speaking,
there. (He was a busy being a three-year-old in

Honolulu.) Still, Obama managed to convince Remnick that
the sacramental fulfillment of

King’s Dream required his own personal aggrandizement to
the Presidency.

When you
stop to think about it, this is one of the funnier hustles
any man on the make has ever pulled off.

Yet, to
Remnick, there’s nothing at all comical about the preppie
from paradise’s rise to power. It’s sacred stuff. (Remnick
proudly emphasizes throughout how Obama seemed like a dream
come true to countless Jewish liberals.)

Remnick retells Obama’s not very eventful
life story with appropriate piety. Thus, despite
The Bridge’s
endlessness, Remnick chose to leave out many juicy details.

Consider Remnick’s dull treatment of
Obama’s long-time friend and financial benefactor

Tony Rezko, who is
still awaiting sentencing in Chicago’s jail. There are a
lot of crooks in Chicago politics, but what makes Rezko
extremely relevant to a book that’s overwhelmingly about
race is exactly what Remnick decided to leave out: for a
quarter of a century, Rezko was in business with the Black
Muslims.

Despite the Syrian Christian immigrant’s
non-Black non-Muslimness, Rezko got his start as a big-time
Chicago operator by managing for the Nation of Islam its
most famous recruit: boxer
Muhammad Ali.
(The champ’s latest wife eventually liberated him from Rezko
and the NoI.) Rezko went on to a long career of pocketing
lucrative minority set-aside contracts using the son of the
founder of the Nation of Islam as his token black front man.

Now, you might think that, well, maybe
Remnick just doesn’t know much about the Black Muslims. But
in fact Remnick authored a 1999 biography of Muhammad
Ali. So he’s familiar with the score.

Remnick, we can infer, left out his most
amusing and germane material about Rezko
intentionally. Why?

Perhaps because allowing readers to
contemplate just how much money was made off black pride and
affirmative action by
Tony Rezko—a
white guy from
the
Levant!—would
inject a subversively farcical note into Remnick’s
sanctimonious book about race.

Moreover, Obama’s 15 years of chumminess
with the Black Muslims’ chief wheeler-dealer inevitably
raises embarrassing questions about Obama’s
cold-bloodedness. After all, Obama’s boyhood hero, Malcolm
X, was executed by a
well-organized assassination squad of…Black Muslims.
Would you pal around with the business agent for the organization that
murdered your idol?

Obama
would, if it was in his self-interest. The President is a
fascinating man, although you wouldn’t notice that from
The Bridge.

Unfortunately for the readability of
The Bridge,
Obama’s career largely consisted of showing up, asking
intelligent questions but not doing much of anything
actually to help black people’s stubborn problems; and then
getting promoted out of there by worshipful white people.

Remnick
therefore feels compelled to devote pp. 164-169 to the
community organizer’s participation in that semi-successful
1986 attempt to get some asbestos removed from certain
public housing projects.

Sure, it’s as dull as it sounds. But,
after all, what else besides the

world-famous asbestos project did the

young Obama ever accomplish—other than to promote
himself?

There are only two places where Obama’s
semi-blackness wasn’t an advantage: the South Side of
Chicago’s First Congressional District; and Indonesia, where
the local
Asian boys tried to

drown him for being black. But with whites in America,
despite all the self-pity in
Dreams from My Father,
it’s been a sweet ride for Obama.

As it
happens, one of Obama’s schoolmates Honolulu’s Punahou Prep
emailed me last week in regard to Obama’s self-pitying
portrayal in Dreams
from My Father:

“Barry was

treated very well and almost worshiped at Punahou
because he was black. This ‘poor me, nobody ever liked me’ is a
complete fabrication.” 

The
Bridge
consists in large part of white people saying that they
thought Obama should be President the first time they met
him. (Something I hadn’t known previously is that the
Joyce Foundation
offered Obama a million dollars a year to leave the Illinois
State Senate and head their organization. The materialistic
Michelle Obama was not
happy when he turned that job down to continue his pursuit
of power.)

Why did
white people love Obama so much his entire life?

BBecause he’s smart. Not with an
Al Sharpton-like
quickness, but in a conventionally white way.

At
Harvard Law School, the normally aloof professors were, in
the words of classmate David Goldberg, now a

civil rights lawyer,
“almost sycophantic”
toward Obama “because
he was brilliant and because he was African-American”.
Similarly,

political consultant Don Rose recounted that when Obama
got back to Chicago and networked with wealthy white
liberals, “they are
all bowled over to discover this brilliant black guy”.

Hmm. Well, how
“brilliant” is Obama?

My answer: certainly, he’s smart enough to
be President—but

that’s not a particularly high bar. I see no evidence in
The Bridge or Obama’s own books that he has ever had an original
thought about anything. But that’s hardly necessary in a
President.

The Obama camp has refused to authorize
the release of any of his academic records. (Bush and Kerry
didn’t release their records either, but I was able to draw

conclusions about both men’s IQ, because they had both
served in the Armed Forces, and taken the IQ-heavy tests
given to

everyone in uniform.)We have a general sense that
Obama’s grades were mediocre at Punahou, Occidental, and
Columbia, but then good at Harvard Law.

His test
scores remain particularly shrouded. It’s easy to see that
releasing them would be a no win proposition for Obama.
Either they weren’t good, which would then underline the
benefits he, coming from an upper middle class white
background, received in getting into all these gaudy
universities from racial quotas.

Or, his test scores were good, which would
emphasize the validity of standardized testing. That’s an
uncomfortable subject in polite society in general, and in
the Obama household in particularly, since

Michelle Obama continues to

complain about being dissed by standardized testing.
Yet, her failures in her abortive law career, such as
not passing
the bar exam at her first chance after graduating from
mighty Harvard Law School, are a classic example of the

failures of affirmative action in general.

My guess
is that the President did quite well on at least the verbal
sections of his tests.

Obama
has a way with words, less in speech than in text. Remnick
reprints several well-written personal letters he sent to
friends, which again demonstrate a certain literary talent
that makes him unusual among politicians.

Obama is
especially facile at restating other people’s views, which
is a highly useful skill that everyone should try to
develop.

Paradoxically, most people aren’t good at
listening to other people’s arguments because they assume
that their opponents disagree with them because they simply
don’t understand their point of view; so they are in a hurry
to reiterate it.  Obama,
in contrast, cares less about being right than about
winning. He assumes that most people’s opinions are, like
his, motivated by race, class, and self-interest, so he’s
not terribly interested in arguing with people who disagree
with him.

Remnick notes that Obama signed up for a
course at Harvard Law School taught by the prominent black
moderate

Randall Kennedy, on one of Obama’s passions, affirmative
action. Yet, when Obama discovered that Kennedy encouraged
white students to engage in frank debate with blacks over
quotas, he quickly dropped the course.

Most
young men with political ambitions would think they could
persuade their fellow students to share their views. But
Obama didn’t appreciate in-depth discussion of racial
preferences. What was in it for him?

Instead,
Obama’s usual goal is to outsmart his opponents with
apparent compromises that tempt them with a rhetorical slice
of the pie while he quietly takes the lion’s share.

Thus, for example, when TV newsman

George Stephanopoulos got up the courage to ask Obama if
his two privileged daughters should benefit from quotas,
Obama waffled, giving many the impression that, if elected
President, he would cut quotas because his election
demonstrated a decline in discrimination.

In reality, as soon as he reached the
White House, he

expanded quotas.

This
kind of thing takes skill.

On the other hand, Obama is being judged
against the low average standard of black politicians who
have emerged over the last few decades as the Voting Rights
Act has corralled blacks in majority-minority districts
where they launch their careers by playing the
“Race
Man”. It’s
not hard to look better than, say,
Marion
Barry. The poor quality of so many black politicians
reflects what the black community demands. In contrast,
Obama is a product of
white elite tastes.

Blacks who knew Obama better, such as Rev.
Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., offered Remnick more
interesting accounts of him than the endless quotes from
Obama’s white acquaintances about his super-duperness. Thus
Wright told Remnick something particularly interesting: that
“a close friend of
Barack’s” offered Wright money to shut up. Wright
refused.

But the one thing Remnick

can’t abide in a black is public reference to Jewish
political power. So, after many pages of taking Rev.
Wright’s ideas seriously, Remnick ultimately dismisses
Wright for saying:

“…
hateful things. As late as June, 2009, he bitterly told a
newspaper in Virginia, the
Daily Press, ‘Them
Jews [presumably, Axelrod and Obama’s chief of staff Rahm
Emmanuel] ain’t going to let [Obama] talk to me.’ … He also
said that Jewish voters and “the

AIPAC” vote were controlling Obama … With these
flourishes, Wright made it a great deal more difficult to
see, or care about, the complexity of his drama.”

After Wright’s years of sermons finally
hit TV (although not until

42 states had voted in the primaries), Wright and Obama
talked:

“… Obama said he
would greatly prefer that Wright stay at home and keep quiet
through the rest of the campaign rather than continue to
preach in Chicago and on the road. “He said, ‘You know what
your problem is, is you’ve got to tell the truth.’”

Obama
suffers even less from that got-to-tell-the-truth problem
than does Remnick. One of the relatively few revealing
anecdotes in this huge book comes from Obama’s class at the
University of Chicago Law School on
“Race, Racism, and
the Law”:

“’But
there was a moment when he let his guard down,’ one former
student recalled. ‘He told us what he thought about
reparations. He agreed entirely with the


theory of reparations.
But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable. … as
the complexities emerged—who is black, how far back do you
go, what about recent immigrants still feeling racism, do
they have a claim—finally, he said, ‘That is why it’s
unworkable.’’”

Of
course, the exact same questions also apply to affirmative
action—which Obama finds wonderfully
“workable”.

Obama’s
student recalled:

“You could tell that
he thought he had let the cat out of the bag and felt
uncomfortable. To agree with reparations in theory means we
go past apology and say we can actually change the dynamics
of the country …”

And make
Tony
Rezko l look like a piker.

[Steve Sailer (email
him) is

movie critic for


The American Conservative.

His website

www.iSteve.blogspot.com
features his daily blog. His new book,
AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S
"STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is
available

here.]