Who is Obama?

When Jack Cashill advanced his theory that Obama did not write Dreams of My Father but that the book was actually written by Bill Ayers, my first thought was that this would end Obama's political career if proven true for the simple reason that Obama was promoted as a Philosopher-King. Cashill made a good case, but for the most part, no one really pursued this or even explored the idea that while Obama may not have written much of his classic, it would not have surprised me if he had helped in editing and maybe a ghost writer aiding in spots. Now we have found out that Obama's literary agents managed to make the birthers, well, less crazy by putting in their PR materials that their client was born in Kenya. For the record, I am not a birther, and I do believe that Obama was born in the United States, but I do find this episode disturbing for either Obama is a liar or filled with a vivid imagination. Or he is simply so incompetent that he allowed his agents to tell the world that he was born in Kenya for sixteen years. Maybe it is a mere symbolism that he was really not born in Kenya, but he felt so estranged from America that he felt that he really wasn’t born in America either. Regardless, if this was reported in December of 2007 in Iowa, how long would his campaign have lasted?

Throughout 2007 and 2008, Obama was one of the least vetted Presidents, and much of what we are finding out now, could easily have been found out while he was running for the President the first time around. But if nothing else, maybe we’re finding out that Dreams of Our Father was less an autobiography and more of a creation of a mythology, the Philosopher-King coming to grip with who he was. How does a multiracial man whose father was from Kenya, a third world country, and whose mother was the white daughter of middle class Americans, view himself?

We did not elect a President as much as elect a Messiah whose goal was to transform America into a new Utopia and away from its ugly past. In 2008, Obama was portrayed as a moderate, but he is a man of the left and his economic plan is European social democracy lite. (Translation, a democratic socialist, the same ideology that is collapsing Europe.) From essentially nationalizing our health care, Government Motors and the EPA declaring war on our energy productive capacity, we have seen a big expansion of government and even bigger expansion of debt.

Power line blogger Paul Mirengoff observed, “We know that as an adult, Obama continued to associate, and started with working, with the same kind of left-wing radicals he had gravitated toward as a youth. And when he found religion, it was in the form of the Black liberation theology of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Moreover, as late as March 2008, Obama said he could “no more disown [Rev. Wright] than I can disown the black community. . .no more disown him than I can my white grandmother. . .Based on the record, the case can be made that Obama still has not resolved the fundamental identity issues that drove him to experiment with weird, obnoxious ideologies that are fundamentally hostile to America and what it has stood for. That’s scary…The case can also be made, and has been by Stanley Kurtz, that Obama has resolved these issues in favor of a radicalism that, though less virulent than that of Rev. Wright, Frank Davis (the Communist who mentored Obama in Hawaii), and Bill Ayers, is ambivalent at best about America and what it has stood for. That’s very scary.”

Mr. Mirengoff's point is that maybe Obama's move to the left was always preordained based on those he associated with as a youth and young adult before making his mark as a national figure. What is starting to become obvious is he has not disowned his radical belief systems, but he did keep them well hidden until his Presidency. Mirengoff added, “His candidacy for high political office likely would have prompted only steps to conceal his ideology. His ascension to the presidency would have imposed constraints on his ability to act, but not necessarily any change in his underlying beliefs.”

The question that remains is what will a second Obama administration look like without the restraint of a having to run again; and worse, what would a second Obama administration look like if aided by a Democratic run Congress? These are not insignificant questions; and a look at Obama’s past would be instructive, especially since it was not done the first time. And what does it say about a President when he felt the need to romanticize his own past? And why invent the need to be born outside the United States? Does the past hold the key to the future of a second Obama administration?