In reality, Obama provides a disturbing test of the best-case scenario of whether America can indeed move beyond race. He inherited his father’s penetrating intelligence; was raised mostly by his loving liberal white grandparents in multiracial, laid-back Hawaii, where America’s normal race rules never applied; and received a superb private school education. And yet, at least through age 33 when he wrote Dreams from My Father, he found solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against his mother’s race. ~Steve Sailer

The excerpt from Mr. Sailer’s long piece on Obama, which is sure to cause great agitation among Obama fans everywhere, gets to the heart of the strange appeal that Obama apparently has (I say apparently, because I confess that I still do not entirely understand how it works) and shows that appeal to be false.  To the extent that I do understand this appeal, it is that he somehow “transcends” racial divisions and antipathies by being the son of two races, thereby uniting difference, harmonising discord and smoothly blending together the two peoples.  For some people, this is not just a possibly nice idea, but a solution to the Fundamental Problem of America.  For people of a certain generation and conventional political views, the state of “race relations” bothers them so much that they are constantly forced to talk in vague, euphemistic terms about how this country is founded on ideas and propositions and by fulfilling the “promise” of those ideas and propositions all major problems of race relations will be solved.   

This ideal Obama does not have all the “baggage” of resentment politics that most white voters find so unattractive in the self-appointed spokesmen for the black community, and can at the same time somehow win the crowd at Selma more convincingly than any Northerner has ever been able to do while also winning the admiration of white pundits and voters alike.  But, as his memoir tells it, this image is not who Obama actually is, and thank goodness for that.  Let me explain.  The image that has been presented to the public about Obama is so entirely unreal and unbelievable, and I think this is an important part of why some people are so enthusiastic about his image and the candidacy built on that image.  It is because the image is so unreal and unbelievable that people who like what they see in it embrace it even more zealously: the viability of Obama’s candidacy, such as it is, is not proof so much of progress but of apparently widespread frustration with a lack of any meaningful improvement in the state of race relations.  If there was real, abundant comity in America between races, Obama’s candidacy–and the myth surrounding it–would be unnecessary and would not generate the kind of enthusiasm that it is generating in certain quarters.      

It must be that this image of the ideal Obama fills some need for a great many people.  Why they have that need, I am unsure, but many do seem to have an abiding need to find someone who will “bridge” the divide between races in this country.  In any case, it is worth being reminded that Obama is nothing like the transcendent unifier of all that some people desperately want him to be, because no living man is anything like that and, strangely enough, to view Obama in this way is to view him as something either more or less than a man.  This would be to give a politician either way too much credit or to do an injustice to a real, complex human being who happens to have dreadful leftist politics.  The first is folly, and the second is a serious mistake. 

This image is the product of the pouring of other people’s hopes and dreams into the empty vessel that Obama has been for at least these last many months since he started campaigning.  The media and his admirers have made him into a political sensation because they have made him into what they want him to be, rather than what he actually is.  He has obliged, because in doing so he has catapulted himself into contention for the highest office in the land, and the actual Obama is nothing if not ambitious.  Frankly, it would be much more interesting to know more about the real Obama, the one now so scrupulously hidden from view, and it is a shame that he wants to run on a platform of platitudes and promote uninspired, rehashed conventional left-liberalism.  Like Mitt Romney, who has for his part put on the mask he thinks he needs to wear to advance in GOP politics, Obama has invented himself anew (and he has been working on this new self since he came onto the national stage) and tried to sell himself as the great problem-solver, the figure who will “transform” the country and its politics.  Like Mitt Romney, he will fail when it becomes evident just how false this new self is. 

Given the man’s truly radical background, he might really shake up the political scene one way or another if he ran as himself.  But, then, of course, he would have no realistic chance of becoming President, and that, as we have discovered, is something that he has been aiming at for quite some time.  In the end, this widely-adored public image is the true inauthenticity of Barack Obama, because it is a product of the fantasy that the media would like to create about the progress and improvement in race relations that they apparently need to believe has happened.  It remains to be seen whether enough Democrats will tire of the fantasy before the primaries are concluded, but the fantasy does no justice to Obama’s political skills or the political realities of this country.  It is almost as if to say, “Obama would never have a chance if we did not weave some preposterous but highly attractive myth around him,” which is, in the end, a disservice to the man his admirers and boosters claim to support.