I rarely post something unrelated at all to economics.
But I’m posting this. It’s a long article by David Samuels titled “The Obama Factor.” It ends with a long interview that Samuels does with historian David Garrow, who wrote a biography of Obama titled Rising Star. One thing to be aware of is that Samuels’s questions are in bold and Garrow’s answers aren’t. That confused me after a while because the questions, though typically interesting and informative, are often longer than the answers.
There are so many excerpts to quote.
I’ll settle for two.
There is a fascinating passage in Rising Star, David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama’s early years, in which the historian examines Obama’s account in Dreams from My Father of his breakup with his longtime Chicago girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism. As readers, we know that the stakes of this decision would become more than simply personal: The Black American man that Obama wills into being in this scene would go on to marry a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago named Michelle Robinson and, after a meteoric rise, win election as the first Black president of the United States.
Yet what Garrow documented, after tracking down and interviewing Sheila Miyoshi Jager, was an explosive fight over a very different subject. In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.
Garrow in the interview:
He [Obama] has no interest in building the Democratic Party as an institution. I think that’s obvious. And I don’t think he had any truly deep, meaningful policy commitments other than the need to feel and to be perceived as victorious, as triumphant. I’ve sometimes said to people that I think Barack is actually just as insecure as Trump, but in ways that are not readily perceived by the vast majority of people. I think that’s probably my most basic takeaway.
But it does go back to Dreams [of My Father] being a work of fiction, that the absence of an actual personal story makes him need to compose one. For every time he says, “Oh, I spent years reading the history of the civil rights movement,” I know he read BTC [Bearing the Cross], but I don’t think he read much else. This is someone who … 98 percent of his reading has always been fiction, not history.
There’s also a lot of good stuff I’m not allowed to quote because of Liberty Fund’s strictures on language. I’m not complaining; I think the strictures are good. I’m just reporting.
This is one of the most interesting things I’ve read this year and the most interesting thing I’ve ever read about Obama.
The stuff on Michelle is interesting too.
A very close friend of mine told me a few years ago that the only president or ex-president alive today whom he would like to have a conversation with for more than an hour was Barack Obama. I told him that the set of presidents or ex-presidents I would like to talk to for that long was null.
Read the whole thing.
READER COMMENTS
MarkW
Aug 4 2023 at 7:15am
Fascinating. One thing that struck me — I knew about ex-Obama staffers in the Biden Whitehouse, but it had not occurred to me before was to ask to what extent is Obama still running the show, acting as a kind of shadow president, still living in DC, with all his people in key positions and with Biden clearly not in full possession of his never overly abundant mental faculties. I am also not sure if thinking of this possibility makes me feel better or worse about the current situation. Strange times.
steve
Aug 4 2023 at 12:45pm
I suspect that if you asked ex-boyfriend-girlfriend couples their stories about why they broke up you would get different stories about 90% of the time and if you had a way to determine the “truth” both stories would be wrong most of the time.
Is Carter still alive and not completely demented? A friend of our died a few years ago. He was a SAC bomber crew member. Tons of stories about bombs being lost and/or mishandled. Dealing with the legacies of LeMay. As a corpsman I took care of a Navy officer who was relieved of duty from a ship with nuclear missiles when he went psychotic and he was one of the two officers with power to launch. Would be interesting to hear Carter’s take on that era since he had some involvement in it. He was going to be the engineering officer on one of our first nuclear subs so that alone must have been pretty interesting.
Steve
Scott Sumner
Aug 4 2023 at 1:50pm
I’m no fan of Obama’s policies, but that seemed to me like a hatchet job by someone that despises Obama. I judge politicians by how they behave in office, not what they may or may not have said to their girlfriends many decades ago. Obama showed more class than most other recent presidents.
I’d be horrified if my girlfriends from 30 years ago were interviewed. Not because I said awful things, but because they would have misinterpreted and/or misremembered much of what I did say.
But I do agree with this:
“I told him that the set of presidents or ex-presidents I would like to talk to for that long was null.”
Dylan
Aug 4 2023 at 2:43pm
I’ve come to realize that much of my approval/disapproval for presidents is largely aesthetic. I’m likely going to disagree with whoever is in power, regardless of party,on most policy issues, but I want a president that seems smart, acknowledges nuance, can speak eloquently about a range of topics, particularly the idealistic idea of what America is supposed to be. Obama did those things (IMHO obviously) better than any president in my living memory.
I don’t get this. With the possible exception of Trump, I think I’d enjoy talking to any former president and could find things to chat about for much longer than an hour. I was at an event recently with a senior official in the Trump administration who gave a talk and I had a chance to chat with for a bit afterwards. I disagreed with him on a bunch of things, but it was still a fascinating conversation and I learned a lot. I can’t imagine that wouldn’t be even more true for a president. Even one I violently disagreed with. The only reason I think Trump wouldn’t be interesting is because he doesn’t seem like a very good conversationalist.
Mark Z
Aug 5 2023 at 1:29am
I’m fairly certain most presidents are in fact surprisingly uninteresting people, because, as many people share your focus on aesthetics, they’re experts most of all at appearances rather than intellectual substance. It’s also a job that requires a degree of cynicism that’s pretty psychologically inconsistent with being a sincere true believer. I think the primary motivation driving most presidents is a desire for legacy; to have libraries named after them and their names remembered.
Which is fine of course; it’s a setup that’s worked much better than systems ruled by leaders with genuinely grandiose vision and devotion to an ideology, but it is banal. I honestly think the typical undersecretary of state for East Asian affairs would be much more interesting to talk to than the typical president.
Dylan
Aug 5 2023 at 7:58am
Could be, but honestly I don’t think that matters all that much. They’ve had interesting experiences and had to make tough choices and just talking to anyone who’s lived through that and been in the position to make calls that will have far reaching impacts would be fascinating. And, I’m not even expecting them to be all that candid or truthful! But, I tend to be one of those folks who strikes up conversations with random people all the time, and almost always find it interesting. Even the Uber driver who spent half an hour telling me about the hover craft he’d invented that could go anywhere on earth by just floating up a few feet and letting the earth spin under it.
MarkW
Aug 4 2023 at 3:22pm
I’d be horrified if my girlfriends from 30 years ago were interviewed. Not because I said awful things, but because they would have misinterpreted and/or misremembered much of what I did say.
I guess so. But the girlfriends (like Obama) apparently kept journals, and theirs (unlike his) were available, at least to a degree. As for Sheila Miyoshi Jager, she doesn’t say anything particularly bad about him, but as for the specific reason for their breakup, her account at least matches the historical record in the sense that, AFAIK, Obama did not condemn Steve Cokely or his anti-Semitic remarks (and it rings true that doing so might well have been fatal to an ambitious young man eager to rise in politics as a Black activist and part of the Chicago Democratic machine).
Obama showed more class than most other recent presidents
More class, I suppose (those finely delivered speeches and famous trouser creases!), but I’m more one to judge by a President’s policies and actions rather than ‘class’, and in that I found Obama wanting — as with Trump and Biden. And I can’t say even that I find Obama’s post-presidential activities (staying in DC, rubbing elbows and globe-trotting with the celebs and ultra-wealthy) to rate as classy.
And, no, I wouldn’t want to sit down for a chat with any of them.
TMC
Aug 4 2023 at 7:24pm
” I’m more one to judge by a President’s policies and actions rather than ‘class’,”
Exactly. How did we get to where a man’s words are more important than his actions? Maybe that’s the way it has always been, but people used to give a least a little lip service to actions.
Dylan
Aug 5 2023 at 1:02pm
I’m inclined to agree with you, but I think when it comes to a president, words matter a lot and impact perception in a way that actions mostly don’t. Plus, I’ve come to have a lot less faith in what any individual president can do on the action front, for better and worse, the bureaucracy constrains on policy, but not so much on what they say.
Words and poise matter a lot though! And not just for domestic perception. There’s a whole world out there that watches pretty closely what the president says, and it just seems safer to have one that operates in the “normal” range of what we expect from someone at that level.
David Seltzer
Aug 4 2023 at 3:23pm
“I told him that the set of presidents or ex-presidents I would like to talk to for that long was null.” For me, it would be Mister Jefferson and Harry Truman. Truman because I’m curious as to his decision to use the bombs and his subsequent reflection(s) on that decision.
David Henderson
Aug 4 2023 at 4:14pm
We’re not disagreeing. My friend was talking about presidents and ex-presidents alive today and that’s what I was responding to.
There are many ex-Presidents who are dead whom I have loved to talk to. Among them are Van Buren, Cleveland, Harding, and Coolidge.
David Seltzer
Aug 4 2023 at 5:12pm
David, I should have been more clear. I too agree with your comment to your friend. My bad.
Comments are closed.