My impression of Obama is that he never had an American mindset. His formative years were spent in Indonesia, where his nanny claimed he admired 3rd world Liberation Indonesian strong man, Sukarno. His campaign rhetoric is indistinguishable from Juan Peron, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Idi Amin and Hugo Chavez. Obama does not see himself as an American president, but as some global divine philosopher king in the mold of Plato’s The Republic. He has a Pharaonic attitude that makes him above being American.
A new biography that interviews college friends confirms Obama’s non American mindset. He had an Internationalist mindset. Even more startling, Obama did not identify with being black. It was only when he decided to get into politics that he discovered his black identity.
The excerpt focuses on Obama’s brief time in New York after his graduation from Columbia University. The son of a Kenyan father and an American expatriate mother, Obama emerges as a man questioning whether he viewed himself, or wanted to be viewed by others, as an American. Not in a citizenship sense — Obama was born in the United States and that was that — but in the sense of how he saw the world and wanted to be seen by it.
Obama had a lot of Pakistani friends; Maraniss writes that if Obama and his girlfriend socialized as a couple, “it was almost always with the Pakistanis.” Obama appeared to identify with his friends as fellow non-Americans. “For years when Barack was around them, he seemed to share their attitudes as sophisticated outsiders who looked at politics from an international perspective,” Maraniss writes. “He was one of them, in that sense.”
But Obama was ambitious. Appalled by the “dirty deeds” of “Reagan and his minions” (as he wrote in “Dreams from My Father”), Obama became increasingly interested in, as Maraniss writes, “gaining power in order to change things.” He couldn’t do that as an international guy hanging around with his Pakistani friends; he needed to become an American.
So he did. One of those Pakistani friends, Beenu Mahmood, saw a major change in Obama. Mahmood calls Obama “the most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his own identity,” according to Maraniss. The time after college, Mahmood says, “was an important period for him, first the shift from not international but American, number one, and then not white, but black.”
Obama recently invoked Reagan’s name to bash Republicans. Yet his hatred of Ronald Reagan is what motivated him to get into politics. He didn’t identify with being black and he adopted a black identity for politics. Clearly Obama is a chameleon and does not view himself as an American. He views himself as a citizen of the world. That’s why he had a campaign stop in Berlin when he was running in 2008.
At this blog we had Obama pegged. He comes from the 3rd World Liberation wing of the Transnationalist Progressive Movement. Mitt Romney should use these facts about Obama’s mindset against him.
Bonus: Here’s a video of Mitt Romney mocking the fictional character Julia, created by the Obama Regime.
Could this be the Obama campaign’s Murphy Brown moment? I am starting to think this election is 1992 in reverse.
