Hilary Clinton’s futile and self-defeating attacks on Barack Obama are obscuring a much more significant phenomenon. At the margins, a robust, effective and alluring (to some) anti-Obama narrative is in gestation. And it’s going to be interesting to watch this migrate into the mainstream with every step Obama takes to the White House.
A good place to see what’s brewing on the fringes is this extraordinary column from the pseudonymous Asia Times columnist, Spengler. Like his namesake and fellow apostle of Western decline, Spengler revels in his role as a contemporary Cassandra. Based on scant evidence, he has peered into Obama’s soul and has come away repelled by what he sees.
The root of the problem, Spengler argues, is Obama’s parentage. His mother hated America so much that she married outside her culture and race, not once but twice. His father was ‘an abusive drunk and philanderer whose temper soured his career’, typical of a class of Kenyans who collaborated with their colonial masters and became “hollow men dying inside of their own hypocrisy and corruption.”
Her second husband, meanwhile, the Indonesian Lolo Soetero, took his new family into “the kitchen of anti-colonialist outrage, immediately following one of the worst episodes of civil violence in post-war history.” Young Obama may not have become a Muslim, but his early experiences have left him anti-American to the core.
Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother’s milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion.
He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.
And behind this deracinated and tragic figure is the obligatory harpy, his wife Michelle. She, Spengler argues, burns with the rage felt by all ‘descendants of slaves’ and thinks nothing of ‘bitch slapping’ her husband when he fails to live up to expectations. Like Lady Macbeth, she will drive her weak-willed spouse down to the road to inevitable ruin, whether of himself or America.
So there you have it – a mother who betrays her race and a father who betrays his. A step father and wife who help produce a toxic rage. The result: the Presidential candidate as cuckoo, the archetype of an “embittered outsider manipulating the system from within to achieve his goals.” Spengler finds only one consolation:
It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama.
I think Obama can survive this stuff – but come the Autumn and assuming Hilary doesn’t make an extraordinary comeback – he’s in for an ugly ride…
