Say Anything Blog

Back before Barack Obama was campaigning for the votes of mainstream Americans in a national election for President of the United States, when he was merely the very liberal President of the Harvard Law Review and still a congregant in good standing of Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright’s church, he wrote of this memory of his mother teaching him about America when he was a child in Indonesia (quote from Dreams from My Father):

She had always encouraged my rapid acculturation in Indonesia … She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad. But she now had learned . . . the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere.

That’s quite a different memory from the one Obama is recounted on the campaign trail today in a speech entitled “The America We Love”:

I remember, when living for four years in Indonesia as a child, listening to my mother reading me the first lines of the Declaration of Independence - “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” I remember her explaining how this declaration applied to every American, black and white and brown alike; how those words, and words of the United States Constitution, protected us from the injustices that we witnessed other people suffering during those years abroad. That’s my idea of America.

Abe Greenwald notes:

So: In “The America We Love” version, his mother teaches him about the beautiful promises of the Constitution and in the Dreams from My Father version, his mother teaches him that America is a nation of dumb people who live longer.

In today’s speech, Obama claimed that “As I got older, that gut instinct - that America is the greatest country on earth - would survive my growing awareness of our nation’s imperfections.” If that’s the case someone should tell the blogger on Obama’s official website who specifically praises the Dreams from My Father version, writing, “. . . has any other candidate grown up with such a direct encounter with a country under massive political repression or seen the cynical face of the US Empire? He has experienced it.”

Once again we are faced with a dilemma: Which Obama do we believe?  The 2008, middle-of-the-campaign-for-leader-of-the-free-world, I’ll-say-anything-to-get-elected Obama?  Or the Obama who was writing before the political career and the anointment as the liberal messiah?

Say what you want about John McCain, but at least he’s authentic enough to not have to fabricate his childhood and pre-political years so as to not appear to be too far to the political fringes for the average American.