What's Obama hiding?

Famed landlord Donald Trump has been asking some questions about President Obama's background, such as what were his college records at Occidental and Columbia?

The basic impetus behind questions about Obama is the perfectly reasonable feeling: "Who is this guy?"

For example, I lived in Chicago from 1982 until the late summer of 2000. I read local newspapers, I watched local news. I've got a pretty good memory. When Barack Obama became a media superstar in 2004 and an heir apparent to the Presidency, I said to myself, "Oh, yeah, him! I remember him from my Chicago days from ... stuff. Well, I'm pretty sure I've been hearing his name for years, going back to the early 1970s when his radical Black Power plays were so controversial. Oh, wait a minute, I'm thinking of playwright Amiri Baraka, not Barack Obama. Well ..."

My best guess is that when Barack Obama's name surfaced in the news in 2004, it wasn't new to me, but I might just be kidding myself. 

Now, if I'd been paying close attention to local Democratic black politics on the South Side, I would have remembered him as the guy who got crushed by Bobby Rush (whom I was quite familiar with) in early 2000 in the House primary. If I was a player in Democratic rich white politics on the Gold Coast, I would no doubt have heard about how he leaves wealthy white liberals with fainting spells about how he should be President. 

But to a white Republican yuppie on the North Side with a job, he just wasn't on the radar. And why should he have been? What was he accomplishing that marked him out as Presidential timber?

Four years later, he's elected President, eight years after losing badly a House primary.

That's not the most amazing eight year rise in American Presidential history. For example, in 1860, Ulysses S. Grant was a counter clerk in his dad's shop in Galena, IL. Eight years later he was elected President. 

Of course, in the meantime, Grant had conquered Vicksburg and Richmond and defeated Robert E. Lee. 

In contrast, over eight years, Obama had ... uh ... well, mainly he had given up his lifelong ambition of rising to power on the back of black voters and switched to a strategy of rising to power on the back of white voters. 

Back in 2008 in VDARE, I considered various popular theories about Obama"

That he was really born in Kenya and thus isn’t eligible to be President.

That he isn’t black because his father was 7/8ths Arab.

That he is a practicing Muslim.

That his real father was a Communist poet, Frank Marshall Davis.

That Bill Ayers ghostwrote his 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father.

For example, obviously Obama wasn't born in Kenya. The cost and discomfort for a pregnant lady to travel from Hawaii to Kenya in 1961 would be prohibitive. And why would Barack Sr. have taken Ann to Kenya? To meet her co-wife?

I encourage you to reread my 2008 article for a sensible take on various controversies.

So, what is Obama covering up?

Well, one thing that he's not particularly trying hard to cover up, but almost nobody has noticed, is the dubiousness of his parents' marriage:

"In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I’ve never quite had the courage to explore. There’s no record of a real wedding, a cake, a ring, a giving away of the bride. No families were in attendance; it’s not even clear that people back in Kansas were fully informed. Just a small civil ceremony, a justice of the peace. The whole thing seems so fragile... "

He doesn't spell it out, but as a lawyer and a politician, the whole thing would strike him as trouble: Barack Sr. was already married back in Kenya with a wife and a couple of kids, so getting married in Hawaii would be the crime of bigamy. (This situation was anticipated uncannily in John Updike's 1978 bestseller The Coup, in which an African student in an American college in 1959 keeps trying to tell his white American girlfriend that he has a wife back home in Africa.) Or, you could argue that Barack Sr.'s marriage in Kenya according to the customs of his tribe wasn't a "real" marriage, but that sounds pretty racist. And the whole thing raises the topic of polygamy, which isn't really on-message in American political campaigns.

Obama introduced himself to America at the 2004 Democratic convention with a famous speech that began with 390 words about his ancestry, especially his parent's marriage. It's always been a big selling point for Obama that he unites through his parents' marriage the black and the white, just as Henry VIII united the white and the red roses of the War of the Roses. And, it's been a selling point that his parents' black-white marriage was illegal in many states in 1961 (although not, of course, Hawaii, where a huge fraction of marriages by then were interracial, a subject that Obama supporters don't like to talk about). This is a big part of the self-congratulation that helped get Obama to the White House: look how enlightened we are on race today!

But what's the political utility of the truth about his parents' marriage: that it was illegal because polygamy is illegal in America? The federal government fought a small civil war with the Mormons over polygamy in the 1850s. There's no way, no how to positively spin the fact that Obama's parents marriage was illegally bigamous, so let's not talk about it.

But, Obama has been reasonably forthcoming about his parents' illegal marriage. He's never mentioned that his parents marriage was bigamous, but he's laid out enough facts in Dreams from My Father that you can easily figure it out if you read the President's autobiography closely, but who's bothered to do that? (I have.)

So, what is Obama still hiding?

One theory that makes more sense out of his career's ups and downs -- graduating in the top 16% supposedly at Harvard Law School, where he made a big impression on everybody, alongside periods where he seemed down and withdrawn -- is that he's mildly bipolar. Lots of people are. Famous people often are famous because their up phases coincided with periods of opportunity in their lives. By his own accounts, he appears to have suffered major depressive episodes in New York in the 1980s and after his rejection by black voters as not black enough in 2000.

Another theory that I'm increasingly drawn to is that Obama got a little help along the way from CIA/NSA types, but that's completely off everybody else's radar because it doesn't fit ideological categories. His father was a protege of the CIA's main man in Kenya, Tom Mboya, and was chief witness of his assassination. His mother worked in the U.S. embassy in Indonesia, a main front in the Cold War, soon after the 1965 coup, and then went on to a long career with U.S. government-affiliated organizations in the Third World. Barack Jr.'s one private industry job was as a copy editor at a firm, Business International, whose owner had previously admitted the firm served as a front for four CIA agents.

But that likely wouldn't be that big of a deal: say that his parents and stepfather got some people they knew at Langley or NSA or the Ford Foundation or some oil companies to pull some strings to get young Barry transferred from Oxy to Columbia to study international relations. And then, somebody directed him to a job at a CIA-connected firm for a year after college There might be an interesting story here, but perhaps the more interesting one is how he rebelled against this path laid out for him in international affairs and came up with the idea of becoming mayor of Chicago, a very insular, anti-international ambition, a rebellion against his parents' internationalism.

Overall, though, I think the basic situation is that Obama wakes up every morning in the White House and says to himself, "Holy crap, those poor dumb saps really did elect a black lefty affirmative action baby to be President. I'd better act like a complete tool of Wall Street and the neocons, or the saps might finally figure it out. Fortunately, the Republicans are even bigger tools of Wall Street and the neocons, and white Democrats are complete idiots about race, so Democrats will never grasp why I have to sell them out: because I can't let anybody notice I'm a black lefty affirmative action baby! It's so ironic that if white liberals started to think about it, their heads would explode like that computer on Star Trek."

But, mostly, Obama's big dark secret is that he just didn't do much in his life other than self-promote himself as the guy who should be the first black President. The embarrassing secret is that Obama is President for the same dumb reason as the last guy was President: because of who his daddy was.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer