Obama’s Father
(A good read)
One problem with Obama running on his biography is that he’s systematically misled voters into imagining things about the implications of his life story that aren’t true. He has a gift for telling people what they want to hear; unfortunately, one of those people is Barack Obama. He is weak at learning from his own biography. He tends to draw lessons that are cliches from the conventional wisdom, no matter how obviously inapt they are.
Here, for example, is the emotional climax of Dreams from My Father, in which Barack Obama Jr. visits his father’s and paternal grandfather’s graves in Kenya (p. 429). His passionate reflections on his father strike me as heavily Oprah-influenced and bizarrely backward: