A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

Now that Barack Obama is the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee, I figured that it made sense for me to read the book that launched him on the literary scene. Overall, I have to write that I am very impressed. By all accounts, this book was Obama's own and he did a very good job telling the story of his life. His voice is developed, his narrative is compelling and his ability to observe and recount is formidable indeed.

I suppose that I should note as well two of the problems I had with the book. The first has to do with the way in which he tells the story of his maternal grandmother, who Obama calls "Toot." Recall the following from Obama's now-famous speech on race when the Jeremiah Wright controversy broke:

I can no more disown [Reverend Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

From this passage, I thought that Toot was going to be portrayed as a woman of quite antediluvian views on race. But when I read the book, I found that the only potentially objectionable thing she did was to express fear a day after having apparently been somewhat aggressively panhandled by a black man on the bus she took to and from work. This isn't the most enlightened behavior around; merely because a person of one particular race decides to be less-than-pleasant on one particular day, it does not mean that such less-than-pleasant behavior can be attributed to all people of that race. But Obama's speech made it seem as if Toot was guilty of far, far worse and when I read the book, my reaction to Obama's description of his grandmother's offending attitude was to be underwhelmed. Again, her Pavlovian reaction in the wake of being aggressively panhandled was not enlightened, but neither was it the "cringe" inducing pattern of behavior that Obama described it as in his speech. And indeed, Obama was unfair to his grandmother in his speech, since many a time in his book, he describes her enlightened attitudes on race, recounting, for example, the stories of her willingness to stand up to bigots and their ugly words and deeds when Toot and Obama's maternal grandfather lived in Texas.

Obama also needs to be taken to task regarding his discussion of his community activism days. As this New York Times story points out:

In a stirring scene from his memoir, Mr. Obama describes an organizing success at Altgeld Gardens, a badly neglected housing project.

Mr. Obama wrote that one day an Altgeld parent handed him a newspaper advertisement soliciting bids to remove asbestos from Altgeld's management office.

Mr. Obama recounted that he helped arrange a bus trip to the housing authority headquarters where residents had demanded a meeting with the executive director and a pledge that residential units would be tested for asbestos. As television cameras rolled, the residents were promised testing and a meeting.

"I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way," Mr. Obama wrote. It was the kind of action that "hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on."

What Mr. Obama does not mention in his book is that residents of the nearby Ida B. Wells housing project, and some at Altgeld itself, had already been challenging the housing authority on asbestos. A local newspaper had also taken up the issue.

So there is some glory-hogging in the book. And Obama should be called out for it, as it does misrepresent his activism record and misleads voters to the extent that they rely on Obama's activism record as a way to predict his potential Presidential performance.

All of this having been written, it is incumbent to stress that anyone who can write a compelling biography of his life up to his early to mid 30s is a formidable figure. Most people are not able to do this, of course--either because their lives are not interesting enough by the time they hit their early to mid 30s to justify a biography, or because they are not good enough at story-telling, or both. Obama has the storyteller's touch and has led a unique and interesting--if especially introspective--life. He has shown the ability to weave a powerful narrative in telling the story of that life.

There is nothing to suggest that he won't be able to weave a powerful narrative in telling the story of why he ought to be elected President, and anyone who does not fully appreciate that fact underestimates Obama at his/her peril.