Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story punctures two sets of falsehoods: The family tales Obama passed on, unknowing; and the stories Obama made up.
[snip]
The two strands of falsehood run together, in that they often serve the same narrative goal: To tell a familiar, simple, and ultimately optimistic story about race and identity in the 20th Century.
No kidding. I’d like to note, by the way – and, indirectly, contra Smith – I’ve never been one of those “conservative critics [who] have, since the beginnings of [Obama’s] time on the national scene, taken the self-portrait at face value.” In fact, the phrase that I’ve used to describe the fellow is “a clueless Harvard liberal who is as about as authentically African-American as I am.” No reason for bringing it up, except that it mildly annoys me whenever people try to pretend that something is a staggeringly new insight, instead of being a commonplace observation that’s been obvious for years…
Via @ewerickson.
I do agree that Mr. Obama, taken at (his) face value has something of the Grand Opera about him.
However, I admit to skepticism about this revisionism also. Remember it is a WaPo ‘reporter’ who has written this book. They have a rather rich history of seeing everything in Barack and White.
Shorter Moe Lane: Obama Lies.
Shorter (Joe Wilson version): You Lie!
Why does everyone conveniently forget all the fretting from racialist hucksters during the ’08 primaries about Ovama not being “down with the struggle”? His own party members were questioning his racial bona fides right up until the writing was on the wall and they saw, quite clearly, how they could make beaucoup bucks off our “post-racial” President.
“Ovama”? Really, Autocorrect?
Ovama sounds vaguely Russian/Soviet. It works.