Why Is He "Black"? I Don't Get It

Barack Obama’s Racial Juggling Act

His associates in Chicago, his carefully chosen bromides, and even the background he has decided to embrace explain much about Senator Obama's quest for power.
May 8, 2008 - by Evan Sayet

In a world where genetics and not culture matter, Barack Obama was “half black.” In the real world, however, he is a white kid who called himself “Barry,” attended private school in the paradise of Hawaii, and went home each night to a mother and grandmother from the plains of Kansas. The influence of Barry’s black (African) father was negligible at best, providing him with little more than the name that the child quickly rejected in favor of the more Anglo moniker he used every day of his young life.

Here’s a brief description — from Obama’s own website — of the people who didn’t abandon him when he was a toddler but, instead, changed his diapers, did his homework with him, and nurtured Barry into adulthood:

Barack’s mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in small-town Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression, and then signed up for World War II after Pearl Harbor, where he marched across Europe in Patton’s army. Her mother went to work on a bomber assembly line, and after the war, they studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program, and moved west to Hawaii.

But somewhere along the way Barry, always an ambitious lad, came to realize that there was more to be gained by being black — by going from “Barry” to “Barack” not only in name but in agenda.

The “black” Barack would get what the white Barry couldn’t: a sense of uniqueness, the benefits of affirmative action, the embrace of the “multiculturalists” in academia, and later the path to personal power and riches he sought in the overwhelmingly black wards of Chicago.

But simply calling himself “Barack” would not be enough to win him admittance to and support from the leftists in the universities where he first taught and then amongst the power brokers in the political movements whom he’d need to underwrite his thirst for power. To win their trust, allegiance, and support, Barack needed to do more than call himself “black” — after all, people like Condoleezza Rice and Bill Cosby call themselves black — he’d have to prove he was “authentically” black (i.e., held radical leftist positions).

Barry, always quick on the uptake, realized there could be no better way to prove his “true” identity as a black man than by joining the Afrocentric, anti-white, anti-Jewish church of Jeremiah Wright. In fact, he would, as always, go one step further; he’d become Wright’s protege. Similarly, Barry knew there was no better way to prove his leftist credentials to the folks in academia than to sidle up to terrorists — both foreign and domestic.

Soon he would become friends and colleagues with William Ayers — whose group had murdered Americans in the 1960s and, as recently as just a few years ago, in the wake on 9/11, proclaimed that the only regret he had is that it didn’t succeed in murdering more of his fellow citizens. And, just in case his resume wasn’t strong enough, he’d cozy up to Edward Said, the Islamist/Arab apologist who sought to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth.

It’s not that Barry necessarily believed in any of these causes — it’s hard to know if Barry believes in anything other than Barry — it’s that these are the kinds of things you did if you wanted money, power, and fame. And Barry wanted money, power, and fame.

Whatever doubts Barry — now insisting on only being called by his father’s African name, “Barack” — may have had about kicking in with hate-mongers, racists, and terrorists were quickly assuaged as the benefits began to roll in. In what seemed like no time Barry was teaching law, and then they made him a state senator and then a U.S. senator! His wife was given a cushy job at the university and the couple’s income rose to nearly half-a-million a year while they slept comfortably each night in a mansion purchased only with the “help” of Chicago mobster Tony Rezko.

And Barry’s friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators invested wisely. The young, handsome, articulate “black” man was good to his mentor at the church of hate, making sure to “kick back” a taste — nearly twenty-thousand dollars (virtually every penny the “caring” Obamas gave to charity) in 2007 alone. The university’s kindness to Ms. Obama was repaid by her husband’s advancing their radical agenda first in the state legislature and then in the United States Congress, where Barry would soon become the single most leftist of all U.S. senators. The terrorists, who would hold fundraisers for Barack, would be repaid by Barry in droves, with him not only supporting their agenda as a legislator, but using his first major national exposure — the nationally televised keynote address at the Democratic National Convention — to spread the canard of an evil and bigoted America picking on the innocent Muslims, a standard tactic of the terrorists to dissuade legitimate investigation into their plots.

Yes, Barry’s arrangements were working out well for all.

But Barry got too big for his britches. His ambition soon exceeded his handlers’ needs. Barry wouldn’t be happy with the half-million dollars a year that he and Michelle were pocketing — in fact, Michelle would publicly complain about the struggles of getting by on such a piddling sum. It wouldn’t do for the Obamas to live in that crowded little mansion the mobster helped them secure; Barry and Michelle wanted to live in the White House. It simply would not be sufficient for Barry to share power with 99 other senators; he wanted all the power for himself and he wanted it now!

And thus, despite the fact that he had finished less than one-third of his first term as a junior senator from Illinois, Barry quickly announced that he planned to become president!

But soon Barry realized he had a problem. A big one. For the first time since he was a child, getting his way meant he had to connect not with the powers in the God Damn America community of the left, but the God Bless America community of the rest of America. But how could he win over mainstream America while not raising the ire of the people to whom he owed everything and who hated everything about America? How could he attract the folks without angering the people who not only made him but, as Barry would soon learn, could also break him?

But Barry, as always, had a plan. He would run as the Seinfeld candidate — the candidate about nothing. He’d use meaningless bromides that would soothe the one side but not offend the other. His speeches would be packed with empty words like “hope” and “change,” knowing that what each side hoped for and the change they envisioned would be diametrically opposed, but neither side would know which one he meant.

At first Barry’s cohorts on the left were displeased. He wasn’t shoving their message down America’s throats the way his predecessors — Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson — had. The old racist questions began to be thrown out about Barry. The leftists publicly challenged him, demanding to know if he was “black enough.”

But as Barry’s maneuvering began to see him succeed where Sharpton and Jackson had failed, Barry’s handlers saw the genius of his ways. Besides, while Barry wasn’t doing the things they wanted him to do — attacking America and Americans — they saw that he was using his surrogates, most obviously his closest and most intimate adviser, Michelle Obama, to do it for him. Yes, Barry was all smiles. Michelle was paying the angry black woman, advancing the hate-America-always crowd’s agenda by portraying America as “mean,” with a damaged “soul,” and with absolutely nothing (except Barry) to be proud of. No, it wasn’t what they had expected, but now so close to having their man in the White House, the preacher of hate and the terrorists would, in the words of Jeremiah Wright, allow Barry “to do what politicians do.”

And for more than a year Barry’s strategy paid off. Anyone who questioned him on his affiliation with his hate-mongering mentor or his work with terrorists or his affiliation with mobsters would be dismissed as “engaging in the politics of old” or “distracting us from the real issues,” with the legitimate questions going unanswered.

On those rare occasions when a question of substance could not be dodged, Barry would use his lawyerly skills of obfuscation and equivocation to, for example, “reject” the words of Louis Farrakhan while, with a wink and a nod to his cohorts, letting them know that he still highly respected the “minister.” And the left let Barry do what politicians do.

And then the roof caved in.

Videotapes of Barry’s hateful mentor began to surface through media sources his leftist allies couldn’t control. Fox News — especially Sean Hannity — was on the story and then talk radio and the blogosphere. When the first of Jeremiah Wright’s sermons of hate was posted on YouTube and people could see for themselves what the old media had been covering up, there was rightful outrage. Barry’s numbers began to plummet. He started to lose vital primaries. His whole act was falling apart. Barry knew he had to do something, for not even Chris Matthews — he of the tingling thighs — could help him now.

So Barry, the “post-racial candidate,” whatever that means, suddenly become the racial candidate — the guru of race, in fact — who would lecture the rest of America about all racial truths.

Barry, of course, knew from the start that this would have to be his greatest dance yet. The whole dynamics of his game would have to change. Now, instead of satisfying everyone by saying nothing, he’d have to hop back and forth from foot to foot, trying to soothe the rightful fears of the God Bless America crowd on the one hand and then cleverly signal to his people that he was really still on their side and that he hadn’t gone “white” on them. And, truth be told, Obama did as good a job as he could have possibly done. He’d be Barry one moment and Barack the next; he’d throw one side a bone and instantly snatch it back only to throw it the other way; he’d call the clearly hateful remarks of his mentor “racist” but then explain how it was really the white man’s fault that the man was that way. Yes, he’d give his handlers a little tap, but, to make up for it, he’d throw his own white grandmother under the bus.

It was a masterful performance. But it failed. It failed for the same reason that John Kerry, Al Gore, Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, et al. constantly failed: it was exquisitely full of nuance about things that aren’t all that complicated. With regard to the hate speeches of Jeremiah Wright, there can be no “on the one hand this and on the other hand that.” Either he agreed with his mentor of twenty years or he didn’t. Either the white man invented AIDS to murder people of color or they didn’t. Either innocent Americans deserved to be burned alive by the thousands on 9/11 or they didn’t. Barry’s game-playing served only to expose him as a cheap politician at best or someone in agreement with a hateful, anti-American, anti-white, antisemitic preacher.

But this wasn’t the worst of it for Barry, for his attempts at equivocation didn’t sit well with the God Damn America crowd either.

It was one thing for Barry to fail to play the angry black man for them and say nothing, but now he was saying things, things like comparing his benefactor, his mentor, the man who made Barry everything he is today, to a “crazy uncle” and, worse still, comparing him to some lily-white cracker woman from Kansas! It was time to do to Barry what Barry had done to his mother and grandmother: it was time to throw Barry under the bus!

Evan Sayet has rapidly become one of the most in-demand speakers in the country. His talk to the Heritage Foundation last year has become a phenomenon, with close to half-a-million viewers. It can be seen (and Evan can be reached) via his website at www.evansayet.com. The book Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals ‘Think’ — based on that talk — will be available soon.

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