Fred Martinez's Monitor

Could Obama's Emotionally Chaotic Family Background Make his Presidency a Disaster?

TomRoeser.com ::

-"But the question remains: How much emotional stability can accrue when you come from a mad house non-family background like his? When two fathers have abandoned you? This hasn't been reported very much."

-"Barack Obama's flabby views on the Iraq war... [are] the litmus test to show how wrongheaded Obama has been-and how his inexperience and Jimmy Carter-like timidity threaten to make his presidency a disaster."

TomRoeser.com ::
Personal Aside: Barack Obama's Chaotic Family Background Could Lead Some to Ask: Who is this Man? Does it Impact on Voters' Insecurity About Him?

Posted: 28 Jul 2008 06:31 AM PDT



Chaotic Family Background.

With the papal-style visit of the Middle East and Europe ended, Barack Obama returned to the U.S. yesterday to be greeted by a 9-point bump in Gallup-a respectable but not overwhelming edge. But probably the most definitive question confronting him ran in "The Wall Street Journal" Friday.

A WSJ-NBC News poll finds that a full 50% of all voters say they are still trying to make up their mind on what kind of president he would be. Only a quarter are viewing Sen. John McCain the same way. All of which validates what most analysts have been saying for months: (1) change is in the air and the pendulum desperately wants to swing to the Democrats but (2) Obama seems to present some major risks while (3) voters have known John McCain for many years, understand he is not an extremist and feel comfortable with him but (4) Obama is an enigma.

Writes the WSJ: "When voters were asked whether they could identify with the background and values of the two candidates, 58% said they could identify with Sen. McCain on that account while 47% said the same of Sen. Obama. More than four in 10 said the Democratic contender doesn't have value s and background they can identify with."

Small wonder. Take the chaotic jumble that is in his immediate background. He has eight half-siblings-seven of them living-by four other marriages or relationships of his parents. His father, Barack Obama, Sr.had four children by a woman he married in Kenya before his 1960 marriage to Obama's mother in Hawaii. Two of those children-son Aborigo (Roy) and daughter Auma-were born before Barack Obama, Jr.

After Obama, Sr. divorced Obama's mother in 1963, he married another American woman whom he had brought to Kenya and with whom he had two more sons-Mark and David. That marriage ended in divorce and Obama, Sr. resumed his relationship with his first wife. Obama, Sr. and they had two other sons-Abo and Bernard-although Barack, Jr. wrote in his autobiography that there is some question as to whether another man actually fathered Bernard. Then Obama, Sr. had another son, George, by a woman he was involved with but did not marry. Following which Obama's mother, the former Stanley (yes, Stanley since her father wanted a son so much he insisted she take a man's name) Ann Dunham had a daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng from a second marriage to a man named Lolo Soetoro.

Got all that?

Not surprisingly, half-brothers and half-sisters to Obama keep popping up all the time (one just surfaced to the media in China the other day). The question could be asked: what does this trick bag of half-brothers, half-sisters, illegitimate brothers and sisters who may not be related at all but sired by others do to one's stability?

We all know the emotional stress that settles on a child when one father abandons the child. What happens when TWO fathers abandon the same child, as happened with Obama? I mean Obama's mother who took husband number two, Lolo Soetoro when Obama was six. He was an Indonesian student with whom she moved to Jakarta. Obama relates in his autobiography that she was shocked to discover Soetoro was a male chauvinist. So she divorced him and sent 10-year-old Barack, Jr. to live with her parents in Honolulu while she and his half sister stayed in Indonesia. All the while Obama's polygamous natural father takes up again with his first wife, then marries another white American woman and adds a mistress, eventually fathering eight kids by four women.

Spider-web complications for genealogists and psychologists to work on for the prospective 44th president. Not exactly like George Washington marrying the widow Martha Custis, is it?

Reading the two autobiographies of this man who is 46 years old, we get a glimpse of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro Obama. She has a favorite film, a 1959 Brazilian art-house classic "Black Orpheus" which she talks insatiably about. Years later while working on Wall Street, Obama goes to a theatre to see it. He realizes that his very fair-skinned mother is sexually drawn to black men. So he writes, "The emotions between the races could never be pure; even lose was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that-menacing, alien and apart."

Ben Wallace-Wells writing in "Rolling Stone" last year:

"There is an amazingly candid moment in Obama's autobiography when he writes of his childhood discomfort at the way his mother would sexualize African-American men. `More than once,' he recalls, 'my mother would point out: "Harry Belafonte is the best-looking man on the planet." What the focus groups his advisers conducted revealed was that Obama's political career now depends, in some measure, upon a tamer version of this same feeling, on the complicated dynamics of how white women respond to a charismatic black man.'"

Op Ed writer Roger Cohen in "The New York Times" earlier this year wrote from Brussels: "So there I was, a couple of weeks back, sitting under a mango tree in western Kenya when Sen. Barack Obama's half-sister Aune says to me: `My daughter's father is British. My mom's brother is married to a Russian. I have a brother in China engaged to a Chinese woman.'" Cohen adds he understands this half brother living in China is named Mark-the son of Obama's father. But all this is good news if Obama becomes president.

Why?

Cohen exults: "If elected, Obama would be the first genuinely 21st century leader. The China-Indonesia-Kenya-Britain-Hawaii web mirrors a world in flux. In Kenya, his uncle Sayid, a Muslim told me: `My Islam is a hybrid, a mix of elements including my Christian schooling and even some African ways. Many values have dissolved in me.'"

How thrilling. And how revelatory of the man his half sister Auma spoke of to writer Cohen during Obama's second trip to Kenya:

"He was trying to figure out who he was. He needed to be whole to be able to do what he's doing now. He went about it in the right way. A big chunk of his life was missing. It's very healthy that he now knows he has these roots here."

But as he himself wrote, on his first trip to Kenya two decades ago he met a woman named Ruth in Nairobi, whom he described as "a white woman with a long jaw and graying hair."

Who was she? She was a woman who divorced Obama's father, remarried and gave the family name of her second husband to her two sons by Obama, Sr. In his book she asks Obama bluntly:

"But your mother remarried. I wonder why she had you keep your name?"

Good question. But only one of many. This jumble, this crazy-quilt of divorces, illegitimate births, mistresses and a potential president having been abandoned by two fathers in a row may lead even more voters to be doubtful when it comes out (as it hasn't to any substantial degree yet). Even now there's enough doubt to understand why in the new WSJ/NBC poll by a 55% to 35% margin voters are more likely to say that Obama would be the riskier choice. Not only are his views opaque but his very background is... as Churchill described the USSR... an enigma, wrapped in a mystery bound up in a riddle.

Odds are even my bringing up this chaotic background will be assailed as "unfair" even "racist." That's standard operating procedure for Obama's aficionados. You can't criticize anything about him... his wife, his religion, the size of his ears, his announcing that he has traveled to all 57 states in the Union, his statement that Israel is Israel's best friend (which had McCain said this would be written widely as an example of a senior moment). Now they will howl it's unfair to report his murky, very murky, familial past.

But the question remains: How much emotional stability can accrue when you come from a mad house non-family background like his? When two fathers have abandoned you? This hasn't been reported very much.


Well I just did.






Personal Aside: "The Great One" Speaks in Berlin... but Back Home Obama's Iraq Views are Seen as Pompously Wrongheaded.

Posted: 25 Jul 2008 07:29 AM PDT



He may cause emotional kids and idealistic old ladies in audiences to swoon, but Barack Obama's flabby views on the Iraq war will likely do him in. More than any other issue, McCain is right to make Iraq... even though it's an unpopular war... as the litmus test to show how wrongheaded Obama has been-and how his inexperience and Jimmy Carter-like timidity threaten to make his presidency a disaster. Already polls are showing that Obama is not getting his "bounce" from the ecstatically immature mainstream media camp followers.

Small wonder. The American people are wary of this con-man rhetorician... inflated as if by a bicycle pump manned by David Axelrod with the help of Big Foot media.

Several points.

In the long view of history, President George W. Bush will go down as the true great one... ranking with Harry Truman... on the issue of seizing the moment to launch an effort that will defeat our enemies.

From the very start, on September 12, 2001, Bush understood a new existential threat to our safety made clear the necessity for interventionism. He understood immediately that the ground-rules had changed. The end of U.S. foreign policy was still the security of the United States but to do this-as John Kennedy had said of the Cold War-it is imperative to achieve "the success of liberty." Bush saw intuitively-brilliantly-that while we will support democracy everywhere, we will commit blood and treasure only where there is a strategic urgency. Because he understood al Qaeda was behind the attack, he saw the U.S. had no choice but to go to war in Afghanistan. Secondarily, he saw that the Saddam regime posed a great threat to the region. Thirdly he saw farsightedly the fact that a self-sustaining democracy in Iraq would be a major first step in draining the swamp of the poisonous political culture... composed of intolerance and religious fanaticism... that spawned anti-American extremism which produced 9/11. On all these elements, John McCain was with President Bush. In fact, he was ahead of him-pointing out the initial insufficiency of our efforts in Iraq, calling for the replacement of Donald Rumsfeld and anticipating the surge which the president later implemented.

In contrast to this, the views of Barack Obama have been shriveled and amateurish. So wrongheaded that for the second time in U.S. history, by making the winning of an unpopular war key, the Republicans may well retain the White House. The first time came when the American people became convinced that though he was running an unpopular war, Abraham Lincoln was on the track to victory. Lincoln won despite the fact that he was running against a supposedly well-versed general who at two points had commanded federal forces in that war and who vociferously criticized its conduct--Gen. George C. McClellan.

McClellan's views on the war roughly parallel Barack Obama's. McClellan never completely saw victory in the war as essential-but only the ending of it. But Obama far exceeds McClellan in his error-prone views of the war and his failure to understand the value of winning a war so as to bring stability.

Initially... and from the time he entered the presidential race... Obama first urged total withdrawal as quickly as the troops could be pulled out and then said he would order the Joint Chiefs of Staff to withdraw within 16 months. That college prof assessment was grievously wrong. As even "The New York Times'" said when he first made this statement as a presidential candidate and talked about precipitate withdrawal, "Iraq and the region around it could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the [American] invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate."

In October, 2006-three months before the surge was announced-this is what Obama said: "It is clear at this point that we cannot, though putting in more troops or maintaining the presence that we have, expect that somehow the situation is going to improve, and we have to do something significant to break the pattern that we've been in right now."

The night before the surge was announced, Jan. 10, 2007, Obama said: "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact I think it will do the reverse."

On Jan. 17, 2007: "The surge strategy will not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly." That July despite evidence the surge was succeeding, he said: "My assessment is that the surg/e has not worked." Now-just yesterday-- even the anti-Iraq war newspaper "USA TODAY" said: "Why can't Obama bring himself to acknowledge the surge worked better than he and other skeptics, including this page, thought it would? What does that stubbornness say about the kind of president he would be?"

I'll tell you what it says. Had we pulled troops out of Iraq when Obama first urged us to do so, the Iraqi army that went into Basra and achieved in a few weeks what the British had failed to do in four years-capture the city, drive out the insurgents and seize the vital ports from the Iranian-backed militias would not have been successful and probably could not have attempted to do it: thus the earlier expenditure of U. S. lives and treasure would have been in vain.

Without any U. S. ground forces to instill morale, the Iraqi army could not have entered and occupied Sadr Citry, the Mahdi army stronghold.

With a retreating-or departing U. S. presence--the Iraqi parliament could not have enacted its de-Baathification law which under-girds its political stability.

Obama's continued refusal to acknowledge the value of the surge and his insistence that stability in Iraq is dependent on a time-table means that with his election this country would forfeit every success and substitute for it the aura of defeatism inculcated unconditional withdrawal. There is no doubt that there is not a U.S. commander in the field who supports his strategy. Moreover while the media play the fact that Premier Maliki would support a withdrawal of U.S.forces by 2010, they do not focus on the fact that it was CONDITIONED ON THE READINESS OF IRAQI FORCES and that MALIKI'S TIMETABLE WOULD EXPAND OBAMA'S BY AT LEAST SEVEN MONTHS.

The reason Obama cannot admit the surge worked nor alter his views of withdrawal is that he sees his campaign owned on national defense policies by the Democratic party's far-left contingent. Thus a candidate who (a) cannot appreciate the need to stabilize the Middle East, who (b) wrong-headedly denied the efficacy of the surge and (c) avoids the flexibility of judgment mandatory in the president on Iraq proves that this young man is immature, unready and not nearly at the stage of maturity the nation demands in a president.

What McCain should do is continue to drive this point home. The David Axelrod campaign surge in Berlin and with photo ops of his candidate with U.S. generals has not comforted the American people who are realizing that what we have here is a very, very egotistical young man without even the beginnings of maturity that were contained in John Kennedy, age 43, in 1960. Obama is a man who in three and a half years in the Senate has a record that is barren of accomplishment. As a law professor and Harvard Law Review president he has not propounded a single idea that is worthy of enunciation. As a state senator he was noteworthy for not lifting a finger to improve his poverty-stricken inner city district.

The scandalously biased national media puff job employs a bicycle pump to puff him to the heroic stature of world citizen, like the displays toted down the street in a Macy's Thanksgiving day parade... held to earth by moorings-but now the helium gas is seeping... pfffffft!... shortly to reveal little more than an empty suit.

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posted by Fred Martinez @ 1:06 PM