Obama: A Hollow Man Filled With Ruling Class

Ideas
by Paul Street June 2, 2017

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/02/obama-a-hollow-man-filled-with-ruling-class-ideas/

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/06/200pm-water-cooler-622017.html

A Hollow Man Who Was Unwilling to Fight the Good Fight

What on Earth motivated the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and law professor David J. Garrow to write an
incredibly detailed 1078-page (1460 pages with endnotes and index included) biography of Barack Obama from
conception through election to the White House? Not any great personal affinity for Obama on Garrows part,
thats for sure. Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama is no hagiography. On the last page of this
remarkable tome, Garrow describes Obama at the end of his distinctly non-transformative and failed
presidency as a man who had long ago had become a vessel [that] was hollow at its core.

Near the conclusion, Garrow notes how disappointed and betrayed many of Obamas former friends felt by a
president who doesnt feel indebted to people (in the words of a former close assistant) and who spent
inordinate time on the golf course and celebrity hobnobbing (1067). Garrow quotes one of Obamas long-
time Hyde Park [Chicago] friend[s], who offered a stark judgement: Barack is a tragic figure: so much
potential, such critical times, but such a failure to performlike he is an empty shellMaybe the flaw is hubris,
deep and abiding hubris. (1065). Garrow quotes the onetime and short-lived Obama backer Dr. Cornel West
on how Obama posed as a progressive and turned out to be a counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street
presidency, a national security presidencya brown-faced Clinton: another opportunist.

The subject of Garrows meticulous history is a single-minded climber ready to toss others (including family
members, lovers, and close friends) aside in service to an all-consuming quest for political power fueled by a
belief in his own special destiny. (It is clear from Rising Star that Obama was set on a run for the presidency
by age twenty-five.) Dozens of former Obama associates interviewed by Garrow report having been impressed,
even blown away by the future president as a young man. But many others were put off by Obamas sense of
superiority and arrogance (full of himself by the recollection of one Harvard Law classmate [p. 337]) and by
his often lecturing, professorial know it all presentation and by his transparent hyper-ambition.

During his time at Harvard Law, fellow students invented the Obamanometer a numerical measure of how
long Obama would spend taking up class time with long-winded dialogue with the professor, often while
claiming to speak on behalf of his fellow students.

Obama struck many on his way up as far too impressed with his own awesomeness. As one of his fellow black
Illinois state senators commented to another veteran legislator as Obama began his eight-year career in the
Illinois Senate in 1996, Can you believe this guys some thirty years old [and] hes already written a book
about himself? (p.600)
Progressives lobbyists found Obama a disappointing legislator during his time in the Illinois
Senate. According to Al Sharp, executive director of Protestants for the Common Good, state senator Obama
was so very pragmatic that he, in Garrows words, was unwilling to fight to the good fight. By Garrows
account. Legal aid veteran Linda Mills recalled that [state senator] Barack sponsored a number of bills I
wrote, but I stopped seeking him out as a chief sponsor early on because Barack was disengaged rather than
actively pushing the bills. He was never involved in the legislation, and on many days Barack was simply
unavailable. Golfing, playing basketball. He was just out to lunch so often (p.731)

An Ugly Offer: Money for Silence

I find a different story related in Rising Star just as disturbing. It comes from April of 2008, when then
presidential candidate Obama was being compelled by the Hillary Clinton campaign to throw his onetime South
Side Chicago spiritual mentor Reverend Jeremiah Wright under the bus because Obamas association with the
fiery Black and left-leaning pulpit master was costing him too many white votes. On April 12, 2008, Obama
visited Wright, asking him not to do any more public speaking until after the November election. Wright
refused. Barack left empty-handed but before long Wright received an e-mail from Baracks close friend Eric
Whitaker, also a Trinity [church] member, offering Wright $150,000 not to preach at all in the months ahead.
(p.1044). Wright refused.

How was that for progressive hope and change?

A Work of Historical Fiction

Young Obama tried to beat historians to the punch by writing a deceptive, self-serving account of his own first
three and half decades gracing the planet with his special qualities. Garrow, to his credit, doesnt fall for it.
Rising Star takes the future presidents 1995 book Dreams From My Father Dreams and some of Obamas later
autobiographical reflections to task for: inventing a deep racial identity drama that never occurred during
Obamas early years in Hawaii, Indonesia, and Occidental College; incorrectly portraying Obama as a
difference-maker on his high school basketball team; deceptively claiming that Obama had been an angry
thug during high school; deleting the Community Party background of the Black old poet (Frank, as in
longtime Communist Party activist Frank Davis) who gave Obama advice as a teenager in Honolulu;
inaccurately claiming that Obama have received a full scholarship to Occidental; misrepresenting himself as a
leader in the movement against South African apartheid at Occidental; exaggerating Obamas involvement in
anti-apartheid activism at Columbia University; covering up evidence of Obamas enrollment in a Columbia
course taught by a Marxist academic; absurdly mispresenting the nature of Obamas work for the New York
Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) at the City University of New York; concocting a mythical and
supposedly life-changing dialogue with a black security guard on Obamas first trip from New York City to
begin community organizing work on the far South Side of Chicago; falsely claiming that Obama converted to
Christianity during his early years in Chicago; largely writing Obamas white mother out of his autobiography,
which spilled far more ink on a father (Barack Obama. Sr.) who played little role in his life; painting a
decidedly uncharitable portrait of Obamas loving white maternal grandfather (Stanley Dunham) who did so
much to raise him; suggesting that Obamas maternal white grandmother was a racist; unduly downplaying
Obamas supreme enjoyment of his years at Harvard Law School; and coldly condensing his three top pre-
marital girlfriends (more on them below) into a single woman whose appearance in the book was fleeting
indeed. Garrow judges Dreams a work of historical fiction, not a serious autobiography or memoir.
The Revenge of Sheila Jager: His Deep-Seated Need to be Loved and Admired

Rising Star might almost deserve the sub-title The Revenge of Sheila Jager. Like Garrows giant and classic
1986 biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rising Star gets very, very personal. Garrow reports the
complaints of Obamas three former girlfriends Alex McNair, Genevieve Cook, and Sheila Jager. Each one
recalls an Obama that was ultimately inaccessible and hopelessly self-involved. Ms. Jager, a partly white
Asian-American University of Chicago anthropology graduate student when she met Obama, garners singular
attention. She fell into a prolonged and ardent affair with then community organizer Obama during the late
1980s. But her long and tumultuous relationship with him was doomed by the color of her skin. Obama shared
the passion but decided he could not marry her because his political ambitions in Chicago required a Black
spouse.

Garrow recounts an ugly scene in the summer of 1987. A loud and long dispute developed one day at the
Wisconsin summer home of a friend. From the morning onwards, a witness recalled, they were back and forth,
having sex, screaming yelling, having sex, screaming yelling. That whole afternoon, they went back and forth
between having sex and fighting, with Jager yelling: Thats wrong! Thats wrong! Thats not a reason.

Near the end of his colossal volume, Garrow says that no one alive brought deeper insight into the tragedy of
Barack Obama than Sheila Jager. He reproduces numerous quotations from Jager, now an Oberlin College
anthropology professor. As a young woman, she was frustrated by young Obamas lack of courage. Writing
to Garrow in August of 2013, Jager saw that cowardice in his excessively pragmatic, disengaged, and
compromising presidency:

the seeds of his future failings were always present in Chicago. He made a series of calculated
decisions when he began to map out his political life at the time and they involved some deep
compromises. There is a familiar echo in the language he uses now to talk about the compromises hes
always forced to make and the way he explained his future to me back then, saying in effect I wish I
could do this, but pragmatism and the reality of the world has forced me to do that. From the bailout
out to NSA to Egypt, it is always the same. The problem is that pragmatism can very much look like
what works best for the moment. Hence, the constant criticism that there is no strategic vision behind
his decisions. Perhaps this pragmatism and need to just get along in the world (by accepting the world
as it is instead of trying to change it) stems from his deep-seated need to be loved and admired which
has ultimately led him on the path to conformism and not down the path of greatness which I had hoped
for him. (1065)

The italics are Garrows. He added emphasis to the entire passage.

Or Maybe He Really Believed All that Vacuous to Repressive Neoliberal and Pragmatism Stuff

Garrows mammoth biography is a tour de force when it comes to personal critique, professional appraisal, and
epic research and documentation. His mastery of the smallest details in Obamas life and career and his ability
to place those facts within a narrative that keeps the readers attention (no small feat at 1078 pages!) is
remarkable. Rising Star falls short, however, on ideological appraisal. In early 1996, the brilliant left Black
political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. captured the stark moral and political limits of what would become the state
and then national Obama phenomenon and indeed the Obama presidency. Writing of an unnamed Obama, Reed
observed that:
In Chicagoweve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one
of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal
politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His
fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about
meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over
program the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form
over substance.

Garrow very incompletely quotes Reeds reflection only to dismiss it as an academics way of calling Barack
an Uncle Tom. That is an unfortunate judgement. Reeds assessment was richly born-out by Obamas
subsequent political career. Like his politcio-ideological soul-brothers Bill Clinton and Tony Blair (and perhaps
now Emmanuel Macron), Obamas public life has been a wretched monument to the dark power of the
neoliberal corporate-financial and imperial agendas behind the progressive pretense of faade of telegenic and
silver-tongued professional class politicos.

Reeds prescient verdict more than 12 years before Obama became president brings more insight to the Obama
tragedy than Jagers reflection five years into Obamas presidency. Obamas nauseating taste for supposedly
(and deceptively) non-ideological get things done pragmatism, compromise, and playing it safe for
accepting the world as it is instead of trying to change it (Jager) was not simply or merely a personality
quirk or psychological flaw. It was also and far more significantly a longstanding way for liberal Democratic
presidents and other politicos to appear tough-minded and stoutly determined to getting things done while
they subordinate the fake-populist and progressive-sounding values they mouth to get elected to the harsh deep
state facts of U.S. ruling class, imperial, and national security power. A pragmatic, supposedly non-
ideological concern for policy effectiveness what can be accomplished in the real world has long given
liberal presidents a manly way to justify governing in accord with the wishes of the nations ruling class and
power elite.

Garrow and Jager might want to look at a forgotten political science classic, Bruce Miroffs Pragmatic Illusions:
The Presidential Politics of John F. Kennedy [1976].) After detailing the supposedly progressive Kennedys
cool-headed, Harvard-minted, and best and brightest service to the nations reigning corporate, imperial, and
racial hierarchies, Miroff explained that:

Most modern presidents have claimed the title of pragmatist for themselves. Richard Nixon was just as
concerned as John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to announce that he was not wedded to dogma, and that his
administration would follow a realistic and flexible course. It has chiefly been the liberal presidents, however,
who have captured the pragmatic labelFor liberal presidents and for those who have advised them the
essential mark of pragmatism is its tough-mindedness. Pragmatism is equated with strength and intellectual
and moral strength that can accept a world stripped of illusions and can take the facts unadorned. Committed
to liberal objectives, yet free from liberal sentimentality, the pragmatic liberal sees himself as grappling with
brute and unpleasant facts of political reality in order to humanize and soften those factsThe great enemy for
pragmatic liberals is ideologyAn illusory objectivity is one of the pillars of pragmatic tough-mindedness.
The second pillar is readiness for power. Pragmatists are interested in what works; their prime criterion of
value is success[and] as a believer in concrete results, the pragmatist is ineluctably drawn to power. For it is
power that gets things done most easily, that makes things work most successfully. (Pragmatic Illusions, 283-
84, emphasis added).

The classic neoliberal Bill Clinton embraced the pragmatic and non-ideological get things done faade for
state capitalist and imperialist policy. So did the pioneering neoliberal Jimmy Carter and the great corporate
liberals Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kenney and Franklin Roosevelt. Was this really or mainly because they were
psychologically wounded? The deeper and more relevant reality is that they functioned atop a Superpower
nation-state rule by unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money, empire, and white supremacism. They
were educated, socialized, seduced and indoctrinated to understand in their bones that those de facto
dictatorships must remain intact (Roosevelt boasted of having saved the profits system) and that liberal reform
must always bend to the will of reigning institutions and doctrines of concentrated wealth, class, race, and
power. Some or all of them may well have to believe and internalize the purportedly non-ideological ideology
of wealth- and power-serving pragmatism. And Obama was either a true believer or one who cynically chose to
impersonate one as the ticket to power quite early on.

A Fully Minted Neoliberal Early On

The irony here is that one can consult Rising Star to determine the basic underlying accuracy of Reeds acerbic
description. My foremost revelation from Rising Star is that Obama was fully formed as a fake-progressive
neoliberal-capitalist actor well before he ever received his first big money campaign contribution. Hes headed
down the same ideological path as the Clintons even before Bill Clinton walks into the Oval Office. Obamas
years in the corporate-funded foundation world, the great ruling and professional class finishing schools
Columbia University Harvard Law, and the great neoliberal University of Chicagos elite Law School were
more than sufficient to mint him as a brilliant if vacuous to repressive neoliberal.

During his years at Harvard Law, Garrow notes, Obama took said the following at a Turner Broadcasting
African American Summit for the 1990s:

Whenever we blame society for everything, or blame white racism for everything, then inevitably were giving
away our own powerif we can get start getting beyond some of these old divisions [of race, place, and class]
and look at the possibilities of crafting pragmatic, practical strategies that are going to focus on whats going to
make it work and less about whether it fits into one ideological mold or another.

These were classic neoliberal and ruling class themes.

Along with a healthy dose of market economics, this was the heavily ideological if nominally anti-ideological
essence of much of Obamas intellectual work at Harvard Law, where he and his good friend the former
economist Rob Fisher were drawn to the courses of a libertarian professor and wrote oxymoronically about the
progressive and democratic potential of market forces. Like other ruling class and professional class
educational and ideological institutions of higher education, Harvard Law was and remains a great
schoolhouse of precisely the kind of pragmatism which knows that no policies and visions can work that
dont bow to the holy power of the finance-led corporate and imperial state, ruling in the name of the market
among other things.

Again, and again across Garrows many hundreds of pages on Obamas community organizing and legislative
career one hears about the future presidents classically neoliberal efforts to address poverty and joblessness by
increasing the market value of poor and jobless folks human capital and skill sets. Never does one learn of
any serious call on his part for the radical and democratic redistribution of wealth and power and the advance of
a peoples political economy based on solidarity and the common good, not the profits of the investor class.

The main things Obama needed to add on to fulfill his destiny after Harvard Law were a political career in
elected office, a great moment of national celebrity (his spectacular Keynote Address to the Democratic
National Convention in August of 2004), elite financial sponsorship (including record-setting Wall Street
backing in 2007 and 2008), and proper appreciation and articulation of U.S.-imperial Council on Foreign
Relations ideology. All of this and more, including no small good fortune (including the awfulness of the
George W. Bush administration and the 2007-08 Hillary Clinton campaign), followed and brought us to the
great neoliberal disappointment that was the Obama presidency.
Curious Deletions: MacFaquhar, Marxists, and the Ruling Class Sponsors

There are some interesting deletions in Rising Star. It is odd that the meticulous Garrow never quotes a
remarkable essay published by The New Yorker in the spring of 2007. In early May of that year, six months
after Obama had declared his candidacy for the White House, the New Yorkers Larissa MacFarquhar penned a
memorable portrait of Obama titled The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From? In his view of
history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very
slowly, MacFarquhar wrote after extensive interviews with the candidate, Obama is deeply conservative.
There are moments when he sounds almost BurkeanIts not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he
values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good
(emphasis added).

MacFarquhar cited as an example of this reactionary sentiment Obamas reluctance to embrace single-payer
health insurance on the Canadian model, which he told her would so disruptive that people feel like suddenly
what theyve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside. Obama told MacFarquhar that weve
got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different
system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system thats not so disruptive that people feel like
suddenly what theyve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.

So what if large popular majorities in the U.S. had long favored the single-payer model? So what if single payer
would let people keep the doctors of their choice, only throwing away the protection pay off to the private
insurance mafia? So what if the legacy systems Obama defended included corporate insurance and
pharmaceutical oligopolies that regularly threw millions of American lives by the wayside of market calculation,
causing enormous disruptive harm and death for the populace?

Was this personal weakness and cowardice? The deeper reality is that Obamas deeply conservative beliefs
reflected an either calculated or heartfelt allegiance to neoliberal free market ideals and related pragmatic and
realistic ruling- and elite professional-class values inculcated and absorbed at Harvard Law, in the corporate-
captive foundation world, and through his many contacts in the elite business sector and the foreign policy
establishment as he rose in the American System. Along with a bottomless commitment to the long American
imperial project, those power-serving beliefs were written all over Obamas conservative late 2006 campaign
book The Audacity of Hope (Obamas second book and his second book mainly about himself see my critical
review of it on Black Agenda Report in early 2007 here), whose right-wing and imperial content Garrow
ignores. They also raised their head in the famous 2004 Democratic Convention Keynote Address (see my
critical reflection on that oration at the time here) that did so much to make Obama an overnight national and
even global celebrity another document whose right-leaning ideological nature escapes Garrows attention.

Like Obamas neoliberal and imperial ideology, the many left activists and writers (this reviewer included) who
saw through Obamas progressive pretense and warned others about it early on are basically missing in Rising
Star. The list of Left commentators left out is long. It includes Bruce Dixon, Glen Ford, John Pilger, Noam
Chomsky. Alexander Cockburn, Margaret Kimberly, Jeffrey St. Clair, Roger Hodge, Pam Martens, Ajamu
Baraka, Doug Henwood, Juan Santos, Marc Lamont Hill, John R. MacArthur, and a host of others (Please see
the sub-section titled Insistent Left Warnings on pages 176-177 in the sixth chapter, titled We Were Warned,
of my 2010 book The Empires New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power [Paradigm, 2014], my
second carefully researched Obama book not to make it into Garrows endnotes or bibliography).

Also largely missing the other side of the coin of omission, so to speak in Garrows sprawling acount is the
elite corporate and financial class that made record-setting contributions to Obamas rise with an understanding
that Obama was very much on their side. How write a 1000-page plus account of Obamas rise to power
without at least once mentioning that august and unparalleled ruling class figure Robert Rubin, whose nod of
approval was critical to Obamas ascendancy? As Greg Palast noted, Rubin opened the doors to finance
industry vaults for Obama. Extraordinarily for a Democrat, Obama in 2008 raised three times as much from
bankers as his Republican opponent.

Rubin would also serve as a top informal Obama adviser and placed a number of his protgs in high-ranking
positions in the Obama administration. Rubins Obama appointees included Timothy Geithner (Obamas first
treasury secretary), Peter Orszag (Obamas first Office of Management and Budget director), and Larry
Summers (first chief economic adviser).

Just as odd as his ignoring of MacFarquhars May 2007 essay is Garrows inattention to a remarkable report
from Ken Silversteins six months before. Its not always clear what Obamas financial backers want, the
progressive journalist Ken Silverstein noted in a Harpers Magazine report titled Obama, Inc. in November of
2006, but it seems safe to conclude that his campaign contributors are not interested merely in clean
government and political reformOn condition of anonymity, Silverstein added, one Washington lobbyist I
spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didnt
see him as a player. The lobbyist added: Whats the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist? Obamas
allegiance to the American business elite was evident from the get go. It was well understood by the K Street
insiders that Silverstein interviewed in the fall of 2006.

His dollar value to Wall Street would become abundantly clear in early 2009, when he told a frightened group
of Wall Street executives that Im not here to go after you. Im protecting youIm going to shield you from
congressional and public anger. For the banking elite, who had destroyed untold millions of jobs, there was, as
Garrows fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Ron Sukind wrote, Nothing to worry about. Whereas [President
Franklin Delano] Roosevelt had [during the Great Depression] pushed for tough, viciously opposed reforms of
Wall Street and famously said I welcome their hate, Obama was saying How can I help? As one leading
banker told Suskind, The sense of everyone after the meeting was relief. The president had us at a moment of
real vulnerability. At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we would have rolled
over. But he didnt he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob.

On Love and Admiration

As noted above, professor Jager told Garrow that the limits of Obamas presidency stemmed from his
longstanding need to be loved and admired. But surely that need would have been met to no small degree had
Obama (like Roosevelt in 1935 and 1936) governed in at least partial accord with the progressive-sounding
rhetoric he campaigned on in 2007 and 2008. Beyond the social, democratic, security and environmental
benefits that would have been experienced by millions of Americans and world citizens under an actually
progressive Obama presidency, such policy would have been good politics for both Obama and the Democratic
Party. It might well have pre-empted the Tea Party rebellion and kept the orange-haired beast Donald Trump a
dodgy neo-fascistic legacy of Obama and the Clintons ruling- and professional-class Ivy League elitism out
of the White House. The bigger problem here was Obamas love and admiration for the nations reigning
wealth and power elite or, perhaps, his reasonable calculation that the powers that be held a monopoly on the
means of bestowing public love and admiration. Non-conformism to the ruling class carries no small cost in a
media and politics culture owned by that class.

The Biggest Omission: Empire

The most glaring thing missing in Rising Star is any understanding of U.S, Senator and presidential candidate
Obamas imperial world view. His brazenly American exceptionalist and imperial mindset, straight out of the
Council on Foreign Relations, was written all over Obamas foreign policy speeches and writings (including
large sections of The Audacity of Hope) in 2006, 2007, and 2008. I wrote about this at length in the fourth
chapter (titled How Antiwar? Obama, Iraq, and the Audacity of Empire) in my 2008 book Barack Obama and
the Future of American Politics.
This significant omission but it is unsurprising given Garrows own apparent enmeshment in the American
imperial mindset. Rising Stars long epilogue includes John McCain-like criticisms of Obama for failing to
launch military strikes on Syria and for being too allergic to the use, or even the threat of force in global
affairs. Garrow even offers a lengthy critical quote on the need for the next president to be more resolute
from the former leading imperialist defense secretary Robert Gates, who Garrow strangely describes as the
weightiest and most widely respected voice of all.

Problems Out There with the Situation of African-Americans in Society

Obama first became something of a celebrity when he became the first Black editor of the Harvard Law Review
in February of 1990. I wouldnt want people to see my election, Obama told the Associated Press, as a
symbol that there arent problems out there with the situation of African-Americans in society (Garrow, Rising
Star, p. 392). Note the carefully calibrated nature of Obamas public commentary already at the age of 28:
problems out there with the situation of African-Americans in society could just as easily refer to alleged
Black personal and cultural failure (a persistent white-pleasing theme in the rising stars political rhetoric) as it
could to cultural and/or institutional and societal racism. Note also that while Obamas election and re-election
to the U.S. presidency brought few if any tangible material and policy gains to Black America (whose already
terrible economic situation deteriorated significantly during his time in office), it functioned as something like
the last nail in the coffin of many whites stark reluctance to acknowledge that the nations still deeply
embedded racism any longer poses real barriers to Black advancement and equality in the U.S. Are you
kidding me? Ive heard countless whites say, we elected a Black president! Stop talking about racism! Never
mind the persistence of deeply embedded racial inequality and oppression at the heart of the nations labor and
housing markets, credit and investment systems, legal and criminal justice systems, its military and police state,
and its educational and media systems and the dogged tenacity of personal and cultural race prejudice among
a considerable part of the white populace. In that and other ways, the tragedy of the Obama years has been
greatest of all for those at the bottom of the nations steep social and economic wells.

King v. Obama

If I could ask Garrow one question beyond the personal matter of why my own heavily researched and
annotated study of (and Left warning on) rising star Obama (Barack Obama and the Future of American
Politics [Paradigm-Routledge, 2008]) is so egregiously missing in his bibliography and endnotes, it is this: what
does Garrow think his previous epic biography subject Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. (who politely refused
progressives effort to enlist him as a presidential candidate and whose bust sat behind Obama in the Oval
Office), would have thought of the career of Garrows new epic biography subject, Barack Obama?

As Garrow knows, King in his final years inveighed eloquently against what he called the triple evils that are
interrelated, essentially capitalism, racism, and militarism-imperialism. King came to the end of his martyred
life with the belief that the real faults in American life lay not so much in men as in the oppressive institutions
and social structures that reigned over them. He wrote that the radical reconstruction of society itself was
the real issue to be faced beyond superficial matters. He had no interest, of course, in running for the White
House of all things.

Obama took a very different path, one that enlisted him in service both to narcissistic self and to each of the
very triple evils (and other ones as well) that King dedicated his life to resisting.
The Obama-King contrast continues into Obamas post-presidential years. As Garrow showed in Bearing the
Cross: Martin Luther King. Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (William Morrow, 1986),
the great Civil Rights leader and democratic socialist Dr. King sternly refused to cash in on his fame. Now that
he out of the White House, Obama, by contrast, is cashing in. Hes raking in millions from the publishing
industry and Wall Street and hes back to his old hobnobbing ways with the rich and famous.

The reverend would be 88 years old if he had been blessed with longevity. My guess is that he would be less
than pleased at the life and career of the nations first technically Black president.