Obama has added so promiscuously to the national debt that the United States risks bankruptcy and perhaps even economic collapse over the next four years, yet Obama seems unconcerned. If he had the chance, it’s clear he would have spent far more. True, debt levels have been rising since the 1980s, yet as one economist put it, what used to be annual deficits under Reagan have now become monthly deficits under Obama. U.S. government spending rose from $2.9 trillion in 2008 to $3.7 trillion this year; currently the government borrows 40 cents of every dollar it spends. Much of this money is owed to foreigners and foreign governments, and according to economist Stephen Cohen and Bradford DeLong, “the money will not soon be coming back to America.” In their book
The End of Influence
, they warn that debt will not only change America’s economic place in the world but also its political, military, and cultural leadership role. The authors predict, “The American standard of living will decline relative to the rest of the industrialized and industrializing world” and “the United States will lose power and influence.” Their conclusion: “The United States will continue to be a world leader, but it will no longer be the boss. The other countries, after all, will have the money.” Obama seems fine with this; in fact, he recently spoke about how the American dream ought to be scaled back to more modest proportions: “raise a family,” “not go bankrupt,” “have health insurance that helps you deal with those difficult times,” “put some money away for retirement.” Obama concluded, “That’s all most people want. Folks don’t have unrealistic ambitions. They do believe that if they work hard they should be able to achieve that small measure of an American dream.”
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While Obama has been blocking oil drilling in the United States, he has been promoting and even subsidizing it in other countries. Obama placed on hold the proposal for the Keystone oil pipeline even though the project would, at a time of economic hardship, create thousands of new American jobs. Many interpreted Obama’s action as a concession to environmental groups, and this is consistent with the conservative view of Obama as a typical liberal, another acolyte of Al Gore environmentalism. Gore, however, is not like Obama. Gore believes the “earth has a fever,” and he wants people all over the world to curb their energy use and their carbon emissions to help prevent global warming. This is not Obama’s view. Case in point: On May 9, 2011, the Obama White House announced that it was providing $2.84 billion in American taxpayer money to finance oil drilling and oil refining in the South American nation of Colombia. The money goes to Reficar, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Colombian government. Now what rationale could there be for America giving money to the Colombian government to drill and refine oil? One might expect that oil to come to the United States, but the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which cleared the transaction, clarified that this was not the case. The oil would be used for Colombia, and the Colombians could sell the surplus on the export market.
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This raises the larger question: Why would Obama block drilling over here but promote it over there?
Obama routinely advances the interests of foreign companies over those of American companies. Currently the Obama administration is promoting in Asia a trade treaty called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. As drafted by the Obama team, the treaty would prevent any U.S. manufacturers who advertise “Buy American” from qualifying for U.S. government contracts covered by the treaty. Another provision would allow foreign companies doing business in America to appeal regulatory rulings on labor and environmental issues to an international tribunal. This international tribunal would have the authority to overrule American law and to impose trade sanctions on America for failing to abide by its rulings. When sixty House Democrats protested the impact of this on American sovereignty and American jobs, Obama officials refused to share with them the provisions of the treaty and said they were merely trying to be “non-discriminatory” in their contracting processes.
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In 2011 the Obama administration was faced with two bids for a $1 billion military contract. The contract was between Hawker Beechcraft, an American company based in Wichita, Kansas, and the Brazilian company Embraer, which is owned by the Brazilian government. Hawker had worked closely with the Air Force for two years and invested more than $100 million preparing to meet the contract’s requirements. But at the last minute, the company was informed in a letter that it would not be considered for the contract. No explanation was given. The contract was subsequently awarded to the Brazilian competitor. Industry analysts expressed surprise. Normally the American government tries to award contracts, especially in the defense industry, to American companies. Hawker Beechcraft’s loss of the contract, the company confirmed, will now lead to layoffs, and of course it will make part of our national defense dependent on a Brazilian contractor. In another case, the Obama administration, once again operating through the Export-Import Bank, provided $3.4 billion in loan guarantees to Air India, the national airline owned by the Indian government. India used the subsidy to buy new planes and launch nonstop service between Mumbai and New York, undercutting Delta, which had pioneered nonstop flights between these two destinations two years earlier. Delta was forced to abandon its Mumbai-New York service, and the company has bitterly complained to the Obama administration, accusing it of subsidizing foreign carriers at the expense of American companies and American jobs. Obama, however, recently secured increased funding for the Export-Import Bank, and he has been praising its efforts to subsidize a loan program for Lion Air of Indonesia to purchase Boeing planes.
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Over the past two years, we have seen major uprisings in several Muslim countries, from Tunisia to Libya to Bahrain to Egypt to Syria. President Obama has responded in a very odd and inconsistent manner. First he dithered about using force in Libya; then, pushed by the French and the British (along with the Arab League, the United Nations Security Council, and NATO), he used force in Libya, finally ousting the dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Obama for the longest time, however, refused to provide any assistance to the rebels in Syria, who were attempting to remove the dictator Bashar Assad. What made Obama’s conduct especially strange is that the American decision to use air strikes and other forms of military force in Libya was taken after Gaddafi had killed around 250 people; Obama raised the specter of genocide in Libya. The Syrians, however, had to kill thousands before the Obama administration, largely responding to international pressure, agreed to provide modest forms of assistance to the rebels while ruling out direct U.S. military involvement. How to account for Obama’s conduct? Why intervene in one place but not the other? A similar inconsistency defines Obama’s response to Egypt and Iran. In Egypt, Obama used diplomatic pressure to oust America’s longtime ally Hosni Mubarak, clearing the way for the Islamic radicals, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, to win the subsequent parliamentary and presidential elections. Using the rhetoric of democracy, Obama allied himself in Egypt with the Tahrir Square protesters. Yet when there were equally massive democratic uprisings in Iran a year earlier, aimed at ousting the regime of the mullahs, Obama urged caution and restraint. He refused to embrace the protesters. Essentially, he did nothing. Eventually the Iranian police subdued the protesters and the Iranian rebellion dissolved. So we have a dual inconsistency here. We need an adequate account of Obama’s selective involvement, using force here but not there, getting rid of one ruler but keeping others in place. With respect to the Muslim uprisings collectively known as the Arab Spring, what explains Obama’s double standards?
More than any other president, Obama criticizes and apologizes for his own country and also takes sides against America’s closest allies. An interesting example of this surfaced in a small portion of a cable that was published by the renegade group WikiLeaks. The September 2009 cable was from U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos. In the cable, he informed the Obama Administration that Japan didn’t think it was a good idea for President Obama to visit Hiroshima or apologize for America using two atomic bombs on Japanese cities during World War II. Leave aside the fact that many military analysts believe the atomic bombs hastened the end of the war, saving American lives and possibly even Japanese lives (by preventing an Allied invasion of Japan). Isn’t it odd for an American president to want to apologize for America to Japan, while the Japanese themselves don’t want him to do so? Obama’s dim view of America also seems to extend to America’s allies, like Britain. Remember the Falklands War? The war was fought in 1982 between Britain, under Margaret Thatcher, and Argentina, under its dictator Leopoldo Galtieri, over the Falkland Islands. Britain won and retained the disputed territory. But Argentina still seeks possession of the islands it terms the “Malvinas.” While previous administrations, Republican and Democratic, have sided with Britain on this one, the Obama administration has switched sides. It now backs the Argentine position, calling on Britain to enter into negotiations over the sovereignty of the islands. This is a position also supported by the Organization of American States, and it is one that the British government regards as completely unacceptable .
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These examples should suffice to show that, with Obama, we are dealing with a different kind of president. Where, then, do we begin the task of understanding him? We begin where Obama begins, with the dreams he got from his father.
CHAPTER THREE
ABSENTEE FATHER
It was into my father’s image, the black man,
son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes
I sought in myself.
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—Barack Obama,
Dreams from My Father
Y
ou can get a meeting with Sarah Obama, President Obama’s “granny,” but to do so you have to bring her a goat. Our film team had taken the one-hour flight from Nairobi to Kisumu, and then made the one-and-a-half hour drive to Kogelo. We wanted to make sure we could get into the Obama homestead, so we brought three goats! Unruly animals they were, and I had difficulty yanking them up the dirt road to the farmhouse gate. But the old woman was delighted with the gesture, and there we were, sitting inside the Obama family compound, sipping Cokes and listening to Sarah Obama narrate the family history. While Obama calls her granny, Sarah isn’t really Obama’s grandmother; she is one of his grandfather’s other wives. The man had five, and so by Obama’s terminology he has five paternal grannies. I explained this to a member of the film team, and he commented, “I guess that’s multiculturalism, Obama style.” Sarah Obama is a woman of dramatic gestures, and she spoke in Swahili, while a translator made her meaning clear. But somehow I couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying, most of which I knew anyway. My attention was raptly focused on the grave located just yards away from the main house. “That,” I told my film crew, “is where the man himself is buried. That is where it all started.”
As he tells us in his autobiography, Barack Obama stood before that grave in 1987, when he was twenty-six years old. He flung himself on the ground and wept. Later he recalled, “I had sat at my father’s grave and spoken to him through Africa’s red soil.” The whole scene is a little creepy, because by 1987 Barack Obama Sr. had been dead for five years. Even so, Obama is almost literally trying to get the man out of the ground so he can talk to him. But he can’t; his father is gone. Obama has also come to the bitter realization that his father was not the model figure that he once imagined him to be. He now knows that the man had terrible flaws and failings, as a husband, as a father, and also as a man. So Obama has an epiphany. “The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brother’s questions. Their struggle, my birthright.” Obama dries his tears, and he resolves then and there that he will not emulate his father’s entire personality, but he will embrace his dream. Where the father failed in carrying out the dream, the son will succeed. Thus he will prove worthy of his father’s love, even if he never got it.
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This is the meaning of Obama’s book title,
Dreams from My Father
. The book is about how Obama created his own identity and defined his core values by taking his father’s dreams and making them his own.
I first noted this connection between Obama and his father in my earlier book,
The Roots of Obama’s Rage
. The book was excerpted in a cover article in
Forbes
, and the article and the book produced a tremendous furor, including repeated and ferocious attacks by the Obama White House. To my knowledge, not since Watergate has the White House been so aggressive in attacking a critical exposé. Obama’s point man in this was Robert Gibbs, the former White House press secretary, but the White House also dispatched Vice President Joe Biden to attack my thesis. Even Colin Powell went on national television to urge that we focus on Obama’s policies, not on his family history. The White House barrage brought out the Obama attack dogs, such as Maureen Dowd in the
New York Times
, Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, and the activist group Media Matters. I am not so interested here in their wild accusations—D’Souza is a birther, D’Souza is a race baiter—which I have discussed and refuted in the introduction to the paperback edition of
The Roots of Obama’s Rage
. Suffice it to say that I didn’t get my facts wrong; nor am I (as Maureen Dowd tartly observed) “Ann Coulter-in-pants”; and I can hardly be considered, in Keith Olbermann’s term, the second worst person in the world, although I am certainly working on it.
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