Monk

President Barack Obama throws a football at Soldier Field following the NATO Summit working dinner on May 20, 2012 in Chicago, Illinois. By Pete Souza/The White House via Getty Images.

-- Sully's Dish

It has been discovered that Obama is actually descended from slaves, and this is through his white mother. It sounds like a convoluted story, and I'm not going to strain my brain to make sense of it. I'm only keeping an excerpt from the article. I feel skeptical about the story (as one Washington Post commenter put it, "By about October 28 they will determine that Obama is also related to King David, Moses, Sun Tzu, Confucius, Peter the Apostle, and the Prophet Muhammad. He is also a distant cousin of Osiris and of Genghis Khan."), but the mainstream press is reporting it. It greatly enriches Obama's American story - from slavery to the White House.

_ _ _

President Obama’s extraordinary family story gained a new layer this week as a team of genealogists found evidence that he is most likely a descendant of one of the first documented African slaves in this country.

The link to slavery, which scholars of genealogy and race in the United States called remarkable, was found to have existed approximately 400 years back in the lineage of Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. It was discovered by a team of four genealogists from Ancestry.com whose findings from two years of work were released in a report Monday.

Using property and tax records, the team uncovered “a lot of context and circumstantial evidence” that points to an enslaved black man named John Punch being Obama’s ancestor, said Joseph Shumway, one of the genealogists who worked on the report.

Because his father immigrated from Kenya and his mother, who was born in Kansas, was white, Obama was thought to have no direct ancestral links to slaves.

-- Washington Post/LJ

The media is rocking with the story that Obama was quite the marijuana smoker in his high school days. Interestingly, this story does not originate from the right-wing and Fox News. Instead, it comes from respected biographer David Maraniss, who did some good biographical work on President Clinton.

I am not getting that vibe that this is deadly for Obama. After all, those were high school days, and people know Obama now, after four years in office. Sure, the people who think Obama is an anti-colonialist Kenyan looking to subvert the United States will doubtless make a lot of hay out of this, but any fair minded person would have to acquit Obama as a sober and serious man. This marijuana story might have killed him when he was running for his first term, but not now. On the other hand, I doubt it helps, and this promises to be a close race.

I will get down one snippet to capture some of the wild side of Obama's get-down youth. He apparently had a patented move when the bud was going round: “When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted ‘Intercepted!,’ and took an extra hit.” The president was young once too, and, hey, he was also a cool guy. At least he wasn't ganging up on weaker kids to bully them, like a certain Romney that we all know too well.

And you know, when the presidential debates roll round, Romney is ready to drop this rhetorical grenade:"I don't know what you have been smoking, my friend!"


(Source: Natalie Jennings, "The Choom Gang: President Obama’s pot-smoking high school days detailed in Maraniss book" at The Washington Post)

Jacob spoke first.

“I want to know if my hair is just like yours,” he told Mr. Obama, so quietly that the president asked him to speak again.

Jacob did, and Mr. Obama replied, “Why don’t you touch it and see for yourself?” He brought his head level with Jacob, who hesitated.

“Touch it, dude!” Mr. Obama said.

-- NY Times/LJ




_ _ _

For decades at the White House, photographs of the president at work and at play have hung throughout the West Wing, and each print soon gives way to a more recent shot. But one picture of President Obama remains after three years.

In the photo, Mr. Obama looks to be bowing to a sharply dressed 5-year-old black boy, who stands erect beside the Oval Office desk, his arm raised to touch the president’s hair — to see if it feels like his. The image has struck so many White House aides and visitors that, by popular demand, it stays put while others come and go.

As a candidate and as president, Mr. Obama has avoided discussing race except in rare instances when he seemed to have little choice — responding to the racially incendiary words of his former pastor, for example, or to the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Florida. Some black leaders criticize Mr. Obama for not directly addressing young blacks or proposing policies specifically for them.

Yet the photo is tangible evidence of what polls also show: Mr. Obama remains a potent symbol for blacks, with a deep reservoir of support. As skittish as White House aides often are in discussing race, they also clearly revel in the power of their boss’s example.

The boy in the picture is Jacob Philadelphia of Columbia, Md. Three years ago this month, his father, Carlton, a former Marine, was leaving the White House staff after a two-year stint on the National Security Council that began in the Bush administration. As departing staff members often do, Mr. Philadelphia asked for a family photograph with Mr. Obama.

When the pictures were taken and the family was about to leave, Mr. Philadelphia told Mr. Obama that his sons each had a question. In interviews, he and his wife, Rosean, said they did not know what the boys would ask. The White House photographer, Pete Souza, was surprised too, as the photo’s awkward composition attests: The parents’ heads are cut off, Jacob’s arm obscures his face, and his older brother, Isaac, is blurry.

[...]

“As a photographer, you know when you have a unique moment. But I didn’t realize the extent to which this one would take on a life of its own,” Mr. Souza said. “That one became an instant favorite of the staff. I think people are struck by the fact that the president of the United States was willing to bend down and let a little boy feel his head.”

David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s longtime adviser, has a copy framed in his Chicago office. He said of Jacob, “Really, what he was saying is, ‘Gee, you’re just like me.’ And it doesn’t take a big leap to think that child could be thinking, ‘Maybe I could be here someday.’ This can be such a cynical business, and then there are moments like that that just remind you that it’s worth it.”

-- NY Times/LJ

An LJer was kind enough to share a Republican e-mail that reminds us of some of the darker undertones of our political culture, of the racial and religious prejudice that festers not to far beneath the surface.

Nevertheless, I marvel that we have a black president at all. I honestly never thought that we would see the day. I used to think that we might see a white woman or two in my lifetime, if I made it to sixty and better, but never a black or brown president. So, if we see quite a bit of racial hatred directed at Obama, it bears noting that it is practically a miracle that we even have a President Obama (Lord, especially with that name!), even if he is not nearly as liberal and progressive as one would like.

( The e-mail joke )

The one thing I might say is that we shouldn’t really wonder what happened to Obama — he is who he always was. If you paid attention to what he actually said during the primary and the election, he was always a very conventional centrist. Progressives who flocked to his campaign basically deluded themselves, mistaking style for substance. I got huge flack for saying that at the time, but it was true, and events have borne it out.

Just to forestall the usual (or to try, anyway): no, we don’t know that Hillary would have been any better. And John Edwards turned out to be a worse person than one could have imagined. So I’m not trying to rerun the primary. I’m just pointing out that a lot of people were remarkably blind to the warning signs.

I had hoped that Obama would rise to the occasion, but he keeps not doing it. And no, I have no idea what progressives do in the near term.

-- Paul Krugman

It may be that liberals also made the same stereotypical lapse that conservatives did and assumed that he must be liberal because he is black.

I will also include here a bit from his column this morning, giving a more general assessment of our politico-economic straits.

( Column excerpt )

I can also see the argument that our problems go beyond party and personalities, in that America is going through the turbulence of adjusting from being the pre-eminent world power after World War Two to becoming a somewhat more normal country. The world is a lot more competitive today, and it is certainly worth considering that Americans have developed supremely high expectations with a lowered sense of work-ethic and thrift (and let it be said that I am extremely American in this regard). Even if this is right, though, our Republicans and Teabaggers are making this turbulence a lot rougher than it perhaps needs to be, if they do not succeed in ruining us altogether.

When I read commentaries expounding on the notion that this man [Obama] is competely out of his depth, I just have to scratch my head. Given his inheritance, this has been the most substantive first term since Ronald Reagan's. And given Obama's long-game mentality, that is setting us up for a hell of a second one.

-- Andrew Sullivan

I love Sully, but sometimes he can be so full of shit! That's a real clever strategy: giving Wall Street and health insurers and the Republicans everything they want. He's got them right where they want to be! Very shrewd.

Please, when is the bubble going to burst already? Obama is not playing some chess master's game, but is hanging on for life, though he is good at looking calm and collected as he gets beaten up and washed away in the storm. It's workers and poor folk, especially blacks and latinos, who are not looking so well.

I posted readers' views on how we should understand President Obama's negotiating stance during the (unnecessary and abusive) debt-ceiling "showdown." Was he thinking eight steps ahead of the opposition, playing multi-dimensional chess while they were playing tic-tac-toe? Or was he a fatal step or two behind, playing patty-cake while they were playing Mixed Martial Arts? Chess master? Or pawn?

I think we know the answer, at least about this encounter. Pawn, and captured pawn at that.

The Republicans, with control of only one house of Congress, succeeded on virtually every point that mattered to them, especially to their most intransigent members. The Democrats, in control of the presidency and the other, "senior" house, succeeded on nothing that should have mattered to them...

-- James Fallows for The Atlantic

Bingo, an excellent summation and assessment.

The deal isn't finalized yet, but it looks like we have a deal and we are only waiting for the faux-celebration when the President signs. Obama will make it seem like a big victory, but the only people who can truly feel that way are these Tea Party yahoos and their billionaire backers.

I am in that mood where I don't want to follow news anymore, or at least not political news. I don't know why I ever should want to. It's not my world, no matter what. But sometimes that becomes so resoundingly clear that I can wonder how I ever came to care.

Bah, until the brainwaves are stilled forever and one is buried over, one can still appreciate the black comedy of it all. And, of course, there are the little joys, like this sunny morning, and the cats, and all those books, so many worlds in which to get happily lost.

I think I'll hang out at the Chestnut Tree Cafe this morning. Care to join me for a little Victory Gin?

( Krugman excerpt )

BARACK OBAMA, though he is evidently thoughtful and intellectually capable, is not usually considered a man of ideas. In contrast to a policy wonk such as Bill Clinton or an ideological standard-bearer such as Ronald Reagan, Obama has never even brandished a distinct political philosophy. He sought the White House not so much on a platform as on a sensibility—a spirit of change, a promise of redemption, a song of hope.

-- David Greenberg for The New Republic

Obama was mostly the anti-Bush. A Plausible alternative. If we might have presumed he was liberal in inclination, he was not scarily radically so. As far as 2012 is concerned, one supposes he has demonstrated a basic competency (with especial thanks to the premature death of Osama bin Laden) that gives him a good leg to stand on for the canvass. And what do the Republicans have to offer us this go around?