DENIS STAUNTONreviews The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack ObamaBy David Remnick Picador, 621pp. £20
FOR A POLITICIAN who put his personal biography at the centre of his election campaign and whose face has adorned more magazine covers than the late Princess Diana, Barack Obama remains curiously opaque to millions of Americans.
It’s not just that right-wing conspiracy theorists cast doubt on his place of birth, portraying the president as a real-life Manchurian Candidate under the direction of a secret cabal of 1960s radicals and enthusiasts for world government. Many on the left, disappointed by Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan and his administration’s failure to close Guantánamo, extend workers’ rights or introduce comprehensive immigration reform, are also wondering just who they elected in 2008.
The endless commentary in recent weeks on Obama's failure to show enough anger over BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico suggests, however, that the mystery surrounding the president goes deeper than politics. Not for the first time, Americans were left wondering why a president who attracted tens of thousands to campaign rallies and fired up millions more with a message of hope and change should find the emotional, inspirational side of his office so challenging. In fact, the more familiar a figure Obama becomes on the nation's television screens, the more remote and unknowable he appears to become as a person. This mystery is all the more surprising given how thoroughly Obama's life has been documented, notably by himself in his eloquent, intimate memoir, Dreams from My Father.
David Remnick's The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obamais the first of a number of heavyweight books on Obama due over the next few months. (Bob Woodward, who wrote four books about George W Bush's presidency, will publish his first about Obama in September.) A former Washington Postforeign correspondent, and editor of the New Yorkersince 1998, Remnick has previously written Lenin's Tomb, an account of the end of the Soviet Union, and King of the World, a biography of Muhammad Ali, among other books.
This volume emerged from The Joshua Generation, a long article Remnick published in the New Yorkera few days after Obama's 2008 election victory, placing his triumph within the historical context of the civil-rights movement. The bridge of the title refers, among other things, to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where state troopers bludgeoned civil-rights marchers on March 7th, 1965.
In 2007, when Hillary Clinton still commanded the support of most African- Americans, Obama used a speech at Selma to claim the leadership of the generation of black leaders chosen to complete the work of the civil-rights movement. “I’m here because somebody marched,” he said. “I’m here because you all sacrificed for me. I stand on the shoulders of giants.” One reason black voters were slow to swing behind Obama was that they feared he could not win the election; another was a feeling that his biracial background, his upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia and his Ivy League education meant he was “not black enough”.
Obama faced the same suspicion in 2000 when he launched a doomed campaign to unseat the Chicago congressman Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther with impeccable credentials within the city's black community. "It's amazing how he formed a black identity," Rush recalls to Remnick, rising from his desk to imitate Obama's sinuous walk. "Barack's walk is an adaptation of a strut that comes from the street. There's a certain break at the knees as you walk . . . He's the first President of the United States to walk like that, I can guarantee you that. But lemme tell you, I never noticed that he walked like that back then."
Remnick shows how Obama inserted himself into the timeline of American racial politics, placing Dreams from My Fatherwithin the tradition of "narratives of ascent", the form of memoir favoured by countless African-Americans from Frederick Douglass to Malcolm X. Remnick acknowledges the inconsistencies and implausible anecdotes in Obama's memoir, but he is too subtle to play a simple game of "gotcha" over the book, preferring to view its exaggerations in the context of Obama's process of self-definition.
Unlike many of Obama’s white liberal supporters, Remnick contrives to be fair to Jeremiah Wright, the president’s former pastor, whose incendiary sermons almost destroyed Obama’s 2008 campaign. Without endorsing Wright’s more extreme views, Remnick acknowledges his eminence within the black church and shows some understanding of Wright’s sense of betrayal after Obama disowned him.
The Obama who emerges from these pages is intelligent, erudite, intellectually agile and endowed with an unusual gift for persuading ideological antagonists of his good faith. He is also a crafty, cautious politician who avoids radical policy positions and carefully calibrates his pronouncements to secure the support of the broadest possible coalition.
Obama’s 2002 speech opposing the Iraq war, which played such a crucial role in winning the support of the left in 2008, was carefully constructed to appeal to anti-war voters while stressing that he did not oppose wars in principle. Throughout his career, from Harvard Law School through community politics in Chicago, the Illinois legislature, the US senate and into the White House, conciliation has been Obama’s modus operandi. It has served him well, as has the chameleon quality that made one Chicago journalist describe him as a Rorschach test: “What you see is what you want to see.”
Obama comes clean to Remnick about his political shape-shifting, admitting that he sometimes tailors his delivery to his audience. “The fact that I conjugate my verbs and speak in a typical Midwestern newscaster’s voice – there’s no doubt that this helps ease communication between myself and white audiences,” he says. “And there’s no doubt that when I’m with a black audience I slip into a slightly different dialect. But the point is, I don’t feel the need to speak a certain way in front of a black audience. There’s a level of self-consciousness about these issues the previous generation had to negotiate that I don’t feel I have to.”
Obama’s political caution, his chameleon quality and his zeal for conciliation are likely to ensure that he remains hard to pin down, but Remnick’s elegant, meticulously researched book is the most complete portrait of the president to date and the most thoughtful analysis of his place in the racial history of the United States.
Denis Staunton is Foreign Editor of The Irish Times
