Obama was abandoned by his father and, in a sense, abandoned by his mother too. When he was 10 or 11, she sent him back to Hawaii from Indonesia to live with his grandparents and go to Punahou School. Obama had great fondness for his grandparents, but he also saw right through them. He grew himself up. He has always been by himself in the world. This has made him strong and self-reliant, and there is an edge of mistrust, too.
Halfway thru the book he quotes a long monologue he offered to Auma, his half sister from Kenya, visiting him in Chicago, about a white girl in New York who "I loved." Obama went out with the girl for a year, met her privileged family at their country home. The two broke up over racial issues. The story is beautifully told; Obama is an astonishing writer.
But it I found it weird and jarring to learn about this love affair nearly 100 pages after its actual place in the chronology, his New York chapters, when he had said nothing about it. And in a book filled with pseudonyms, the girl doesn't even rate a pseudonym. I wondered whether Obama still pined for her. Also a little strange that in a racial narrative, in which Obama anatomizes his feelings about his blackness at many turns, he's failed to tell us that he fell in love with a white woman.
The best judge of political character I know, Peter Kaplan of the Observer, told me a year ago that Obama was great because he is cold. "And Jack Kennedy was cold, too." My own sense is that other individuals don't fully register emotionally in Obama's consciousness, they're expendable, he's arrogant, lacks empathy.
Which may, in fact, be the character of a great leader.
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