Barack Obama in His Own Words (Part I of III)

This appraisal of Mr. Obama’s character is based on his two books, Dreams From My Father (DMF) and The Audacity of Hope (AOH). The advantage of relying on these sources is that they are not only Mr. Obama’s own words but his considered words. He cannot claim that were written hastily and without reflection.

It is also worth bearing in mind that the first book, DMF, was written in 1995 when Mr. Obama was a married man in his mid-thirties. Hence, it reflects his mature views, not those of a giddy teenager. In addition, Mr. Obama agreed to the republication of DMF in 2004 when he was already an established politician, so his 1995 views cannot be written off as something that do not represent his present thinking. Together with The Audacity of Hope, written in 2006, these two books give us a picture of Mr. Obama before he started his political career and after he became a politician.

Shaping the Past

Both books are filled with great swathes of what appears to be reported speech. These are ostensibly conversations from Mr. Obama’s early childhood onwards. In the case of DMF, a casual reader could easily think he had picked up a novel.

Mr. Obama says coyly in the introduction to DMF that “although much of my book is based on contemporaneous journals or the oral histories of my family, the dialogue is necessarily an approximation of what was actually said or relayed to me.”

Approximation is putting it mildly because Mr. Obama “recalls” astonishingly vast tracks of dialogue from all stages of his life. There are many pages of almost continuous dialogue, and when he meets his Kenyan half-sister Auma for the first time we get a monologue that takes up almost seven pages. (DMF pp. 212–219.) As for contemporaneous journals, nowhere does Mr. Obama mention keeping such records or refer to journals kept by others. As he is the protagonist in almost all the dialogue, he is presumably relying almost entirely on “oral history,” a notoriously unreliable source.

Mr. Obama’s writing veers even further into fiction because, as he writes, “For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.” The books are often vague about even approximately when an event occurred. Mr. Obama then tops all this imprecision by telling the reader, “With the exception of my family and a handful of public figures, the names of most characters have been changed for the sake of their privacy.” This sounds like a device to make sure nosey journalists ask no awkward questions and that the people he writes about raise no objections.

Source:
Barack Obama in His Own Words (Part I of III)
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