BOOK
REVIEW Obama, the Lone
Ranger Barack Obama in
Hawaii and Indonesia: The Making of Global
President by Dinesh Sharma
Reviewed by Richard Kaplan
If any
of you are old enough to remember The Lone
Ranger, you probably remember how at the end
of each episode, one of the characters, watching
the lone ranger ride off into the horizon would
ask, "Who is that masked man?"
Barack
Obama has been in office as president of the
United States more than three years and many
people are asking pretty much the same question of
him; many are wondering who he is behind the
presidential mask.
He seems still to be to
so many, ardent supporters among them,
something of a cipher.
Like no other president in recent memory, however
politically polarizing, he is the subject of
rumors ranging from the merely laughable to the
certifiably deranged.
Given his name, his
parentage, and his upbringing, Obama certainly is
strange in the sense of the word that its
equivalent in French, l'etranger, more
readily conveys - of foreign.
As a young
American in Indonesia the future president was, of
course, a foreigner - officially so - for a
several years; and he must have felt like one too
while growing up in geographically isolated and
culturally exotic Hawaii. But if those constitute
Obama's "lost years" and are, for the most part,
the inspiration for those persistent hydra-headed
rumors, they have now at last been found.
Dinesh Sharma's new book is one of the
very few, among the scores if not the thousands of
books that have been written about the president,
to tell us something new not only about the
details of his early life but about its cultural
context as well.
Unlike Theodore White's
famous account of John Kennedy's election, it is
not about the making of the president. It is about
the making of the person who became, because of
how and where and with whom he spent his formative
years, the first global president.
This is
of no small importance when you consider that it
is his supposedly global or internationalist
perspective that so many of Obama's opponents find
particularly indigestible.
Particularly
illuminating, however, are Sharma's investigation
of the cultural influence on, and the global
underpinnings of, Obama's character and thought.
The investigation draws variously, imaginatively -
and, to this reader, quite engrossingly - from
psychology, cultural anthropology, political
science, history, ethnology, genetics, demography,
religion, mythology, and a few other disciplines
that I am sure I overlooked.
The river of
Obamiana continues to rise and if it has already
overwhelmed the levees of your critical judgment
you are not alone. But if there are operas,
ballets, theme parks or detective stories for
people who hate operas, detective stories, et al,
then Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia
is the Obama book for people who have had, or
think they've had their fill of Barack Obama
books. I certainly did, and have Sharma to thank
for offering a boldly fresh perspective.
Sharma is not a biographer or a political
scientist but a specialist in cultural psychology
- a once inconceivable field of study that has
become, in this century, an indispensable one. For
10 years he has been consulting for today's much
maligned 1% - Fortune 500 clients representing
everything from pharmaceuticals and biotech to
publishing and media and has contributed articles
to publications ranging from International
Psychology Bulletin, Far Eastern Economic Review
and Middle East Time to the Wall Street Journal
Online and Health Affairs.
Sharma claims
that Obama is bigger than his "census identity".
Obama is the first multicultural head of a
Western democracy, and garnered strong support
from various ethnic voting blocks to form a
winning coalition.
He is the first Pacific president, born and
raised in Hawaii and schooled in Indonesia, the
largest Islamic populist democracy.
Finally, he is the first biracial President,
whose father was from Kenya and mother from
Kansas.
The constellation of genealogical,
biographical and personality characteristics
singularly qualified him to lead America into the
21st century.Thus, Sharma decided to write the
cultural biography of this unique president -
partly because this narrative was not reported in
the media but also, as an immigrant, the author
could truly empathize with Obama both from within
and without.
Sharma discovered the
candidate Obama in 2007 when he met one of the
future president's classmates from the Harvard Law
School well in advance of the primaries; he took a
couple of years to research Obama's background and
wrote the book in nine months, bringing an
anthropological and psychological lens to the
study of Obama's early years.
Sharma
visited and interviewed many friends, neighbors,
teachers, and some family members connected with
the first family in Honolulu, Jakarta, Chicago,
Washington DC and New York. The book is
ethnographic, journalistic, and interpretive,
complete with new evidence, theories and pictures;
and is written in an engaging style.
The
narrative moves chronologically and thematically
through childhood, adolescence and adulthood,
demonstrating the synergy between biography and
history, culture and globalization, race and
politics. Sharma claims that Obama is
transformational not solely for his high-minded
rhetoric, rather for the ability to weave together
a life narrative that spans generations, races,
histories, continents and cultures.
In the
opening chapter, several trends that are driving
post-9/11 America are examined, including the
demographic changes at home, the perceived threat
of radical Islam, and the rising Asian economies.
Sharma claims that Obama represents a "paradigm
shift" because of these mounting domestic and
international challenges.
In a chapter
called "Origin Stories", Sharma proposes that
since Obama's father abandoned the family when he
was only two years old, the "women who shaped
Obama" play an archetypal role in his early years.
The mother, Ann Dunham, grandmother, Madelyn
Dunham, and wife Michelle Obama figure prominently
throughout the book; their visions and voices are
examined as impetus to Obama's heroic journey.
Sharma also examines Obama's transition
from Hawaii to Indonesia and back. When Obama was
six years old he moved to Jakarta, commencing his
home-to-school transition. In Jakarta, the young
Obama grasped the raw nature of political power in
the making of a fledgling democracy.
He
saw first hand the impact of the "hard" and "soft
power" of America's adventures in international
diplomacy and nation building. At this age,when a
child's mind is highly imaginative and tinged with
a moral intuition and a magical sensibility, Obama
penned an essay expressing his wish to be
president "because he wanted everyone to be
happy".
At the age of 10 years, Obama
returned to Hawaii to enroll in an elite
preparatory institution, the Punahou School. As a
counterpoint to his life in Jakarta, Hawaii was
like a paradise representing a new spring. It is
here that Obama learned the leadership skills that
he is now famous for.
In the multicultural
context of the Punahou School, a microcosm of
Hawaii, Obama learned to walk into different
cultural worlds with ease and to relate to people
from all walks of life, something his mother had
perfected as an anthropologist.
After
graduation from Punahou, like many Hawaiians,
Obama went to the mainland for college, first to
Los Angeles and then to New York City. This
journey across the United States from the West
Coast to the East Coast turned into a journey of
self-discovery as he was actively engaged in
establishing a "hybrid identity on the mainland".
While in New York City, Obama learned that
his long-absent father, who had abandoned him at
the age of two years, had died in a car accident.
This loss intensified his search for an identity.
When Obama left New York after graduation, he
fully took on the name of his father and committed
himself to a public-service career; Barry Obama
became Barack Hussein Obama.
Why is
Obama's upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia
significant at this turning point in American
history? Is there indeed a connection between the
personal and the political? In a chapter titled
"The Obama world", Sharma concludes there is a
remarkable degree of confluence between Obama's
biography and the challenges America faces today.
Americans may have chosen a truly global president
to guide America into a multi-polar world.
The book is very timely with the upcoming
election in 2012 when the eyes of the world will
once again be transfixed on the US presidential
race.
As Sharma stated in a recent
article, America's foreign policy is shifting
towards the Asia-Pacific region. He considers it
likely that this will become a campaign theme -
that America needs to innovate to keep pace with
the growth in China and other emerging economies.
Who better to lead us into the 21st century than
the lone ranger president who grew up in the
Pacific region?
Richard Kaplan
is a retired foreign services officer, who spent
25 years in the State Department, and is the host
of the author events at Harvard University's Coop
Bookstore, Cambridge, MA.
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2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights
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As a young
American in Indonesia the future president was, of
course, a foreigner - officially so - for a
several years; and he must have felt like one too
while growing up in geographically isolated and
culturally exotic Hawaii. But if those constitute
Obama's "lost years" and are, for the most part,
the inspiration for those persistent hydra-headed
rumors, they have now at last been found.
