Honolulu, Harvard, and Hyde Park
The Making of Barack Obama
Article Summary and Author Biography
David Remnick’s The Bridge delivers fresh insights about Barack Obama’s personal and political odyssey -- particularly when it comes to understanding the degree to which Obama is a product of New England’s commitment to social and global reform.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD is Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Essay
After Iraq, we may be tempted to turn inward. That would be a mistake. The American moment is not over, but it must be seized anew. We must bring the war to a responsible end and then renew our leadership -- military, diplomatic, moral -- to confront new threats and capitalize on new opportunities. America cannot meet this century's challenges alone; the world cannot meet them without America.
Barack Obama's appeal has always been something of a paradox. On the one hand, Obama's election as the United States' first African American president can be seen as a triumph for "identity politics" and a blow to the near hammerlock that white Protestant males have had on the presidency since George Washington. On the other hand, it moves the country closer to an era of nonracial or postracial politics, in which racial identity will matter less and less.
Obama is a clear break from past generations of black politicians. In the parlance of the civil rights movement, he is a member of "the Joshua generation" -- a term drawn from the Bible that refers to the generation of Jews who did not remember the Exodus but lived to enter the Promised Land. And he has embraced a very different political style from those of other black politicians, such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. With a white mother and a Kenyan father who lived in the United States only briefly, Obama had little personal connection to the forces and history that shape African American identity. Growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia, two places where black-white relations were a marginal and distant force, young Barry Obama's life was touched only tangentially by race. From this start, Obama emerged as the most commanding figure in African American politics ever and was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win a majority of the popular vote since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Who is Obama? What does he really believe? How has his quest to find and understand his place in American life shaped him and his vision for the United States? These are the questions that David Remnick, the author of Lenin's Tomb and the editor of The New Yorker, sets out to investigate in The Bridge, an intelligent and searching biography of Obama. Although he covers ground that has already been examined by other writers (most notably, Obama himself), Remnick nevertheless manages to frame important questions about the current occupant of the Oval Office. The Bridge is a significant accomplishment and a compelling read. At its best, it illuminates some very dark corners.
The book is not always at its best. Most readers will feel that Remnick spends entirely too much time on detailed accounts of the ultimately irrelevant candidates who tried and failed to stop Obama's march to the Senate in 2004. Instead, Remnick should have put his intelligence to work on the mostly white world of liberal Hyde Park activism, which had a profound effect on Obama during his years in Chicago. This is a regrettable oversight, since, as Remnick's narrative makes clear, white (and often Jewish) friends and associates formed a critical part of Obama's network. Remnick has a gift for laying bare the cultural and intellectual forces at work in a person or a milieu; had he turned that searchlight on Hyde Park, he would have produced a much richer account of the president's intellectual and political journey.
When it comes to the world of black Chicago, Remnick gets closer to the story. His portrait of Representative Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther who defeated Obama in a congressional primary, is particularly sharp; his take on Jeremiah Wright, the spellbinding preacher who built the church in which Obama found his faith, although good, leaves readers wanting more. The book's dominant metaphor is a bridge -- Remnick compares Obama's role in society to the bridge in Selma, Alabama, that was the site of one of the most significant struggles of the civil rights movement -- and to some degree, the image closes as many doors as it opens. The image is a compelling one, but African American politics, religion, and culture are about much more than civil rights. By scanting this complexity, Remnick leaves readers with a less than totally satisfying depiction of Obama's encounter with the world of black Chicago.
THE PRESIDENT FROM NEW ENGLAND
Nevertheless, Remnick delivers some fresh insights about the president's personal and political odyssey that open up new perspectives on American society as a whole -- particularly when it comes to understanding the degree to which Obama is a product of New England's commitment to social and global reform. The Bostonian vision of the United States as "a city on a hill," whose government is the moral agent of a society of good people determined to suppress vice and establish virtue, has fueled some of the country's most important and lasting social movements, and it is this tradition that seems to have shaped Obama most profoundly.
The high school that Obama attended in Hawaii, the elite Punahou School, was founded in 1841 to educate the children of the New England missionaries who led the kingdom of Hawaii into both Christianity and the United States. In 1851, it was opened up to students from all racial and religious backgrounds, and today, like any good New England boarding school, it attempts to infuse its students with an ethic of service, along with solid academic skills. This Exeter of the Pacific did more than give Obama the academic skills he would need at Columbia and Harvard Law School; socially and culturally, it helped prepare him for both the ideas and the people among whom his lot was to be cast.
At its best, the tradition of New England reform, with its moral earnestness and its willingness to call on the full powers of a strong state, is a nonracial or postracial vision. Punahou's 1851 decision to open its doors to nonwhite and non-Christian students reflected more than the missionary ambitions of its founders; it represented the New England faith in the essential equality, and even similarity, of all people under the skin.
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