Nyhan Strikes Back

"[D]oes Yglesias really believe that the GOP won't try to capitalize on Obama's past history with drugs?" he asks. Of course I don't (though I doubt the GOP will do it directly, it's more an "independent expenditure" kind of thing to do), and I don't think that's what I said. What I said was that I don't see anything racist about inevitable attacks on Barack Obama's drug use.

I think there's every reason to believe that a white candidate whose memoir strongly implied a past history of cocaine use would face attacks for it.

Comments

I think there's every reason to believe that a white candidate whose memoir strongly implied a past history of cocaine use would face attacks for it.

Is putting it in a memoir the dispositive factor? Becasue there is no reason to suppose that Obama did more cocaine than the incumbent president . . .

Posted by rea | May 31, 2007 8:11 PM

He's right and you're missing what he means, again. Read the word "capitalize" in the context of the rest of the post in which he explains how "drug use" will be tied to racial anxieties.

And I ask again, do you really believe that any American can separate attitudes about drug use from our collective, racist history? Racial fear has been a part of drug hysteria since Reefer Madness.

Posted by Antid Oto | May 31, 2007 8:12 PM

To put it a different way, you seem to be saying "I could imagine a hypothetical American who cares about Obama's drug use apart from his blackness." Except what hypothetical American would that be? Who doesn't know that Obama is black? Who isn't steeped in the racial implications of the Drug War? What island did Homo Hypotheticalis just sail from?

Posted by Antid Oto | May 31, 2007 8:14 PM

FWIW, I've noticed that the Sailer-esque racist hate comments about Obama appearing on lefty blogs tend to frequently refer to him as "Crackhead Obama".

Could be one guy's obsession popping up under multiple screennames, but it could also be a confirmation of Nyhan's suspicions.

Posted by Petey | May 31, 2007 8:15 PM

The comments themselves may not be racially motivated, but I can see Nyhan's point that harping on Obama's past drug use will be more effective cause he's black than it would for a white candidate (say, GWB) because the comments play into racist fears of blacks and drugs.

Posted by Dave | May 31, 2007 8:16 PM

"To put it a different way, you seem to be saying "I could imagine a hypothetical American who cares about Obama's drug use apart from his blackness." Except what hypothetical American would that be? Who doesn't know that Obama is black? Who isn't steeped in the racial implications of the Drug War? What island did Homo Hypotheticalis just sail from?"

There are millions of Americans like that; they're called "hard-core partisan Republicans." If John Edwards is the nominee and he admits to past coke use, they'd jump all over him for that. And yet, they don't care about Dubya's drug use. The double standard is partisan, not racial.

There are other ways in which they'll probably attack Obama that will be racist, but drug use isn't one of them.

That said, knowing a candidate did coke and isn't all whiny and apologetic about it is actually a point in his favor to me. It doesn't lock up my vote -- if I vote in the Dem primary this time, I'm leaning toward Richardson -- but it doesn't hurt.

Posted by too many steves | May 31, 2007 8:18 PM

I think Dave's right. If, fifteen years ago, a white candidate had to pretend he didn't inhale, I think there's every reason to believe the Republicans would reasonably go after a white candidate who had admitted in print that he had used cocaine. Why I should give a fuck what the people who previously voted for a draft-dodging, cheerleading alcoholic think is another issue.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | May 31, 2007 8:22 PM

I agree with Antid... it seems you are (perhaps deliberately) missing the point of Nyhan's post. He isn't saying that making hay of a candidates drug history is inherently racist; he's predicting that, when the GOP does make hay of it, they will do so in a way that deliberately invokes racial stereotypes. I suppose you could disagree with that prediction. But I have a hard time believing that the party of the Swift Boat wouldn't take advantage of every dirty tactic possible.

Posted by Freddie | May 31, 2007 8:24 PM

Ah, well.

This is an odd back and forth considering who the bad guys are in this: Rove Republicans.

The "good" thing if you are a typical fact-free wingnut soldier in the Rove Brigade in that, in the search for a smear to destroy your evil librul 'murka hatin' opponent with, you don't need a real issue like actual past drug use to smear an opponent.

You can just make something up like drug use and ideally their echochamber will work to make it stick true or not.

If Obama hadn't admitted to trying coke, some Karl Rove wannabe would have just made it up and floated it just as successfully in the media.

That said, I think Matt is off here.

The GOP would use a far more over the top ugly racial angle to smear Obama with a drug meme as opposed to a white candidate with a drug issue.

Because its an attack that says "scary black man" to the GOP's target audience of suburban and rural white people, and its pretty much par for the course with the Rove-Atwater GOP. When they went after Ford in Tennessee they went "Fancy Ford" and implied he was a pimp.

If they were attacking a white candidate with a womanizer history, sure they would have gone at him hard, but they wouldn't have said he was a pimp. Calling a white John Edwards candidate "Fancy John" doesn't work as a scare because he's white. They were trying to sell Harold Ford as Huggie Bear becuase he was black and they wanted to spook white voters. The pimp angle only works the way they want it to work with a minority candidate.

Posted by Cynical Bostonian | May 31, 2007 8:43 PM

Unable to defeat the U.S. in conventional war, Osama Bin Laden has engaged in an alternative plan.

He is creating an army of solar-powered negroids, which have already infiltrated the ranks of U.S. society.

Their goal? Rape every last woman they can find, thus over time diluting the purity and genius of the white race, causing the decline of Western Civilization. Initial intelligence reports show that a solar-powered negroid can sniff out a white woman (to rape) from 200 yards.

And who is solar-powered negroid #1? Barack Hussein Obama. Look at his eyes when he is near a white woman. He cannot hide that "rapist gaze."

Posted by Dale Gribble | May 31, 2007 8:47 PM

Of course, the first person to blame Obama's drug use on his racial identity was Obama, who wrote in his "Story of Race and Inheritance" that taking drugs was "something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind . . ."

When questioned by reporters, his old classmates at his expensive school in Honolulu uniformly found this a ridiculous rationalization. Why did all these preppies in paradise, like Obama and his classmates, take drugs on the beach in Hawaii in the 1970s? Because it was fun!

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 31, 2007 8:50 PM

I don't understand this dispute. Does Nyhan argue that Obama is a bad candidate because of his vulnerability to this kind of attack? if not, what on earth is at stake here?

Posted by lemuel pitkin | May 31, 2007 8:54 PM

Something that's striking is how much harder a time the press (e.g., Tim Russert last Sunday) is giving Bill Richardson than it's giving Barack Obama. Richardson, who is 1/4th rich Mayflower WASP and 3/4th Mexican and spent his youth in Mexico City and at New England prep school, really is much more "the post-racial man" who is "comfortable in his own skins" and "transcends race" than is Obama, who (at least claims at vast length to) be psychologically traumatized by his mixed race identity.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 31, 2007 8:59 PM

"it's more an "independent expenditure" kind of thing to do"

They'll outsource the dirty work. They always do.

Poppy didn't know anything about the Willie Horton campaign. Bush Jr. had nothing to do with the swiftboat liars. Their hands were clean.

GOP fatcats will bankroll a group, Christian Patriots for Truth, and by the time they are finished they will convince millions that Obama is cousins with Osama.

GOP fatcats will bankroll it. The Right Wing Noise Machine will distribute it. You will see the group all over cable TV making their accusations about cocaine orgies, early Islamic education, terrorist sympathies. WSJ editorial page will take up their cause. So will NY Post, NY Sun, Moonie Times. Rush and friends on talk radio will spread the smear. They will accuse the MSM of "protecting" Obama and hiding the truth. MSM will cave and start doing he said/she said reporting, concluding that "the truth is probably somewhere in the middle".

Posted by DonB | May 31, 2007 9:01 PM

Matt has been kidding himself when he claims that Obama's race doesn't play a huge role in his popularity with whites -- that what's really making him a popular candidate is Obama's occupation to the Iraq War.

In reality, Obama became a superstar when he gave the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention. Obama left out overt opposition to the war. Instead, he started right off by emphasizing his ancestry.

Obama's race has given him a huge advantage in the race.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 31, 2007 9:13 PM

"Is putting it in a memoir the dispositive factor? Becasue there is no reason to suppose that Obama did more cocaine than the incumbent president . . ."

There is a world of difference.

MSM decided Bush's past drug use was ancient history.

Same MSM will join the Right Wing Noise Machine and say Obama's drug use is a "character issue" that must be investigated and aired fully. Did he break any laws? What about the rumors printed in the WSJ editorial page that he was a dealer?

Besides, Bush found Jesus and was saved. There are all these rumors about Obama's secret visits to a mosque. Rumors discussed 24/7 on FOX "news".

Posted by DonB | May 31, 2007 9:23 PM

""Is putting it in a memoir the dispositive factor? Becasue there is no reason to suppose that Obama did more cocaine than the incumbent president . . ."

There is a world of difference.

MSM decided Bush's past drug use was ancient history. "

There is another world of difference here: in 2000, the country had largely been traumatized by a heavily divisive partisan battle over the impeachment of the President over what were largely viewed (by his defenders) to be his private personal actions. In 2000, the natural defense against an attack on GWB's past drug use was that now (ie., 2000) was the time for the country to move past highly personal attacks on long past discretions, and to heal as a nation by embracing a more gentle humane brand of politics. This allowed GWB to also push his "Uniter not Divider" meme, and to look like a more electable centrist candidate.

Now, I think the 2008 campaign is going to be particularly ugly the other direction. Once the nominees are set, I think Bush's approval ratings will probably be in the mid-20s, and the MSM meme at that point will be that people could have seen in 2000 how disastrous a President GWB would have been even prior to his first election. Thus the media will in fact be doing the public a service by reporting on past personal misconduct in an effort to fully protect the public against electing another not-great President. And safe to say, one or more of the campaigns will be happy to feed past indiscretions to a hungry media convinced of the need for blatant personal attacks.

(I'm convinced that this is already well underway as the unspoken driving force behind the Edwards-haircut stories.)

Posted by msmackle | May 31, 2007 9:36 PM

When questioned by reporters, his old classmates at his expensive school in Honolulu uniformly found this a ridiculous rationalization. Why did all these preppies in paradise, like Obama and his classmates, take drugs on the beach in Hawaii in the 1970s? Because it was fun!

Links? I've yet to see or hear a negative comment about Obama by a Punahou classmate or faculty member. Or are you just making shit up again?

Posted by DaveL | May 31, 2007 9:40 PM

Then you haven't been paying attention. Lots of reporters talked their editors into sending them on expense account trips to Hawaii or Indonesia in the late winter to check up on Obama's autobiography. For example,

In the Chicago Tribune, Kirsten Scharnberg and Kim Barker report from Honolulu and Jakarta, where Obama spent his first 18 years:

"More than 40 interviews with former classmates, teachers, friends and neighbors in his childhood homes of Hawaii and Indonesia, as well as a review of public records, show … several of his oft-recited stories may not have happened in the way he has recounted them, sometimes making him look better in the retelling, and sometimes skipping over some of the most painful, private moments of his life."[The Not So Simple Story of Barack Obama's Youth, March 25, 2007]

Obama described Indonesia in the late 1960s as idyllic for a small mixed-race boy, while Hawaii in the 1970s was a nightmare of racism.

The Tribune reporters found the opposite was closer to the truth.

They interviewed Southeast Asians from his Jakarta neighborhoods:

"All say he was teased more than any other kid in the neighborhood--primarily because he was so different in appearance." He was frequently attacked by three Indonesian kids at once, and one time they threw him in a swamp. "Luckily he could swim."

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 31, 2007 9:46 PM

Conversely, Obama's account of his supposedly oppressed and angry 5th-12th grade years (at Honolulu's most prestigious prep school) make Hawaii sound like Alabama in the 1950s—rather than a state where whites didn't hold any of the top three elective posts at the time. However, the Tribune correspondents note, "Much time is devoted in Obama's book to exploring his outsider status at Punahou. But any struggles he was experiencing were obscured by the fact that he had a racially diverse group of friends--many of whom often would crowd into his grandparents' apartment, near Punahou, after school let out."

Obama exploits his typical reader's ignorance of Hawaii's very different racial rules. For instance:

"Obama described having long, heated conversations about racism with another black student, 'Ray,' who once railed: 'Tell me we wouldn't be treated different if we was white. Or Japanese. Or Hawaiian.' The real Ray, located by the Tribune, is actually half black and half Japanese. And according to a close friend from high school, that young man was perceived and treated as one of Punahou's many mixed-race students."

In his Honolulu classmates' recollections, the young Obama wasn't the lonely, alienated victim depicted in his book. Instead, he was much as he is now: a naturally gifted politician with a knack for making himself popular. CBS reported:

"Most classmates and teachers recall an easygoing, slightly chunky young man, with the same infectious smile he sports today. Yet many say they have trouble reconciling their nearly 30-year-old memories with Obama's more recent descriptions of himself as a brooding and sometimes angry adolescent…"

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-070325obama-youth-story,1,4006113.story?page=1&coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 31, 2007 9:48 PM

Taking drugs was "something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind . . ."

Obama is right on, as usual. Drugtaking is an extremely common way to relieve adolescent insecurity.

Oh, and Steve Sailer? The book is called "Dreams from My Father." And you're still an idiot.

Posted by theo | May 31, 2007 9:51 PM

OK, so according to Steve Sailer's quotations from the Tribune articles, which are undoubtedly highly selective, but which I'm not going to bother investigating further:

Obama was frequently the victim of racism as a child, but he either wasn't aware of it or didn't mind it very much then.

And once he was a teenager, he wasn't a victim of racism so often, but he was hyperaware of it and minded it very much.

Now, would you say that (a) teenagers or (b) children are more sensitive to racial discrimination and more likely to agonize about minor slights to their status?

If you said (a), then you are a normal American. Thanks for playing. If you said (b) -- were you homeschooled or something?

Posted by theo | May 31, 2007 9:59 PM

The relevant point is that Obama blamed his taking drugs not on adolescence but on race.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 31, 2007 10:00 PM

Of course, it's completely unusual and noteworthy when a person's perceptions of his adolescenct experience - both while he's experiencing it and in retrospect - are at odds with what the people around him would describe. That just never happens.

Posted by Quarterican | May 31, 2007 10:07 PM

Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly has actually read Obama's "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" and here is his reaction:

"Obama routinely describes himself feeling the deepest, most painful emotions imaginable (one event is like a "fist in my stomach," for example, and he "still burned with the memory" a full year after a minor incident in college), but these feelings seem to be all out of proportion to the actual events of his life, which are generally pretty pedestrian. Is he describing his real feelings? Is he simply making the beginning writer's mistake of thinking that the way to convey emotion is to use lots of adjectives? Or is something else going on?"

Drum's reaction is very similar to Obama's classmates' reactions when questioned by reporters. For example, here's an article from CBS News that has an amusingly Onionesque flavor:

Obama's "Aloha" Days in The Spotlight

Hawaiians Who Knew Democratic Hopeful Say He Showed No Signs Of Racial Angst

Hans Nichols

Most classmates and teachers recall an easygoing, slightly chunky young man, with the same infectious smile he sports today. Yet many say they have trouble reconciling their nearly 30-year-old memories with Obama's more recent descriptions of himself as a brooding and sometimes angry adolescent, grappling with his mixed race and the void left by a father who gave him his black skin but little else. …

Dan Hale, the 6-foot-7-inch star center of the 1979 Punahou basketball team, said Obama's depiction of Hawaii as a place where race really mattered hardly resonates with him. "I was certainly oblivious to a lot of what he references," Hale said in an interview. "If you look at our teams, that year I was the only white guy on the starting five. You had three part-Hawaiians, one Filipino and me." …

Most of his teachers and friends express sorrow that they did not know of Obama's racial anguish or inner demons. "I wish I would have known that those things were bothering him, or if they did bother him," said Eric Kusunoki, Obama's homeroom teacher from grades nine through 12. "Maybe we could have helped him. But he seemed to have coped pretty well." [As I said, Onionesque ...]

Others are more skeptical that the boy known as Barry felt the angst described by Barack. Furushima [a high school crush] said that many of her classmates have expressed dismay at Obama's rendering of the past. "We are just such a mixed-up bag of races. It was hard to imagine that he felt that way, because he just seemed happy all the time, smiling all the time," she said. "We have so many tones of brown here. If someone is brown, they can be Samoan or Fijian or Tongan. I can't tell if someone is Fijian or black."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/14/politics/main2567770_page2.shtml

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 31, 2007 10:07 PM

No, I was looking for a link that actually supported the assertion you made. What you've provided supports the shocking proposition that different people have different memories and different perceptions of events from their childhoods. And--golly gee!!--teenagers who appear to be doing very well may nonetheless be struggling to grow up and figure out who they are.

Yet somehow the one who's outraged by all these "deceptions" isn't any of the people who are quoted as remembering Obama fondly, it's the white guy from somewhere else who's out to convince the world that he's just another lying druggy [deleted]. Funny, that.

Posted by DaveL | May 31, 2007 10:16 PM

Don't bother talking to Steve Sailer. It's a waste of time and only encourages him to write more comments I then have to skip over.

Posted by Antid Oto | May 31, 2007 10:21 PM

The constant refrain in the press that Barack Obama "transcends race" would be much truer of Bill Richardson.

In contrast, Obama's emotional racialism is not at all ancient history. The closest Obama has come to finding a surrogate for the father he desperately missed is his pastor and avowed spiritual advisor, the Rev. Jeremiah T. Wright Jr., longtime leader of the Trinity United Christian Church on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago. The title of Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, is lifted from one of Wright's sermons

That Obama is a "devout Christian" is a big part of his political appeal. But Wright's black church, which Obama joined in the mid-1980s, turns out to be almost as racialist and political in its own way as the Boers' old Dutch Reformed Church was in apartheid South Africa.

Obama now realizes he has to keep the Rev. Wright covered up, which is why the day before his nationally televised campaign kickoff in Springfield, Illinois, Obama rescinded his invitation to Wright to give the invocation on television.

Wright, however, is a loose cannon. He explained to the New York Times why he was "disinvited":

"When [Obama's] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli [in Libya]" to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mr. Wright recalled, "with [Black Muslim leader Louis] Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell." [March 6, 2007 Disinvitation by Obama Is Criticized By Jodi Kantor]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/us/politics/06obama.html?ex=1180756800&en=0f1af835fa4c8699&ei=5070

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 31, 2007 10:23 PM

So what, Sailer? John David Stutts's co-workers and associates described him, variously, as quiet, hard-working, and polite. It's often the case that people don't know what's going on in an someone else's head, particularly when that head is adolescent. In fact, isn't that a fairly common trope of American humor: parents don't understand their teens, etc.? I'm not sure what the fact that the friends of the adolescent Obama didn't know what was going on his head is supposed to demonstrate. That he's not completely transparent? You've convinced me.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | May 31, 2007 10:24 PM

That he's not completely transparent?

Well, he is a bit on the dark side. That might be the problem, all right.

Posted by DaveL | May 31, 2007 10:26 PM

Democrats can go on refusing to read Obama's autobiography and go on joyfully making up fantasies about how he "transcends race" and go on denouncing anyone who has read his book for the crime of explaining what's in it. But if the Democrats nominate Obama for President, the Republicans are sure going to read his book with extremely close attention. So, maybe you ought to pay attention to what Obama wrote now rather than in September of 2008?

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 31, 2007 10:55 PM

And the Republicans charge will be what? That Obama doesn't "transcend race," whatever that means? I can live with that.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | May 31, 2007 11:16 PM

"Thus the media will in fact be doing the public a service by reporting on past personal misconduct in an effort to fully protect the public against electing another not-great President."

This is wishful thinking

Do you see the MSM digging into Rudy's serial adultery? No, they are still yapping away about the "Clinton marriage".

MSM is not in the busines of protecting the public interest. They allow themselves to get pushed around by outside forces especially the Right Wing Noise Machine. Since there is no comparable Noise Machine on the left this means the MSM often goes after Dem candidates.

Posted by DonB | May 31, 2007 11:17 PM

I read Obama's book(s). Sailer's reading, shockingly enough, is a mite tendentious. But his concern for Democrats' electoral prospects is touching.

Posted by DaveL | June 1, 2007 12:00 AM

Barack Obama supports the third-world (i.e. cheap labor) invasion of the U.S. He is a globalist fraud who cares nothing about working Americans (especially if they are white). He laughs at driving down American wages. He is a traitor and should be tried for treason. I'm a Democrat, but I'd rot in Hell before I'd vote for Obama.

Posted by Union Man | June 1, 2007 12:01 AM

Here's what's going to happen. You are going to get up on the Tuesday morning after Labor Day 2008, and Fox News will be blaring excerpts from Democratic nominee Barack Obama's autobiography carefully chosen to elicit the reaction that Kevin Drum had when he read the whole book: this guy is either a crybaby or a drama queen.

And you guys will denounce quoting Obama as an evil racist plot. And you will feel very good about your own moral superiority as Obama goes down to defeat and President McCain or President Giuliani or some other Republican maniac gets in the White House and proceeds to blow up the world.

Look, your man Obama is a really, really talented politician. If anybody can talk his way around the problems his autobiography causes, he can. But, if he can't do it, then you need to find that out in 2007, not in the fall of 2008.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 1, 2007 12:03 AM

The problem isn't the autobiography, it's the racists and know-nothings looking for a hook to hang their bigotry from. Of course they'll find one. They'll find many. This does not reflect poorly on Obama.

Posted by DaveL | June 1, 2007 12:08 AM

Right, like Kevin Drum.

The reason liberals lose elections they shouldn't is because feeling morally and culturally superior to the mass of Americans, those despicable racists, is so much more crucial to them, as DaveL demonstrates above for the umpteenth time.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 1, 2007 12:13 AM

A good buddy of mine (who was at Harvard Law Review) who knows Obama well told me that Obama would go off on rants about white people (how he can't trust them) and Western Civilization (how it must come to an end). Crackhead Obama is a fifth columnist, just waiting to open the gates to the invading third-world hordes and just ready to lead them as they pillage America. He is the Clement Dio of Camp of the Saints.

Wake up, America!!! This man should be tried for treason, not running for President!

Posted by Sir Alfred | June 1, 2007 12:16 AM

Steve shows off his mad reasoning skillz yet again. If I believed that the mass of Americans were despicable racists it would be pretty stupid to support a black guy for president. If, on the other hand, I saw that a guy who spends his time debunking the fallacy that black people are just as good as white folks had developed a strange fixation on the one black guy who's running for president, I might tend to draw some conclusions about that particular American.

Posted by DaveL | June 1, 2007 12:20 AM

Back in 2004 if somebody had told us that the GOP dirty trickster would accuse Kerry of shooting himself in the leg to get a medal we would all be laughing. And yet it happened. And MSM reported it as legitimate news.

Posted by DonB | June 1, 2007 12:35 AM

Sailer you're just wrong. Period. Your reading of his autobiography is wrong and your analysis of the political situation is also wrong.

I'm not going to rehash the whole thread, but basically what's happened is that all of your arguments have been destroyed, and now you've been reduced to grasping at a single straw. Do you *really think* nobody else but you and Kevin Drum has read Dreams from My Father, which hit #1 on the NYT bestseller list? And in fact people who read the book liked it a lot, including myself. It has great reviews.

Now, okay, we all get you think the book makes Obama look like a drama queen racist crybaby Big Man. BUT NOBODY ELSE DOES. Certainly not Kevin Drum, who was trying to figure out what policies Obama would implement as President and apparently read the wrong book (that would be The Audacity of Hope).

Dreams from My Father is such a good book precisely because Obama doesn't just shit his life out on the page, he actually creates a narrative. The book ends up reading more like a novel than your typical crappy memoir. This process necessarily involves selecting things that are important and discarding things that are not. It's *not* important that Obama write about all the friends he had at Punahou or that apparently he got thrown into a swamp as a little kid in Indonesia. It *is* important that he write about his internal struggle with race during his adolescence, because that drives the arc of the entire book. This doesn't mean Obama is a racist liar, as Steve Sailer seems to think for some unknown reasons (which we can all guess at). It just makes him a good, honest, subtle writer.

Obama's past cocaine use is, I submit, a political asset. Nobody wants a person who's been perfect since they were six. Everyone likes and identifies with that guy who was maybe troubled in childhood but turned himself around and is now a upstanding citizen. Now Obama's blackness is probably not an asset in a general presidential election. But I believe it's less of an issue than many people might think.

Posted by Korha | June 1, 2007 1:27 AM

Thank you, Korha.

Posted by sangfroid826 | June 1, 2007 1:55 AM

First off, I've a notion that 'Union Man' may have begat 'Sir Alfred.' Not only did he parrot the same hackneyed nonsense regarding treason, but he felt the need to dress it up with an unqualified personal anecdote -- no doubt due to the complete lack of attention his initial charges received. I love how the same folks that gasp at taking God's name in vain, as he's supposedly not to be taken lightly, feel no qualms at bandying about 'treason' whenever possible, as if the latter is anything less than the gravest charge that could be brought against a citizen. It's times like this I think the OED definition of 'irony' should just be a photo of the Confederate flag...

Posted by EpicureanQuaker | June 1, 2007 2:46 AM

Korha writes:

"The book ends up reading more like a novel than your typical crappy memoir. This process necessarily involves selecting things that are important and discarding things that are not. It's *not* important that Obama write about all the friends he had at Punahou or that apparently he got thrown into a swamp as a little kid in Indonesia."

Like Korha, I'm a big admirer of Obama's aesthetic control of his memoir, of his admantine refusal to put in anything unrelated to his theme of "race and inheritance" just because it would be interesting or funny or just plain not boring. I've compared him to Evelyn Waugh, which is high praise indeed.

http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_03_12/feature.html

What Korha doesn't grasp is that it's precisely because Obama made such careful decisions about what to put in and what to leave out of his memoir to create a consistent theme that the reporters' revelations above are so telling. Obama, for example, chose to leave out all mention that he used to get beat up for being black by racist Indonesian kids, but he chose to obsess over every slight at the hands of white kids at his prep school in order to make Hawaii sound kind of like Alabama.

Why? Because racist Asians don't fit his theme, but racist whites do.

These were not random decisions. Obama is in complete control of what he writes, which is why his book rewards careful reading.

Now, this wouldn't be a problem, except that's not how he's being sold to the American public as a Presidential candidate. He's being marketed as the man who will help us get past race, not as a self-pitying racial hypochondriac.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 1, 2007 4:00 AM

Obama, for example, chose to leave out all mention that he used to get beat up for being black by racist Indonesian kids, but he chose to obsess over every slight at the hands of white kids at his prep school in order to make Hawaii sound kind of like Alabama.

doesn't really entail this:

racist Asians don't fit his theme, but racist whites do.

since, for example, rejection by one's own will presumably hurt more.

Posted by archytas | June 1, 2007 5:24 AM

Well, I'll admit that all the controversy surrounding Obama's book made me go out and buy a copy. Unfortunately, I found it so deadly-dull I gave up on reading it after a couple of tries.

But here's slightly different question for the seeming hordes of Obama-philes on this thread. Obama has essentially zero track record in national politics, and just two years ago he was describing Joe Lieberman as his personal "mentor" in DC circles.

Now I'm not exactly thrilled with the Democratic field, but I'm not exactly thrilled with Lieberman either, or any of his self-described disciples.

Posted by RKU | June 1, 2007 5:48 AM

"Of course I don't (though I doubt the GOP will do it directly, it's more an "independent expenditure" kind of thing to do), and I don't think that's what I said. What I said was that I don't see anything racist about inevitable attacks on Barack Obama's drug use.
I think there's every reason to believe that a white candidate whose memoir strongly implied a past history of cocaine use would face attacks for it. "
-Matthew Yglesias

There woudn't be anythin inherently racist about attacking him on past drug use but you shouldn't dismiss so easily the posibility of a racially tinged attack on obama that focus on his drug use. It might tie in to black stereotypes or if that is too blatant they might imply that he's soft on crime because he is african american and did drugs and identifies with (insert worst media sterotypes of Young Black Men).

Based on the ugliness of conservative attacks in the last election. And racially tinged attacks against Obama already being thrown, we should unfortunatly expect this sort of thing.

Posted by rtaycher1987 | June 1, 2007 5:54 AM

The "deadly-dull" aspect of Obama's book stems from his aesthetically admirable resolve not to stick in any funny stores or human interest that doesn't have to do with his race and inheritance. In contrast, the extremely unlikely event that I ever wrote my autobiography I'd stick in the time I was under police investigation for suspicion of trying to blow up Margaret Thather with a letter bomb. It didn't actually have anything to do with my growth as a human being, but it's a lot more interesting that the thing that did, so I'd shove it in. But Obama left out all the random events that make memoirs interesting and stuck solely to his theme.

You can tell he didn't have a chostwriter -- they would have insisted on making it less literary and more readerfriendly.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 1, 2007 5:56 AM

From what I've been told Obama has a real hatred for white people...which is why he supports the third-world invasion of the U.S. He wants America to case being a Western nation.

And I'm not even going to talk about his proclivity for raping white women.

Posted by Doug | June 1, 2007 8:27 AM

Did I just feel the ground move? Or was that Doug just pulling the rug out from Obama's campaign with that breathtaking disclosure? It may still be proto-primary season, dude, but I'm pretty goddamn sure a violation this country considers akin to murder would have already bore some 'strange fruit' for Obama.

Posted by EpicureanQuaker | June 1, 2007 8:50 AM

There is another world of difference here: in 2000, the country had largely been traumatized by a heavily divisive partisan battle over the impeachment of the President over what were largely viewed (by his defenders) to be his private personal actions. In 2000, the natural defense against an attack on GWB's past drug use was that now (ie., 2000) was the time for the country to move past highly personal attacks on long past discretions, and to heal as a nation by embracing a more gentle humane brand of politics. This allowed GWB to also push his "Uniter not Divider" meme, and to look like a more electable centrist candidate.

Unfortunately this isn't at all true. Gore suffered personal attacks on a scale rarely seen before in a presidential campaign. If Gore had even had the suggestion of drug use in his past I am certain that it would have been dragged out and flogged even more heavily than the silliness of the supposed internet and Love Story quotes that got endlessly recycled in the MSM in their quest to elect a GOP president. Bush's free pass on his long time and fairly recent drug and alcohol abuse was ignored because he was the GOP candidate, end of story.

Posted by Ricky | June 1, 2007 8:59 AM

I am a liberal, but I'd never support Obama.

He supports increased immigration from the Third World which is being used by big business to drive down American wages.

This guy is a globalist stooge. I'll probably end up voting third party, like America First Party, which actually wants to help working Americans.

Posted by Elizabeth W | June 1, 2007 9:10 AM

"Did I just feel the ground move? Or was that Doug just pulling the rug out from Obama's campaign with that breathtaking disclosure?"

It's just Steve Sailer and his slimy band of racists spreading their very special brand of fear and loathing wherever they go.

Posted by Petey | June 1, 2007 9:18 AM

Hi, Steve Sailer! You claim above that Kevin Drum decided Obama was "either a crybaby or a drama queen" after reading his book. Any evidence to back that up? I sure don't see Drum saying anything like that on his site. I do see him commentingcommenting on your review of Dreams from My Father, though. He calls your thesis "a crock," one that "says more about Sailer's state of mind than Obama's," and says your conclusions are "almost a parody of Sailer's usual race obsession." He also agrees with Alexander Konetzki's assessment that your review was "racist" and "factually incorrect."

Since you seem quite eager to cite Drum's views, I thought this might be of some interest to you.

Posted by Matthew B. | June 1, 2007 9:22 AM

Well, that didn't work. Here's the link to Drum's comments:

www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_04/011199.php

Posted by Matthew B. | June 1, 2007 9:24 AM

As an empirical matter it's almost impossible for Matt's contention (that there wouldn't be any particularly racial component to the attention that will be given to Obama's past drug use)to be true in a culture that has managed to produce Steve Sailer.

Posted by Paul Campos | June 1, 2007 9:28 AM

It's just Steve Sailer and his slimy band of racists spreading their very special brand of fear and loathing wherever they go.

I'm pretty sure Doug was making a joke. Anyway, his comment made me laugh. Sailer, I admit, I find confusing.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | June 1, 2007 10:17 AM

"I'm pretty sure Doug was making a joke."

I'm pretty sure you're wrong.

I'm pretty sure commenter like Doug, Elizabeth W, Sir Alfred, Union Man, and Dale Gribble are the same person. (Or perhaps two people, conceivably.)

I'm pretty sure they're not (intentionally) making a joke, though I do understand the humorous effect they can create.

And I'm damn sure they appear only when Sailer appears.

"Sailer, I admit, I find confusing."

Normally, I find you perfectly harmless, if perhaps a little bit dim, SCMT. But when you say things like this, I worry about you.

Posted by Petey | June 1, 2007 10:44 AM

b

The Democratic Party used to be for hard-working Americans.

But since the 1960s the Democratic Party has sold out the lower and middle classes for the sake of multiculturalism.

Barack Obama is indicative of this. He loves multiculturalism. He wants to increase massive third-world immigration to drive down American wages.

There are more poor white people in America than poor blacks, but Obama could care less. He laughs and dismisses them as "white trash."

The marriage between big business and multiculturalism is the worst thing ever to happen to the American worker. Big business is using legal and illegal immigration to drive down American wages, and Obama is a part of this problem.

Posted by David | June 1, 2007 10:55 AM

Did I just detect a strong whiff of Steve Sailer's Obsession? Why, I believe I did!

A Google search on sailer obama cocaine generates 791 hits. While many of these hits are second- and third-hand commentary on Sailer's writings, it's a pretty good indication of just how far and wide he's pushing his idiosyncratic reading of Obama's memoir.

While nearly everyone else who has read the book describes it as the tale of a man trying to learn to feel comfortable in his own skin, Sailer alone views the book as an extended effort by Obama to express his dislike of white people and blame his problems on them. One explanation for this is that Sailer uses the same 2 or 3 cherry-picked excerpts over and over again to "prove" his point because he's grasping at straws. However, I suppose it's also possible that Steve paid extra to get the "Kill Whitey" special edition.

Other readers see a tale of an angsty teen who went through a "no one understands me" phase and took drugs to relax and fit in, then (looking back as a successful adult) identifies the psychological reasons why his lack of self-confidence contributed to that behavior. Sailer, however, sees this as a tale of a preppy kid hanging out with dumb stoners on the beach who retroactively invented feelings of teenage angst as an adult. Why didn't the dumb stoners ever notice his racial angst? Gee, I wonder.

Obama's story, frankly, is one of the most common narratives in all of pop culture. The world is full of pop-psychology explanations for why teenagers turn to drugs, and explanations for why minorities have trouble fitting in. There's something of an Oprah's Book Club air to the story Obama tells about his past. The story of an introspective middle-class teenager who is friendly and outgoing in public, but moody and angsty in private, with a somewhat distorted view of how the rest of the world views him, is exceptional only for how mundane it really is.

But Steve Sailer reads the same book and sees Al Sharpton version 2.0 lurking between the pages. I posit the hypothesis that this tells us much, much more about Sailer than it does about Obama.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | June 1, 2007 11:13 AM

Sailer kinda disappeared when Drum's opinion of him was quoted here. Probably off raping his sister again. But that's good-ol' white-on-white rape, so it's all good.

Posted by Reality Man | June 1, 2007 11:16 AM

"I'm a big admirer of Obama's aesthetic control of his memoir, of his admantine refusal to put in anything unrelated to his theme of "race and inheritance" just because it would be interesting or funny or just plain not boring."

Now you're just lying, as anyone who has ever read the book would immediately realize. There is tons of stuff in there that is not related to, or only tangentially related to, either race or his family. Indeed the great majority of the "Chicago" section, the longest part of the book, can be characterized in this way. "Chicago" is about Obama's work as a community organizer on the South Side, about the people he meets there and the things he comes to realize about the world. Really, only a racist could see this part of the book as primarily "about" race.

And you tell me what shockingly interesting and funny things Obama has left out of his memoir. I don't think there are any.

Posted by Korha | June 1, 2007 12:33 PM

"If Gore had even had the suggestion of drug use in his past I am certain that it would have been dragged out and flogged even more heavily than the silliness of the supposed internet and Love Story quotes that got endlessly recycled in the MSM in their quest to elect a GOP president"

I remember it being widely discussed that Gore was a pothead in college. Nobody really seemed to care.

Posted by too many steves | June 1, 2007 12:58 PM

Sailer wrote "Fox News will be blaring excerpts from Democratic nominee Barack Obama's autobiography"

Steve, the lesson of 2000-2007 is that Fox News doesn't need Obama's autobiography, because Republican hacks will make shit up.

"John Kerry's wounds were self-inflicted"
"Valerie Plame was a desk jockey"
"Al Gore will say anything to get elected"

They even do it about Republican rivals. (McCain, 2000)

Nobody - NOBODY - will avoid this treatment, no matter how clean they've kept their records, no matter how white they are.

If George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Thomas Jefferson came back from beyond the grave to run, they'd be savaged whether running as a Republican or as a Democrat.

So, given that, there's no point wishing for a white candidate with a scrubbed bio. All that can be done is to fight back and hope journalists will have some integrity *this* time, and the public has wised up.

Posted by Jon H | June 1, 2007 1:44 PM

Still no Sailer after he got called out on his bullshit.

Posted by Reality Man | June 1, 2007 4:31 PM

I'm a little confused about the racial aspect of this. I thought the stereotypes were that white yuppies do cocaine, while blacks do crack. (I forget if poor whites are supposed to do meth or Oxycontin these days)

So I'd think that talking about cocaine use actually makes Obama sound whiter.

Posted by AlanC9 | June 1, 2007 4:36 PM

It was widely known in 2000 that Gore had come close to flunking out of divinity school (!) because he had been stoned all the time. It wasn't much of an issue in that election because he had innoculated himself against it back in 1988 by publicly admitting marijuana use in the wake of Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg's dropping his fight due to revelations of marijuana-smoking. In contrast, Bush's refusal to reveal his drunk-driving conviction, which was leaked the week before the election, may have cost him the popular vote.

Similar to Gore, Obama innoculated himself back in 1995 by admitting youthful drug use. So, I don't think it will be much of an issue. Obama says he stopped by about age 21 when he transferred to Columbia and I've never seen any reason not to believe him.

The point of the debate between Yglesias and Nyhan, however, was whether it was white racist to mention Obama's teenage drug use because of the supposed stereotype that blacks use powder cocaine a lot. My contribution, unwelcome as it may be, was to point out that Obama himself was the first to attribute his drug use to his race; and that this reflects a general pattern that is omnipresent in his autobiographical "Story of Race and Inheritance;" and that his book's relentless racial hypochondria is the opposite of how he's being sold to the American public, which could cause him trouble down the road.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 1, 2007 5:06 PM

It's funny how Sailer provides links, data, and rational argumentation...while the hataz respond con nada pero HATE

Posted by Zagnut | June 1, 2007 7:26 PM

Links to a hate site he works for don't really count. His arguments are only rational if you don't get what's wrong with voting for David Duke in Louisiana. His use of data shows he doesn't really care about consistency of data, but instead hopes his readers never studied statistics.

Posted by Reality Man | June 2, 2007 12:06 AM

Also, Sailer still hasn't addressed the fact he kept on bringing up Drum to back up his own points yet Drum called him a racist.

Posted by Reality Man | June 2, 2007 12:13 AM

Nyhan is right: Obama’s 1980’s drug use will be assessed more harshly than that of a comparable white candidate. Since the GOP expects and intends this result of their attacks, the GOP is probably racially motivated.

Obama attributes his 1980’s drug use to struggles with racial identity, not to his race. Race and racial identity are distinct. Unlike Obama, you keep conflating them; one more example of your tendentious reading of Dreams.

Posted by archytas | June 2, 2007 12:42 AM