'...not my people!'

Blogger Lao at An American Expat in Southeast Asia has been doing a sterling job of analyzing Barack Obama's candidacy in light of his Southeast Asian connections and in general.

The above-linked post is a perceptive one, and he makes some points worth pondering about Obama, and how his -- shall we say -- singular upbringing leads him to a rather odd perspective on America and American identity.

Much of what I have read about Obama's relationship with his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and about her leftist notions about her country of birth, leads to the inescapable conclusion that neither of them have a normal and natural love of America or of American people. Is this what we want in a President, especially a President who makes big claims about 'uniting' the American people?


Lao cites a Mona Charen article in which Obama relates the disputes between his mother and her Indonesian second husband, referred to as Lolo:

"Looking back, I'm not sure Lolo ever fully understood what my mother was going through ... why the things he was working so hard to provide for her seemed only to increase the distance between them ... He landed a job in the government relations department of an American oil company. ... Sometimes I would overhear him and my mother arguing in their bedroom, usually about her refusal to attend his company dinner parties, where American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo's back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the quality of Indonesian help. He would ask her how it would look for him to go alone, and remind her that these were her own people, and my mother's voice would rise to almost a shout."

"They are not my people!"

What a telling phrase.
It's not surprising, given mama Stanley Ann's oddball leftist ideals and her predilection for selecting 'diverse' husbands or paramours. Lao then follows with a quote from Herodotus:

''Herodotus once said that "If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably - after careful considerations of their relative merits - choose that of his own country."

A young mulatto abandoned by his black Kenyan father and cared for by his white American mother, an anthropologist and Islamophile who hated America and subsequently went native. We may never completely understand the pathological self-criticism that Obama holds deep down in his soul, the overwhelming guilt that consumes him or the messianic aspirations that he now seems to revel in.

What we do know is that in Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates would advance argument that piety to many gods, who all want conflicting devotions is impossible.''

Something to think about there. Multiculturalism and 'diversity' amount to trying to worship at many altars, and trying to divide our devotion and loyalty among them all. Of course we all know that; those of us with our eyes open realize this.

The real issue here, for me, is: how can a man with such idiosyncratic allegiances and ideas and background pretend to represent America, historic America, old America? He can't. He doesn't. He won't. He will only be President of the changeling America, the proposition nation impostor that is now being surreptitiously put in the place of the original America. Most of us are the people Obama's mother repudiates and disowns; can Obama be true to his exotic roots and still be the President of the people Stanley Ann Dunham despises?

Early in Obama's candidacy, somebody, I forget who, said that Obama was an anomaly in that he had had the least American upbringing and background of any candidate in our history. Maybe that is what so many of the multicultists see in Obama: he represents change, just as he says. Change, as in presto, change-o: a new America, with a new population who will no doubt be more to the liking of Stanley Ann and Barack.