According to recent headlines, Barack Obama is a man on the
“cusp” and in the “swirl” of history. True enough. But for a man
poised to make American history, Obama has an alarmingly tenuous
grasp of it.
He has portrayed himself and his candidacy as an inventible,
almost predestined force of history. From launching his campaign on
the steps of the Old Illinois State Capitol, where Abraham Lincoln
delivered his legendary “House Divided” speech, to basking in the
youthful shadow of John F. Kennedy while sharing stages with that
martyred president’s relatives, Obama has placed his and his
family’s story firmly in the context of the most noble and heroic
aspects of America’s past.
However, even casual fans of U.S. history will notice that
Obama’s understanding of his country’s story is riddled with
inconsistencies and inaccuracies. On March 4, 2007, speaking at the
Selma Voting Rights March Commemoration, Obama, claiming that the
legendary march brought his parents together, said, “There was
something stirring across the country because of what happened in
Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a
bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So
don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama…”
(Sorry Barack, but if that’s your only claim on Selma, you don’t
have one. The bridge protest took place in 1965, four
years after you were born.)
In the same speech, Obama linked his father’s arrival in America
and his own birth to Camelot. “So the Kennedys decided, ‘We’re
going to do an airlift. We’re going to go to Africa and start
bringing young Africans over to this country and give them
scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country
America is,” he said. And thus his Kenyan father met his
transplanted Kansan mother and history was made.
Not quite. It was Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya who lobbied
Americans to bring Africans to the states to create a new class of
educated African elite, resulting in the 1959 airlift that brought
Barack Obama Sr. to Hawaii. President Kennedy did not take office
until 1961, and there is no evidence to suggest that before he took
office he or any members of his family supported the program.
This past Memorial Day, Obama, speaking in New Mexico, claimed
his uncle was one “of the first American troops to go into
Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps.” Awkwardly, Soviet
soldiers liberated Auschwitz, not Americans forces.
WHILE OBAMA STRUGGLES with dates and facts, even more disturbing is
his cockeyed view of past U.S. diplomacy, which he uses to defend
his own vision of its future.
Shunning the current administration’s strategy for dealing with
foreign dangers, Obama recently said “Change is realizing that
meeting today’s threats requires not just our firepower, but the
power of our diplomacy — tough, direct diplomacy where the
president of the United States isn’t afraid to let any petty
dictator know where America stands and what we stand for.” He
called this the noble “legacy of Roosevelt, and Truman, and
Kennedy.”
So Obama uses the collective legacies of past Democratic
presidents as a shield to defend his proposed presidential
get-togethers with the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar-al
Assad, Hugo Chavez, the Castros and any other murderous dictator
that wants to have tea with the leader of the free world.
But Roosevelt never met with Hitler, Mussolini, or Emperor
Hirohito. Neither did Truman, who also never met with Kim Il Sung.
The inexperienced young Kennedy’s Vienna summit with Nikita
Khrushchev in 1961 is now considered a failure. In fact, reflecting
upon the debacle, Kennedy himself later admitted, “He beat the hell
out of me.”
In fact, it was Kennedy’s disastrous interaction with Khrushchev
that led the Russian leader to believe that America wouldn’t
interfere with the construction of the Berlin Wall or take decisive
action to stop Operation Anadyr — the secret deployment of Soviet
missiles to Cuba.
While Obama freely appropriates history to suggest his coming
place in America’s pantheon of great leaders, his cheerleading
section in the American (and international) press has been rather
quiet, only egged on to call Obama on his distortions when
conservative bloggers point them out. (One wonders what type of
reaction John McCain would get if he were to present a similarly
skewed version of American history?)
Obama’s capture of the Democratic presidential nomination is
indeed historic, as would be his victory in November. But the
would-be maker of American history is no student of it.
How can someone whose understanding of our history is so hazy
now be poised to reshape it?
