Monday, September 13, 2010

Explaining Obama the Wrong Way

Recently, Dinesh D'Souza - a dour, Puritanical, self-described conservative - suggested in Forbes that the reason Obama thinks as he does is due largely to his upbringing, in particular his childhood experiences in Kenya and Indonesia.

I find explanations like D'Souza's puzzling at best. Why reach for some deep, complex psychological explanation based on his upbringing rather than the more obvious one (to me, at least): he's a standard Progressive, a philosophy consciously adopted as a result of his education.

After all, there are literally millions of Americans with Obama's exact views right down the line and they have all sorts of demographic backgrounds, very few of them having anything to do with being raised in Africa and Asia, being raised by a hippie communist and an "anti-colonial" step-father, etc.

For example, individuals like Bill Ayers (Weather Underground terrorist and long-time Marxist Progressive) and Cass Sunstein (Professor of Law at Chicago and Fascist Progressive) had very ordinary, upscale, white bread American upbringings. Their hatred for all things American (not least, the Constitution) is no less warped than Obama's and you couldn't push light through the cracks between the views of all three men. Examples could be multiplied manyfold.

Why any particular individual becomes an Anti - and whether it's a very individual reason or something more basic that encompasses all or most of them - is a tough question. That said, for the most part, I find the focus on Obama's personality rather than his philosophy disturbing and distasteful, not to mention a bad tactic.

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