Ages of Barack

The Obama Presidential Center opened in June to great acclaim. In the Fall edition of the Claremont Review of Books, editor William Voegeli responds with “Barack of Ages,” and wonders “what, if anything, Obama meant.” Right from the start, Obama had few doubts about his own greatness.

“You want to change the country. You want to make a unique contribution. You want to be a greatpresident,” he told Jacob Weisberg in a Men’s Vogue interview in 2006. The Audacity of Hope author explained “When I think about great presidents I think about those who transform how we think about ourselves as a country in fundamental ways,” and so on.

Presumably to make himself look good, Obama partners with intellectual inferiors such as the “gaffe prone” Joe Biden. On the other hand, to many who knew him, this soi-disant great one was “opaque” and “impenetrable” That part of his legacy was apparent from the beginning.

The first book under the Obama name, Dreams from My Father, was “kept secret during the 2008 presidential campaign,” Voegeli contends, because his fans “were completely invested in the idea of a post-racial Obama.” Maybe so, but there was more to it, as David Garrow showed in his massive tome Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, from 2017. The book’s “most discussed” revelation, Voegeli explains, was one from former girlfriend Sheila Miyoshi Jager, who said that she believed Obama had not learned much from history. In fact, however, the most significant revelation from that book was something else:

Dreams From My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction. It featured many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel, and its most important composite character was the narrator himself.