The Myth of Barak Obama

Posted by Lambchop

FROM VANITY FAIR MAGAZINE, JUNE 1990 

June 1990

FANFAIR

Harvard Law Reviewed

Kicking down doors.

by Elise O’Shaughnessy

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN GOODMAN.

The Harvard Law Review’s first black president, Barack Obama.

The new president of theHarvard Law Review was somewhat taken aback by the deluge of media coverage that followed hard on the heels of his election. The New York Times ran a “First Black” headline, which probably won’t be the last time that label is affixed to Barack Obama. The twenty-eight-year-old law student says he wasn’t going to run for the office until a black friend talked him into it. “There’s a door to kick down,” the friend argued, “and you’re in a position to kick it down.” The job does give him a great forum, but there’s a trade-off. “I like to read novels, listen to Miles Davis,” he says. “I don’t get to do that anymore. I don’t get dates anymore.” Still, he’s philosophical, even briskly cheerful, about his lost leisure. And that’s because Barack Obama has a game plan: he wants to tackle the quagmire of America’s inner cities. Federal money alone won’t do it, he argues. The deeper problem is that “those communities are unorganized. We need to get more people planning.” For preparation, Harvard Law School is a “perfect place to examine how the power structure works. It gives you a certain language.” When he’s fluent, he’ll be able to translate the language of the streets (“which I can speak”) into the language of the Establishment, and vice versa. The sense of mission derives in part from his experiences in the Third World. He saw brutal poverty while growing up in Singapore [Editor’s note: We should have said Indonesia.] with his mother, an anthropologist, and his half-brothers and -sisters in Kenya still live hand to mouth at times. Obama says that his late father’s experience in the Kenyan government left him a broken and bitter man, and he responds warily to the assumption that he himself will run for office. “If I go into politics it should grow out of work I’ve done on the local level, not because I’m some media creation.”  Though, as media creations go, he’d be a pretty good one.

Elise O’Shaughnessy is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

 

Comments

[Stevie B]

Only if the GOP surprises us and nominates Dennis Kucinich.

[Lambchop]

So I take it, Stevie B and German Shepherd, you guys aren't gonna vote for Obama this time around?

[Stevie B]

Can you have creation by omission? The media's creationism, if any, is clearly a function of failed or consciously omitted vetting of BHO, as GS's point about the conflicting reports of where the man was raised and a complete lack of journalistic curiosity about those contradictions demonstrates. When I think of Obama as a "creation" of someone, I tend to think Hollywood. You know, Tim Burton - or maybe Wes Cravens...

[German Shepherd]

Ya just gotta wonder where all these writers are getting the bad info on where our SCFOAMF was raised. So far we have Singapore, Kenya, Indonesia, Hawaii. How can so many people get such a simple fact wrong?

I DO love the last line of the article though. Very prophetic methinks.

Maybe she's related to the President? He's also part Irish (he says).