Really Cool Stuff about Barack Obama
1. Not only did Barack’s father have 4 wives but he was married to some of them At The Same Time! Lordy! “He failed to tell her that he had a wife in Kenya with a son and another child on the way. (Nor did he tell his friends.) He lied to Ann, telling her he was divorced. In the years that followed, he carried on overlapping relationships and marriages. If Obama felt any guilt about his cavalier attitude toward his wives and children, he concealed it” (p. 53). To be fair, this bigotry was not unusual in Kenya. “Kezia [his first wife] told a Kenyan reporter that she did not object to her husband taking a second wife, that it was not out of keeping with Luo customs, and that ‘he used to send me gifts, money, and clothes through the post office. Many people envied me’” (p. 53-54).
2. Ann’s (Barack’s mother) real first name was actually Stanley. “She was unapologetic about her odd name, a relic of her father’s initial disappointment at failing to sire a son. During her childhood and adolescence, as the family moved from state to state, she introduced herself to new friends, saying, ‘Hi, I’m Stanley. My dad wanted a boy.’ It would take a while before friends started calling her Ann” (p. 45).
3. Barack was the first African-American to be elected President of the Harvard Law Review. “The news of Obama’s historic election—he was the first African-American president of the Law Review—was picked up the news media all over the world” (p. 207).
4. Obama won his very first primary due to illegal petition practices, such as roundtabling, from his Democratic opponents. “Palmer’s [also running for the state senate] volunteers had had only a few days to collect signatures, increasing the likelihood that they had accumulated ‘bad names’: signatures that were either fakes, had addresses outside the district, or were not from registered voters. Some were printed rather than written in cursive script, as required. In campaigns were signatures were a problem, it was common Chicago practice to ‘roundtable the sheets’—meaning that volunteers would get together in a closed room, sit around a table with a telephone directory, scour the book for potential names and addresses, and forge the signatures they needed. On the day after Christmas, the Obama campaign filed challenges against all his opponents: Palmer, Askia, Ewell, and Ulmer D. Lynch Jr, a retired laborer and precinct captain who had been trying, without success, to win a spot on the City Council for decades. Ron Davis went by train to Springfield, where all petitions had to be filed. He brought back copies of Palmer’s petition lists and everyone could see that they were especially slipshod, containing names like Superman, Batman, Squirt, Katmandu, Pookie, and Slim” (p. 291).
5. Obama almost got in a fistfight on the Illinois Senate floor. One day, a fellow senator, Rickey Hendon, called out Obama about his voting record. “After Obama attempted, in vain, to have his voted changed, he angrily walked toward Hendon’s seat on Leaders Row. As Hendon recalls it, Obama ‘stuck his jagged, strained face into my space’ and told him, ‘You embarrassed me on the Senate floor and if you ever do it again I will kick your ass!’ ‘What?’ ‘You heard me,’ Obama said, ‘and if you come back here by the telephones, where the press can’t see it, I will kick your ass right now!’ The two men walked off the floor of the Senate to a small antechamber in the back…Terry Link and Denny Jacobs say that Hendon hyped the incident—that Obama never cursed at Hendon and that no blows were exchanged—but no one denies it was an emotional schoolyard confrontation that could have gotten out of hand” (p. 340.)
6. The 2008 presidential Democratic primaries were fraught with firsts. “The Obama-Clinton race was historic for reasons of both race and gender, but, while Obama was able to adopt the language, cadences, imagery, and memories of the civil-rights movement and graft it onto his campaign, giving it the sense of something larger, a movement, Clinton never did the same with the struggle for women’s rights” (p. 493).
7. This is probably overkill but, nevertheless, I must mention it: Barack Obama is the first African-American president of the United States.
8. Obama is the first president to place, not only three women on the Supreme Court, also a Hispanic-American. “Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court” (p. 582).
9. I think this is pretty neat: Obama presided over the U.N. Security Council on September 24, 2009.
Overall, I really enjoyed this work on Barack Obama. Not that I’ve read any others, mind you, but I’ll say this: Remnick knows detail. Details about Obama, that is. And trust me, these details are quite fascinating. For instance, I really enjoyed the convoluted saga of Obama’s ancestral history, not only from the Kenyan perspective, but also through the focus on Kansas. Also, Remnick begins the book with a hefty prologue, detailing civil rights history, which I also found completely absorbing. Don’t laugh! I’m currently reading The Help so it all started to make sense.
Probably my favorite part of the book was the peek into Chicago politics. Politics in Chicago, while seemingly anachronistic, is also very people-oriented and I find that enchanting. It’s unlike anywhere else in our country and partly for that reason, this oddity blew my mind.
On the whole, I thought that Remnick was very conscientious about showing us the good and bad sides of Obama. If I had to say what I disliked about the book (other than the entire last chapter focusing on race), I would have to say that it’s also the extreme amount of detail in this book. Normally when I read 600 page biographies, they usually encompass the whole life of the president, including all the presidential stuff. Considering the fact that Obama is a sitting president, this obviously had to end early but still…600 pages!?! Sheesh.
I also have to admit that, after reading his bio, I really grew to like Obama, as a person. After reading about his family’s incredible history and then about growing up in the racially-charged atmosphere of the 60s and 70s, I experienced a strange empathy for our president. Surely, no other history of a president was quite like this one. Obama felt very real and while I don’t agree with all of his political ideas, I certainly feel connected to him on the human level.
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