Steve Sailer on Obama

I've not blogged much about Obama/McCain - mainly because I didn't know much about Obama and what I knew about McCain I wasn't too keen on.

I see a nice-looking chap, good talker, comes over well in the Blair/Cameron style. I don't see much, if anything, in the way of policy. He was against the Iraq war, but that's the past. He accepts that the surge has been a success. I don't think it'll be a disaster for America if he wins, although I'm prepared to be proved wrong. I'm somewhat uneasy that he seems to have a hung out a good deal with people who hate their country - in fact is married to one. But the responsibilities of office have a way of concentrating the mind. With John McCain, you know what you'll get - strong policy abroad coupled with mass immigration at home. Obama's more of a cypher.

Like the BBC and all good lefties, I expect race and racism to play a large part in the election. It's just that I see the racism as mostly coming from white liberals. For black voters, look at the latest figures :

"White" voters (I don't know where Hispanics end up) 44% Obama, 44% McCain
"Black" voters 91% Obama, 1% McCain.

Bush got 8% of the black vote in 2000. Admittedly you'd expect Republican ratings to fall among black voters as they have among whites. But a fall from 8 to 1 ? Hmm.

I digress. And I know nowt about Obama.

The good news is that Steve Sailer, an American writer who treads those dangerous boards where race, culture, economics and genetics meet (he's been described as "a leading promoter of racist pseudoscience" by a "progressive media watchdog group", FWTW - I wrote of him "IQ, genetics, racial differences, racial preferences (i.e. things that would be called racist if a white person did them), all sorts of things you're not supposed to talk about. But no swivel-eyed loon he."), has written a book about him. Well, it's (from what I've read - I'm on page 79 out of 265) half biography, half book review/exegesis of Obama's 1995 book Dreams From My Father : A Story of Race and Inheritance.

And it's unputdownable - or as uputdownable as a pdf can be.

You can download it here. The host site (VDARE.com) may not be work-friendly, given that a/c/t Wikipedia the site has been described as a 'hate site'.

But I've linked to a couple of Sailer pieces before. No hater he - a well-read chap with a neat sense of humour and an interest in other cultures. I don't agree with everything he writes, but he's worth reading. And this is riveting stuff.

I'll precis the beast as much as a man can who's only read a quarter of it. Obamas USP to people who take politics seriously is/was that he transcended race. I remember reading - and agreeing with - a sober post at Booker Rising a year or two back, to the effect that at last we had a black politician whose skin colour wasn't the most important thing about him. That he could be a politician just like any other was the victory. Alas for premature hopes !

Because that's not what Obama thinks. To him, personally, his race is exceedingly important - hence the subtitle of the book.

Remarkably, much of Obama’s campaign image—the transcender of race, the redeemed Christian, the bipartisan moderate, etc.—is debunked in Obama’s own 1995 memoir. Obama’s potential Achilles heel has always been that he has
such a gift for self-expression combined with so much introspective self-absorption that he can't help revealing himself to the few who invest the effort to read carefully his polished and subtle (but fussy and enervating) prose.

I won't go on, except to say that Obama's mother comes across as a very modern type, reminding me of one or two girls I knew at university - white, bright middle-class girl for whom blackness is somehow more authentic - more real - than anything else around her. In her son's words :

I felt as if I were being given a window into her heart, the unreflective heart of her youth. I suddenly realized that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing
on the screen, the reverse image of Conrad‘s dark savages, was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the
promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different.

Her son's politics seem to be far more a product of her teaching than anything from Obama's absent father. But enough of this posting already. I need to get back to the book. Read. Enjoy.