http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/stephaniegutmann/8870206/Does_Barack_Obama_hate_free_enterprise_/Stephanie Gutmann is a journalist based in New York. She has written for dozens of publications including Playboy and the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of two books: The Kinder, Gentler Military: How Political Correctness Affects Our Ability to Win Wars, and The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy. Does Barack Obama hate free enterprise?
By Stephanie Gutmann World Last updated: March 1st, 2009
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Was it “a mere swell in the sea of words… [or]..one of those utterances in search of which psychoanalysts and State department monitors of the Moscow and Belgrade press are willing to endure a lifetime of tedium: namely, the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta, the words in passing, that give the game away?”
(from The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe.)
I had one of those which-is-it moments this morning while listening to Larry Kudlow’s radio show. Kudlow, once a budget guy in the Reagan administration, had a huge head of steam up about what he calls President Obama’s “declaration of war on investors, entrepreneurs, small businesses, large corporations, and private-equity and venture-capital funds.” Maybe the declaration of war language is appropriate, one of Kudlow’s guests commented, because he’d just noticed that in the memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance President Obama dispatches his one and only job in the business world with a few sentences, one of which describing himself as being like “a spy dropped behind enemy lines.” Kudlow went ballistic.
I wondered if the guest had taken the line out of context, so I looked it up with amazon.com’s amazing “Search Inside This Book” function which allows you to search a few pages before and after a search term.
The sentence in question occurs a few pages into Chapter Seven: It is 1983. Obama is finishing college, preparing to go out into the world, and in love with the idea of community organizing. What is community organizing? Of course no one knew during the recent presidential campaign and Obama wasn’t sure either back then:
“There wasn’t much detail to the idea; I didn’t know anyone making a living that way. When classmates in college asked me just what it was that an organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly. Instead I’d pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House where Reagan and his minions were carrying out their dirty deeds…”Driven, he admits, mainly “by impulse” and hazy, romantic images of a Civil Rights movement he’d been born too late for, the young job-seeker writes to “every civil rights organization [he] could think of, to neighborhood councils and tenant rights groups.” When no one wrote back, he decides to take a “more conventional job.”
“Eventually, a consulting house to a multinational corporation agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office, and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe.”So there it is, the obiter dicta — or the blip.
Now, this is a memoir — and, I was surprised to find, a pretty well-written one at that. He is clearly writing about a younger self and plenty of his memories are tinged with irony. A good memoir is honest, especially about one’s grand mistakes and deluded ideas. I haven’t gotten to the end where, who knows, he may describe a period of being in love with Donald Trump or Warren Buffet.
So is this passage highly significant or not? I don’t know yet. But I do know that I’d throw it into my growing “Does the president hate free enterprise?” file.
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hhhmmmmm - why did 180, Hugo, and Lurker never post this?
