Book Review: The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

Published on Friday 14 May 2010 19:10

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama By David Remnick Picador, 672pp, £20

IN 2004, an Illinois congresswoman attended a White House event wearing the campaign pin of her state's candidate for the United States Senate. When she saw President George W Bush do a double-take at the one word on her pin, she assured him that it said "Obama" not "Osama". Bush shrugged: "I don't know him." She answered, "You will." Not long after this, Barack Obama gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, and many people suddenly knew him. He seemed to come out of nowhere. The truth was more intriguing – he had come out of everywhere.

His multiple points of origin made him adaptable to any situation. What could have been a source of confusion or uncertain identity he turned into an overwhelming advantage. As he said in 2000: "My experience being able to walk into a public-housing development and turn around and walk into a corporate boardroom and communicate effectively in either venue means that I'm more likely to be able to build the kinds of coalitions and craft the sort of message that appeals to a broad range of people."

David Remnick, in this exhaustively researched life of Obama before he became president, quotes many interviews in which Obama made similar points. Accused of not being black enough, he could show he has more direct ties to Africa than most African-Americans have. Suspected of not being American enough, he appealed to his mother's Midwest origins and accent. Touring conservative little towns in southern Illinois, he could speak the language of the Kansan grandparents who raised him. While a bit of a shape-shifter, he does not come across as insincere – thanks to his famous "cool". He does not have the hot eagerness of the conman. Though his own background is out of the ordinary, he has the skill to submerge it in other people's narratives, even those that seem distant from his own.

Remnick opens with a set-piece on the 2007 commemorations of the 1965 Selma march. Obama had just begun his presidential campaign, and went to Selma to claim its civil rights legacy as his own. At the time, Hillary Clinton was ahead of him in support among blacks by three to one. The Clintons had a long and excellent record with African-Americans. Obama was three and living in Hawaii during the civil rights turmoil of the 1960s.

In his first race for Congress, against the former Black Panther Bobby Rush, Obama was branded "not black enough". He was not the descendant of American slaves. He had not participated in the civil rights struggle. He was not a militant activist. Nonetheless, Obama spoke at Brown Chapel in 2007, the launch site of the Selma march. Hillary Clinton was slow to make arrangements and had to settle for the less iconic First Baptist Church. She spoke well enough. Remnick is unfair to her, saying she dropped her Gs and gave a northern Illinois version of Southspeak, "channelling her inner Blanche DuBois". In fact, she is a natural mimic who "does the voices" when she tells a story – I have heard her become a Southern judge and a black woman preacher when describing one of her law cases. Obama has the same gift. In the audio version of Dreams From My Father he speaks, in turn, like his Kenyan relatives, his Kansas relatives and the street kids he met in New York.

The difference between the two speeches that day in Selma lay less in delivery than in Obama's way of making the events of his life story meld with those of his audience. He was laying claim to the black struggle as his own. He said: "My grandfather was a cook to the British in Kenya. Grew up in a small village and all his life, that's all he was – a cook and a houseboy. And that's what they called him, even when he was 60 years old. They called him a houseboy. They wouldn't call him by his last name. Call him by his first name. Sound familiar?" Actually, Remnick shows Obama's grandfather was a village elder and property owner, who left his town for Nairobi to cook for colonials, and then travelled with British troops to Burma, bringing back western clothes and ways.

In Selma, Obama claimed that his father was the beneficiary of the civil rights movement because it made the American government bring Kenyans, including his father, to the US: "So the Kennedys decided we're going to do an airlift. We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country." Remnick proves the airlift was an idea for the improvement of Kenya, conceived and implemented by Kenyan leader Tom Mboya, who came to America and raised funds from private sources, including Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. It was only after Obama's father had flown in the first airlift that John Kennedy contributed, also from private (not government) funds.

Obama, claiming to be the indirect beneficiary of the march at Selma, paid tribute to the heroes of that generation's marchers. Having manoeuvred himself into solidarity with the veterans, Obama was praised that day by the Rev Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for "baring his soul". Hillary Clinton had been nudged to the sidelines. The erosion of her black support had begun.

Obama is such a good storyteller that his biographer might well be intimidated by the thought of competing with his own version of his life. But Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, has many important additions and corrections to make to our reading of Dreams From My Father. Obama makes his mother sound naive and rather simple in his book. Remnick shows she was a smart and sophisticated scholar. Though Obama becomes disillusioned by the end of his book with his hard-drinking and bitter father, Remnick shows another of Barack Sr's sons has even darker tales to tell of him – how this African son, Mark, gave up his father's name out of memories of the way his mother screamed as her husband beat her.

Remnick rightly sees Dreams From My Father as a bildungsroman in the specifically black form of a "slave narrative", a story of the rise from dependency to mature self-possession. In order to place himself in that tradition, Obama darkens the early part of the story and lightens the concluding sections. He trims the facts to fit the genre, just as he trimmed the events in his Selma speech to fit the black sermon format. Obama was not literally a slave in his youth, but he was in thrall to false images of his father, fostered by his mother's protective loyalty to her husband. Since Obama comes to a later recognition of his father's flaws, the story is crafted to show him shedding false idealism to become a pragmatic realist. The narrative protects him from claims that he is an ideologue or peddler of false hopes. The art with which the book is constructed to serve his deepest personal needs shows how ludicrous are claims from some of the crazier Republicans that he did not write it.

Remnick presents Obama as a perpetual outsider who wins acceptance in whatever new company he joins – in Hawaii, at Occidental College, then Columbia, then Harvard, in Chicago streets and churches, at the University of Chicago Law School, in the Illinois legislature, in the US Senate. To do this, he had to allay the natural suspicions of any newcomer. Remnick sees how this was accomplished: "Conciliation was his default mode, the dominant strain of his political personality."

In interview after interview, people's initial reaction to him is that he is always winning, always disarming – "cool", intelligent and charming. A perfect example is the way he won election as the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review. With voting editors heatedly divided between left and right, he positioned himself in the centre and won support from conservative editors along with liberals. Once in the editor's office, he banned a more militant black ally of his from the masthead to preserve peace on The Review.

For all Obama's skills at ingratiation, Remnick grants that luck played a great role in his rise. He was never in a closely contested election until the presidential race of 2008, and the charges brought against him in that one were mainly trumped up. Liberals urged Obama, who was too lawyerly in the campaign debates, to get more feisty. Not only was that against his conciliatory character, but it would have backfired dangerously. He knew the one thing he could not become was an angry black man. He had to be more restrained than anyone else in the race.

Obama's strategy before entering the White House was one of placation. It had always worked. Why should he abandon, at this point, a method of such proven effectiveness? Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril. To calm fears of change (the first African-American presidency is, in itself, a big jolt), Obama has stressed continuity. Though he first became known as a critic of the Iraq war, he has kept aspects of Bush's war on terror – possible future "renditions" (kidnappings on foreign soil), trials of suspected terrorists in military tribunals, no investigations of torture, an expanded Afghan commitment, though he promised to avoid "a dumb war". He appointed as vice president and secretary of state people who voted for war, and as secretary of defence and presiding generals, people who conducted or defended it.

To cope with the financial crisis, he turned to Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Ben Bernanke, the very people who were involved in fomenting it. To reform medical care, he huddled with the American Medical Association, big pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms, and announced his effort had their backing. All these things speak to Obama's concern with continuity and placation. But continuity easily turns into inertia, and Obama may have believed that his election could of itself usher in a post-racial, post-partisan, post-"red-state and blue-state" era. That is a change no-one should ever have believed in. The price of being a winner can be losing; and that, in this scary time, is enough to break the heart of hope.