Obama's daddy problem

I do believe that if you go back and read my blogging from early this year about Barack Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the gist of my complaint was not my fear that Obama shared Wright's paranoid racist view of the world, but that Obama's need for a father figure, and one who could make him feel comfortable in his black skin, was so intense that he would choose to accomodate himself to the nasty views of a hustler. I don't suppose any of that matters now, but it came to mind again when reading David Samuels' long, probing psychological profile of Obama from The New Republic. And then there was this passage:

The character of Dr. Bledsoe [from Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man"] also shadows the figure of Jeremiah Wright, who tried his best to destroy his protege's political career by traveling to Washington and making racially incendiary remarks at the National Press Club just to show that his previous remarks had not been misreported by the press. The fact that Obama can't wrap his mind around the shabbiness of his chosen mentor comes through quite clearly in his soft-minded portrait of the preacher and his relationship with his flock. Contrary to the feverish claims of his right-wing critics, Obama's decades-long attachment to Wright doesn't seem to reveal the candidate's secret belief that the CIA sells crack and spreads AIDS in black communities. Rather, it shows the depths of the author's longing for a suitable father. Obama's susceptibility to an older man who peddles nonsense seems like the product of his need to assume a clear and definite personal identity that will serve as a bulwark against childhood feelings of abandonment and vulnerability--a constellation of traits that eerily seems to mirror the fatal cracks in the personality of our current president, whose own father was largely absent.

It is apparent that some of the fateful choices George W. Bush made were done out of his complicated relationship with his father. If George W. had not been so vulnerable in his sense of manhood, one wonders if he would have felt it necessary to adopt Dick Cheney as a surrogate father, or if he would have chosen his father's rival Donald Rumsfeld to run the Pentagon. One wonders what the nation and the world would have been spared.

I wonder who will fulfill the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wright role for President Obama. I wonder what kind of turmoil the nation will be put through because of the turmoil inside Obama's head. I would wonder even more about the turmoil we'd have to go through because of John McCain's inner psychodrama, if he were going to be the next president. Anyway, read the Samuels piece -- it's quite good.