Oct 02 2008
UK Ambassador’s Leaked Letter on Barack Obama
UK Telegraph has the text of a leaked letter from the British ambassador to the United States to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. I have no idea of the source of the leak, but it provides an excellent and dispassionate analysis of Obama, his background (both political and personal) and his policies. This is a cogent, meat-and-potatoes view of an inexperienced guy trying to become president.
Here’s the text; the bulk of it is after the jump, or you can go to the original here. My undergrad was in Political Science/International Affairs, so I’m always fascinated by one nation’s perceptions of another nation’s political processes.
This letter contains sensitive judgements. Please limit copying, and protect the contents carefully.
1. Ahead of Senator Obama’s visit to London next week, I thought it would be useful to give you a snapshot of his personality, politics and emerging policies.
Background and Personality
2. The key themes which are important in understanding Obama’s political makeup are the following:
- His struggle to understand his racial identity. His first book “Dreams from My Father” (1995) traces this struggle through Hawaii, New York, Chicago and Kenya. Raised by his white Kansas-born mother and her parents after his Kenyan father left, Obama made a conscious decision in the 1980s to choose his African-American identity – he worked as a community organiser in the poorest areas of Chicago, and went on to travel to Kenya to learn about his father. His decision after Harvard Law School to settle back in Chicago led to growing integration into the city’s black middle class culture and provided him with the political laboratory from which his career was launched;
- His personal makeup drives his view of politics. Obama talks of wanting to reach out to all Americans (“no red states or blue states, only the United States”). “I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible. It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story which has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many we are truly one.” The race issue is present in the campaign – the debate continues to rage over how much. Obama wanted to avoid it as much as possible until the Reverend Wright videos forced him to make his elegant speech on race in March and then, when this was clearly not enough for the latest Wright outburst, to disown him completely and leave his church;
- Star quality. Obama has always had it, at least since his arrival at Harvard. A friend in the progressive Chicago establishment said, “I honestly don’t remember what it was about him, but I was absolutely blown away. I said to several people that this guy, who is now 30 years old, is some day going to be President. He will be our first black President”. That was in the 1990s. His rise has been meteoric. He first came to the notice of the national political establishment when he won the Illinois Democratic primary for the US Senate in early 2004. But it was his mesmerising speech to the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston which propelled him to stardom, at a low point for his party. He is the only black member of the Senate. He is already the most successful black elected politician in American history, to the discomfort of Jesse Jackson and others;
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