320 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographytransparent black identity much of his life. He needs to ‘be black.’ And this hunger—no matter how
understandable it may be—means that he is not in a position to reject the political liberalism
inherent in his racial identity. For Obama liberalism is blackness.”^171 But Steele has failed to
historicize the “black identity” he is talking about. Obama’s version of the black identity is the post-
1965 black identity as it has been manufactured by foundation-funded intellectuals and social
movements under the reign of affirmative action and multiculturalism, which have failed to solve
the problems of the black inner-city ghetto. The reason this synthetic black identity is so destructive
and consumes so much of the self is that it has been designed to be self-destructive and self-
defeating by the foundation mind-benders. The contradictions related to the foundation-funded
black identity continue to explode into public view around the demonic figure of Reverend Wright:
‘...nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama’s political aspirations than the revelation that
he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday — for 20 years — in an Afrocentric, black
nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel
comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and
Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage (“God damn America”). How does one “transcend” race
in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American
black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no
place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two
daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol? What
could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn’t thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need
to “be black” despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred
seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn’t this hatred more
rhetorical than real? But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually
hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as
a way of bonding and of asserting one’s blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America’s
television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real
hatred. No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to
make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining),
and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity....’ (Shelby Steele,
“The Obama Bargain,’ Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2008) In early July, Jesse Jackson noted
correctly that Obama was talking more and more about personal responsibility for the black family
and the black community, and less and less about the need for government intervention to fight
poverty and exclusion. Jackson was right to say that this amounted to talking down to the black
community. The answer, however, was that the entire foundation race-based divide-and-conquer
approach had to be junked, and replaced with class-based, color-blind New Deal programs for jobs,
housing, education and health care that attacked poverty as an empirically measurable phenomenon
among all groups in the US population, rather than attempting to deal with accumulated grievances,
where the black overclass would always demand the lion’s share of the available benefits. To tell
people of any color that they have to use self-reliance and family values in the midst of a world
economic depression caused by Wall Streets $1 quadrillion derivatives bubble, with dollar
hyperinflation, banking panic, systemic breakdown, the death agony of the US dollar as a reserve
currency, and chain-reaction bankruptcies ripping through the landscape – that is sheer genocidal
madness. It was time for New Deal measures for economic recovery and the general welfare, and
those were necessarily color-blind measures to help the poor of all races, creeds, and national
origins. This was the very outcome that Obama had been deployed by the Trilateral financiers to
prevent, so Jesse Jackson was on to something.