CHAPTER I: OBAMA’S ROOTS IN POLYGAMY AND THE
FORD FOUNDATION
How can I refuse the best education? – Barack Hussein Obama SeniorFor many Americans, Barack Hussein Obama is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Never in recent American history has a candidate so little known approached the presidency. The
only recent comparison is offered by Jimmy Carter, and Carter — who had served as governor of
Georgia for four years — was an open book in comparison to Obama. After Carter had entered the
White House, voters were shocked to realize that they had elected a mystery man — they had
bought a pig in a poke. George W. Bush was another little-known candidate: he too talked about
being a uniter and not a divider, promised a foreign policy based on humility, and pledged to govern
in the spirit of compassionate conservatism. Here too, the reality turned out to be much different.
Back in 1991, I realized that even though George H. W. Bush had been occupying the White
House for a number of years, there was no critical and unauthorized biography of him. I therefore
set out to write such a critical biography, which still stands today as the only non-apologetic study
of his life. My present task is to offer readers a chance to get to know Obama before they make the
irrevocable decision to grant him state power in the midst of one of the most severe crises this
country has ever known.
As we have suggested elsewhere in this book, one way to parse the speeches and promises of
presidential candidates is to examine their advisers, handlers, and controllers, since many of these
will make their way into the cabinet and into the White House palace guard. Another important
method is to examine the candidate’s financial backers, and we will do so. A third approach is to
bear in mind the famous dictum that biography is destiny — meaning that the life experience of any
individual is bound to exert a profound influence on the way that person will tend to use the powers
of a public office. It is mainly this third approach which we will implement in this section, seeking
to assemble what is known about the life of Obama with a view to extracting clues about what kind
of a president he might be.
The guiding principle of the present treatment is that when a politician is seeking to get his hands
anywhere near the famous button which can be used to launch worldwide thermonuclear war, when
that politician is in effect demanding life-and-death power over American voters and their families,
then there are no limits to the public’s right to know anything and everything about all facets of that
politician’s life, without exclusions of any sort. For a presidential candidate, there is and can be no
private sphere. Everything is fair game. Researchers are not only allowed to delve into the
candidate’s background in every conceivable way — they are imperatively obligated to do so.
BARRY WHO?
Obama presents unprecedented difficulties for the presidential biographer. His clever handlers,
controllers, and managers seem to have understood very well that a candidate with a resume, a
voting record, and a history of past performance can very easily find that these things become
liabilities when they are scrutinized by the opposition research of political adversaries, or simply by
journalists in general. Any record at all is apt to become grist for the opponent’s attack machine.
Obama appears to have been advised by Senator Daschle that it is better not to stay in the Senate
very long before running for president, since every vote that a Senator makes can represent a policy