II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 61purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community
organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and
barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks. Luckily, an angel calls, awakens
his conscience, and helps him choose instead to fight for the people. I’m disappointed. Barack’s
story may be true, but many of the facts are not. His larger narrative purpose requires him to
embellish his role. I don’t buy it. Just as I can’t be inspired by Steve Jobs now that I know how
dishonest he is, I can’t listen uncritically to Barack Obama now that I know he’s willing to bend the
facts to his purpose.” Dan Armstrong, “Barack Obama Embellishes His Resume,”
http://analyzethis.net/blog/index.php
Here appears an aspect of Obama’s life which has since become notorious – the identification of
his undistinguished self with Jesus Christ, the Messiah and Son of God. If Armstrong is right about
this parable of the temptations, Obama really does believe that he is the Savior, and has thought this
for almost fifteen years at minimum. Some choose to mimic Christ, some choose to mimic
Napoleon, but the common denominator is megalomania, the most succinct summary of Obama’s
mentality – and, ironically, one that puts him in the same psychopathological class with his apparent
polar opposite, George W. Bush, who is also a megalomaniac, as Dr. Justin Frank has pointed out.
There was another dangerous temptation lurking in Obama’s life. Obama had expressed his
scorn for those he called “half-breeds” who preferred white people to blacks. After college, he lived
with a white woman, but then decided to push her away when he realized that he would have to
assimilate into her (“white”) world, and not vice versa. He later married Michelle, the upwardly
mobile black woman lawyer. Obama’s choices were based on very solid political reasoning: if he
had come forward to run for the presidency with a white woman for his consort, he would have
been politically doomed by the resentment of black women, many of whom would have interpreted
this choice as a confirmation of racial stereotypes held by black males against them, stereotypes
concretely expressed in preference for white women. A white wife would have been political
suicide. When the Greenwich Village poetaster LeRoi Jones wanted to become the black nationalist
organizer Amiri Baraka, it was imperative that he jettison his white wife, who would have been a
fatal impediment for his planned activity in the service of the Prudential Insurance Company –
provoking clashes with poor Italians in the streets of Newark, New Jersey as part of a
counterinsurgency scheme.
NADERITE PUBLIC INTEREST RESEARCH GROUP, NEW YORK CITY
After BIC, Obama moved on for a stint at Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Group in New
York City, a nonprofit group which billed itself as promoting “consumer, environmental and
government reform.” According to Janny Scott, Obama “became a full-time organizer at City
College in Harlem, paid slightly less than $10,000 a year to mobilize student volunteers.” Nader’s
groups attempt to carry out feasible reforms in the areas of health, safety, and consumer issues, all
under the banner of “good government” – the eternal slogan of reform Democrats and upscale
suburbanites who are horrified by the venality of politics among poor people and the underclass.
Obama’s specific assignment was the one he has tried and failed to carry out in 2008: to take
projects that were designed to appeal to affluent suburbanites and sell them to people much lower
on the socioeconomic scale. His job was an exercise in condescending Malthusian elitism: ‘Mr.
Obama says he spent three months “trying to convince minority students at City College about the
importance of recycling” — a description that surprised some former colleagues. They said that
more “bread-and-butter issues” like mass transit, higher education, tuition and financial aid were