Indeed, this entire book suffers from a poor sense of proportion. Garrow adds nothing to our understanding of Obama’s intellectual evolution during his years at Columbia, or the role that the civil rights movement played in shaping his political consciousness and ideals. (Curious, given that Garrow, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his book on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Bearing the Cross.”) And yet Garrow prattles on for pages about legislation Obama worked on in the Illinois State Senate, and about discussions in law school classes he attended or taught. The entire first chapter of the book is devoted to examining the social and political landscape of Chicago’s South Side in the early 1980s before Obama arrived to work there, but Obama’s 2008 campaign and two terms in the White House are compressed into a 50-odd-page epilogue.
Instead, Garrow’s epilogue delivers a crude screed against Obama the president and Obama the man, filled with bald assertions and coy half-truths. He suggests that Obama’s presidency was a long string of failures and disappointments and that “behind the scenes, many Democrats were just as eager for Barack to exit the White House as he himself now seemed,” when, in fact, he left office as one of the most popular presidents in recent decades.
Garrow takes Obama to task for his lack of “bipartisan outreach” with Republican members of Congress, but doesn’t tell the other side of the story — namely, the Republicans’ deliberate strategy of obstructionism throughout Obama’s tenure in office. (The Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously declared, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”) And, as the chapter title indicates, Garrow even mocks Obama, repeatedly, for spending too much time on the golf course. (What, one wonders, would he make of Donald J. Trump?)
Then there is the innuendo. Garrow portentously cites a poll indicating that 64 percent of Republicans and 42 percent of whites agreed that it was “probably true” that Obama was “hiding important information about his background and early life.” This could be a reference to the birther movement, or perhaps to the bitter musings of Sheila Miyoshi Jager, the former girlfriend Obama had met in Chicago - who remained upset for years over their breakup, and whom Garrow has turned into one of his main sources. Jager is quoted as saying that “something changed” in Obama “after we went our separate ways after Harvard, as if the part of him that was so vulnerable and open (and sensual?) went underground and something else - raging ambition, quest for greatness, whatever just took over instead.”
Garrow takes Obama to task for his lack of “bipartisan outreach” with Republican members of Congress, but doesn’t tell the other side of the story — namely, the Republicans’ deliberate strategy of obstructionism throughout Obama’s tenure in office. (The Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously declared, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”) And, as the chapter title indicates, Garrow even mocks Obama, repeatedly, for spending too much time on the golf course. (What, one wonders, would he make of Donald J. Trump?)
Then there is the innuendo. Garrow portentously cites a poll indicating that 64 percent of Republicans and 42 percent of whites agreed that it was “probably true” that Obama was “hiding important information about his background and early life.” This could be a reference to the birther movement, or perhaps to the bitter musings of Sheila Miyoshi Jager, the former girlfriend Obama had met in Chicago - who remained upset for years over their breakup, and whom Garrow has turned into one of his main sources. Jager is quoted as saying that “something changed” in Obama “after we went our separate ways after Harvard, as if the part of him that was so vulnerable and open (and sensual?) went underground and something else - raging ambition, quest for greatness, whatever just took over instead.”
Perhaps Garrow leans so heavily on Jager because she is a source mentioned only in passing (and not by name) in David Maraniss’s “Barack Obama: The Story” (2012). It’s telling, after all, that Garrow mischaracterizes the reception that both Maraniss’s biography and David Remnick’s incisive book “The Bridge” received, suggesting that both volumes failed to get the accolades they did, in fact, receive.
The reader interested in Barack Obama’s life would do well to turn to those books, and not Garrow’s overstuffed and ultimately unfair work here. Or, go back to Obama’s own eloquent memoir.
The reader interested in Barack Obama’s life would do well to turn to those books, and not Garrow’s overstuffed and ultimately unfair work here. Or, go back to Obama’s own eloquent memoir.
Meet Sheila Miyoshi Jager: Nothing like a woman scorned. Ah, cudda been First Lady.
Washington Post Review.
