Carlos Lozada packs a punch. He’s the most important book critic of our time and he’s neither left nor right.<\/p>\n
Washington Post<\/a>:<\/p>\n Garrow portrays Obama as a man who ruthlessly compartmentalized his existence; who believed early on that he was fated for greatness; and who made emotional sacrifices in the pursuit of a goal that must have seemed unlikely to everyone but him. Every step \u2014 whether his foray into community organizing, Harvard Law School, even the choice of whom to love \u2014 was not just about living a life but about fulfilling a destiny.<\/p>\n It is in the personal realm that Garrow\u2019s account is particularly revealing. He shares for the first time the story of a woman Obama lived with and loved in Chicago, in the years before he met Michelle, and whom he asked to marry him. Sheila Miyoshi Jager, now a professor at Oberlin College, is a recurring presence in \u201cRising Star,\u201d and her pained, drawn-out relationship with Obama informs both his will to rise in politics and the trade-offs he deems necessary to do so. Garrow, who received a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Martin Luther King Jr., concludes this massive new work with a damning verdict on Obama\u2019s determination: \u201cWhile the crucible of self-creation had produced an ironclad will, the vessel was hollow at its core.\u201d<\/p>\n …Jager, who in \u201cDreams From My Father\u201d was virtually written out, compressed into a single character along with two prior Obama girlfriends, may have evoked something of Obama\u2019s distant mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. Like Dunham, Jager studied anthropology, and while Dunham focused on Indonesia, Jager developed a deep expertise in the Korean Peninsula. Jager was of Dutch and Japanese ancestry, fitting the multicultural world Obama was only starting to leave behind. They were a natural fit. Jager soon came to realize, she told Garrow, that Obama had \u201ca deep-seated need to be loved and admired.\u201d<\/p>\n She describes their life together as an isolating experience, \u201can island unto ourselves\u201d in which Obama would \u201ccompartmentalize his work and home life.\u201d She did not meet Jeremiah Wright, the pastor with a growing influence on Obama, and they rarely saw his professional colleagues socially. The friends they saw were often graduate students at the University of Chicago, where Sheila was pursuing her doctorate. They traveled together to meet her family as well as his. Soon they began speaking of marriage.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the winter of \u201886, when we visited my parents, he asked me to marry him,\u201d she told Garrow. Her parents were opposed, less for any racial reasons (Barack came across to them like \u201ca white, middle-class kid,\u201d a close family friend said) than for concern about Obama\u2019s professional prospects, and because her mother thought Sheila, two years Obama\u2019s junior, was too young. \u201cNot yet,\u201d Sheila told Barack. But they stayed together.<\/p>\n In early 1987, when Obama was 25, she sensed a change. \u201cHe became. . . so very ambitious\u201d very suddenly,\u201d she told Garrow. \u201cI remember very clearly when this transformation happened, and I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into our relationship, he already had his sights on becoming president.\u201d<\/p>\n The sense of destiny is not unusual among those who become president. (See Clinton, Bill.) But it created complications. Obama believed that he had a \u201ccalling,\u201d Garrow writes, and in his case it was \u201ccoupled with a heightened awareness that to pursue it he had to fully identify as African American.\u201d<\/p>\n Maraniss\u2019s 2012 biography deftly describes Obama\u2019s conscious evolution from a multicultural, internationalist self-perception toward a distinctly African American one, and Garrow puts this transition into an explicitly political context. For black politicians in Chicago, he writes, a non-African-American spouse could be a liability. He cites the example of Richard H. Newhouse Jr., a legendary African American state senator in Illinois, who was married to a white woman and endured whispers that he \u201ctalks black but sleeps white.\u201d And Carol Moseley Braun, who during the 1990s served Illinois as the first female African American U.S. senator and whose ex-husband was white, admitted that \u201can interracial marriage really restricts your political options.\u201d<\/p>\n Discussions of race and politics suddenly overwhelmed Sheila and Barack\u2019s relationship. \u201cThe marriage discussions dragged on and on,\u201d but now they were clouded by Obama\u2019s \u201ctorment over this central issue of his life . . . race and identity,\u201d Sheila recalls. The \u201cresolution of his black identity was directly linked to his decision to pursue a political career,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n In Garrow\u2019s telling, Obama made emotional judgments on political grounds. A close mutual friend of the couple recalls Obama explaining that \u201cthe lines are very clearly drawn. .\u2009.\u2009. If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.\u201d And friends remember an awkward gathering at a summer house, where Obama and Jager engaged in a loud, messy fight on the subject for an entire afternoon. (\u201cThat\u2019s wrong! That\u2019s wrong! That\u2019s not a reason,\u201d they heard Sheila yell from their guest room, their arguments punctuated by bouts of makeup sex.) Obama cared for her, Garrow writes, \u201cyet he felt trapped between the woman he loved and the destiny he knew was his.\u201d<\/p>\n Just days before he would depart for Harvard Law School \u2014 and when the relationship was already coming apart \u2014 Obama asked her to come with him and get married, \u201cmostly, I think, out of a sense of desperation over our eventual parting and not in any real faith in our future,\u201d Sheila explained to Garrow. At the time, she was heading to Seoul for dissertation research, and she resented his assumption she would automatically postpone her career for his. More arguments ensued, and each went their way, although not for good…<\/p>\n Obama had met Michelle Robinson at the Chicago law firm where she worked \u2014 and where he was a summer associate \u2014 after his first year of law school, and the couple quickly became serious. However, Jager, who soon arrived at Harvard on a teaching fellowship, was not entirely out of his life.<\/p>\n \u201cBarack and Sheila had continued to see each other irregularly throughout the 1990-91 academic year, notwithstanding the deepening of Barack\u2019s relationship with Michelle Robinson,\u201d Garrow writes. (\u201cI always felt bad about it,\u201d Sheila told the author more than two decades later. Once Barack and Michelle were married, his personal ties to Sheila was reduced to the occasional letter (such as after the 9\/11 attacks) and phone call (when he reached out to ask whether a biographer had contacted her).<\/p>\n If Garrow is correct in concluding that Obama\u2019s romantic choices were influenced by his political ambitions, it is no small irony that Michelle Obama became one of those most skeptical about Obama\u2019s political prospects, and most dubious about his will to rise. She constantly discourages his efforts toward elective office and resents the time he spends away from her and their two young daughters. Obama vented to a friend how often Michelle would talk about money. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you go out and get a good job? You\u2019re a lawyer \u2014 you can make all the money we need,\u201d she would tell him, as the couple struggled with student loans and the demands of family and political life. (Garrow sides with Michelle, highlighting how, on the day after Sasha was born, Barack went downtown for a meeting.)<\/p>\n …And he goes deliciously small-bore, too, delving into the culture of the Illinois statehouse, where poker was intense and infidelity was rampant. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of people who f\u2014ed in Springfield,\u201d a female lobbyist tells Garrow. \u201cWhat else is there to do?\u201d Obama, however, did not. \u201cMichelle would kick my butt,\u201d he told a colleague there. At times Garrow delivers information simply because he has it; I did not need a detailed readout of all of Obama\u2019s course evaluations from his years teaching at the University of Chicago\u2019s law school. (Turns out his students liked him.)<\/p>\n The book\u2019s title seems chosen with a sense of irony. Garrow shows how media organizations invariably described Obama as a \u201crising star,\u201d in almost self-fulfilling fashion. Yet, after nine years of research and reporting, Garrow does not appear too impressed by his subject, even if he recognizes Obama\u2019s historical importance.<\/p>\n The author is harsh but persuasive in his reading of \u201cDreams From My Father,\u201d for instance, calling it not a memoir but a work of \u201chistorical fiction,\u201d one in which the \u201cmost important composite character was the narrator himself.\u201d (Reviewers were impressed by it, but few who knew Obama well seemed to recognize the man in its pages.) He points out that Obama\u2019s cocaine use extended into his post-college years, longer than Obama had previously acknowledged. And he suggests Obama deployed religion for political purposes; while campaigning for the U.S. Senate, Garrow notes, Obama began toting around a Bible and exhibited \u201ca greater religious faith than close acquaintances had ever previously sensed.\u201d<\/p>\n Throughout the book, Obama displays an almost petulant dissatisfaction with each step he took to reach the Oval Office. Community organizing is not ambitious enough, he decides, so he goes to law school. But then he moves into politics because \u201cI saw the law as being inadequate to the task \u201cof achieving social change,\u201d Obama explains. In Springfield, he is again disillusioned by \u201cthe realization that politics is a business . . . an activity that\u2019s designed to advance one\u2019s career, accumulate resources and help one\u2019s friends,\u201d as \u201copposed to a mission.\u201dAnd upon reaching the U.S. Senate, he tells National Journal that he is \u201csurprised by the lack of deliberation in the world\u2019s greatest deliberative body.\u201d Nothing measures up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n