By Steve Sailer
11/30/2008
I’m happy to announce that you can now buy a hard-copy version of my new book, America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s "Story of Race and Inheritance", which as been available as a free pdf download since last month. This 282-page paperback is my first book and also the first book published by the VDARE Foundation. It can be ordered for $29.95 by clicking here and makes an excellent Christmas gift — just be sure to have it shipped via a fast enough method to arrive by Christmas Eve!
By John Derbyshire kindly writes of America’s Half-Blood Prince:
"Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very different — and much more interesting — than the bland healer/uniter image stitched together out of whole cloth this past six years by Obama’s packager, David Axelrod. Making heavy use of Obama’s own writings, which he admires for their literary artistry, Sailer gives the deepest insights I have yet seen into Obama’s lifelong obsession with 'race and inheritance,' and rounds off this brilliant character portrait with speculations on how Obama’s personality might play out in the Presidency."
My book serves as a reader’s guide to the President-Elect’s elusive but ultimately revealing autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Although there has been a vast effusion of verbiage about Barack Obama (Google lists 117 million webpages), there has been little serious analysis of what the next President has written about himself.
That’s more than a little strange because Dreams from My Father has sold millions of copies, and will likely sell tens of millions more in future decades as it inevitably gets added to high school and college mandatory reading lists.
The seemingly puzzling lack of insightful attention paid to Obama’s 1995 book has a simple explanation: Obama, the MainStream Media, and, for that matter, John McCain (who, as I accurately predicted back in February, more or less threw the election by vetoing all ads having even the most tangential connection to race) haven’t wanted the public to understand the central obsessions of Obama’s memoir. You aren’t supposed to grasp what, actually, are the dreams from Obama’s father: to gain personal political power for himself in service to his race.
The fundamental message of Obama’s enormous tome about himself is that, despite his half-white nature and all non-black nurture, he is black enough to be a leader of the black race. The moral of the story is not at all complicated. It just hasn’t been understood for two reasons:
Peter Brimelow, editor of VDARE.COM, writes in my book’s Foreword:
"Barack Obama has been presenting himself since 2004as a 'half-blood prince,' an archetypal ambiguous figure in whom the various parts of a deeply-divided society can jointly invest their contradictory hopes. Such figures spring up regularly in conflicted polities. A classic example in my own experience: Pierre Trudeau, the son of a French-speaking father and English-speaking mother, who appeared to have pulled off the same trick in reconciling English and French Canada in 1968. But, in such situations, someone is going to be disappointed. In Canada, Trudeau turned out to be an epiphenomenon of French Canadian nationalist debate."
As with Trudeaumania in 1968, Obamamania in 2008 is dependent on nobody paying much attention to the politician’s past. (The 2006 biography by two Trudeau supporters, Young Trudeau: 1919-1944: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, revealed that to aid the Vichy puppet regime in France during WWII, the young Trudeau tried to organize a Fascist revolution to take
Quebec
America’s Half-Blood Prince offers a close critical analysis of the next President’s story of his own life. You'll recognize some of it from my VDARE.com articles and from my iSteve blog, but much is completely new and the rest is put into a coherent framework for the first time. My book provides a biography of Obama, with a fair amount of it in his own words.
Here’s an excerpt from the final chapter:
When asked what represented the greatest challenge for a statesman, British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan responded in his typically languid fashion, "Events, my dear boy, events."
"What kind of President would Barack Obama turn out to be?
"I don’t like to make predictions because I hate being wrong. It’s especially hard to be right about the future interplay of personalities and events. In 2000, another under-examined Presidential candidate, George W. Bush, was elected while promising what his chief foreign affairs advisor, Condoleezza Rice, called a more 'modest'foreign policy.
"Then, 9/11 happened.
"After becoming British Prime Minister in 1957, Harold Macmillan, whose adult life spanned the Great War, the Depression, WWII, and the Cold War, observed that governments are driven less by their own goals than by the sheer necessity of responding in some fashion to unforeseen events. As I write during the financial turmoil of mid-October 2008, 'events are in the saddle and they ride mankind,' to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Whether events would constrain or liberate Obama’s 'deepest commitments' is impossible to say at this point.
"A few likelihoods seem apparent, though. In Obama, ambition and caution are yoked. Becoming President is not his ultimate objective. Becoming a two-term President is. Republican Richard Nixon’s first Administration was one of the most liberal in American history. There were hints at the beginning of his second term, before Watergate washed every bit of policy coherence away, that Nixon, having safely won re-election, intended to move toward his innate conservatism. That analogy suggests that a second Obama administration might more truly reflect the real Obama.
"Also, the conflict-adverse Obama isn’t all that likely to go to the mat with the Senate if the Republicans keep at least the 41 Senate seats necessary to stage filibusters. …
"If elected, this 'blank screen' candidate would inevitably disappoint at least some of his enthusiasts. After all, they espouse profoundly contradictory hopes.
"Which ones will he disillusion?
"Rather than make a prediction, I prefer to take a more Heisenbergian approach. As Barack Obama Sr. no doubt could have pointed out, Marx said, 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.'
"The point of this book is to change a potential Obama Administration for the better by making the public a little less ignorant about Obama. For all his talk of 'audacity,' Obama is far more cautious than his brash father was. Fortunately, the son remains a work in progress. His opportunism makes him deterrable. The less gullible the American people are about who Obama truly is, the better chance we have of keeping him from trying to fulfill his 'deepest commitments.'
"More broadly, America has had it easy for decades, but the fat years are coming to an end. We aren’t so rich anymore that we can continue to get by with a conventional wisdom built on ignorance, lies, and spin.
"The widespread assumption that Obama must be our Half-Blood Prince, born and bred to resolve our racial disputes, is symptomatic of American elites' loosening grip on reality regarding anything dealing with 'diversity.' Recall how the media, both parties, academia, and Wall Street all pushed for 15 years for laxer mortgage lending standards for minorities … with catastrophic results.
"Why? Because everyone who was anyone had agreed that only evil people publicly display skepticism about diversity.
"Similarly, the American establishment has been so intellectually enfeebled by political correctness that for two years we've all been fed a steady diet of David Axelrod’s implausible campaign concoction starring the author of Dreams from My Father as the Great Race Transcender. All these months, our elites barely mentioned (or even noticed) the subtitle of the 'postracial' candidate’s autobiography: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
"It’s time for new elites."
To repeat: America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s "Story of Race and Inheritance", the paperback, can be ordered now for $29.95 from here. It makes an excellent Christmas gift. (Just be sure to have it shipped via a fast enough method to arrive by Christmas Eve.)
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