https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2017/05/02/before-michelle-barack-obama-asked-another-woman-to-marry-him-then-politics-got-in-the-way/
There's a new book about President Obama's life, entitled: "Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama", by by David J. Garrow. In it, Garrow details how President Obama had FIRST proposed marriage to a white woman (white and Japanese). Then, he started getting the idea that he needed a black wife, if he was going to accomplish his goals, in politics (mayor of Chicago, possibly governor, senator, and definitely president, as he felt it was his destiny).
The Washington Post wrote:
He tells us how Obama lived, and explores the calculations he made in the decades leading up to his winning the presidency. 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 — whether his foray into community organizing, Harvard Law School, even his choice of whom to love — was not just about living a life but about fulfilling a destiny.
It is in the personal realm that Garrow’s 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.
...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.
...
She describes their time together as an isolating experience, “an island unto ourselves” in which Obama would “compartmentalize his work and home life.” 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 Jager was pursuing her doctorate. They traveled together to meet her family as well as his. Soon they began speaking of marriage.
...
In early 1987, when Obama was 25, she sensed a change. “He became. . . so very ambitious” very suddenly, she told Garrow. “I 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.”
...
Obama believed that he had a “calling,” Garrow writes, and in his case it was “coupled with a heightened awareness that to pursue it he had to fully identify as African American.”
Maraniss’s 2012 biography deftly describes Obama’s 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.
...
This publishing has brought-about alot of conversation----not only because it surprises some people that President Obama had proposed to someone BEFORE Mrs. Obama----but, also, as I'm sure you can imagine, it surprises some people (and angers, some), because the woman was white.
I'm thinking that most, here, will say it would NOT have mattered----which, quite frankly, was my OWN first thought; BUT, then I thought a little more.....
When I first heard-of this book, I thought: "Nah----no, way" (meaning, that it wouldn't've mattered if his wife would have been white)----BUT, then I got to thinking about the Fundies, and I'm thinking it MIGHT have mattered, to THEM. Then, when I thought about it, some more, I recalled the theory that I've had, about that it's quite possible that the way President Obama got elected, was because enough people thought: "NO WAY, would anybody with a brain, vote for him", and didn't go-out to vote; so, now I'm not so adamant, either way.
Also, the article (which is VERY long) talks about two senators who had a bit of a rough time, because of their inter-racial marriages (both, white/black).
My question to YOU, is: Do you think it could have, POSSIBLY, changed the outcome of the 2008 election, if then-Senator Barack Obama would have been married to a white woman?
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White female; age 59; diagnosed Aspie.
I use caps for emphasis----I'm NOT angry or shouting. I use caps like others use italics, underline, or bold.
"What we know is a drop; what we don't know, is an ocean." (Sir Isaac Newton)
04 May 2017, 5:04 pm
