A new book causes more conversation about just how racially divisive the former President has been.
by M.J. Randolph
Things got real when Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke read portions of Pulitzer-winning David J. Garrow’s new biography of President Barack Obama called Rising Star.
As I wrote last week, the book offers fascinating bits of information about the former President’s love life. The Washington Post reports that, “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 ‘Rising Star,’ 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.”
When Sheila Miyoshi Jager’s parents suggested the two love birds wait to mature a bit, Obama got an itch to go into politics. Suddenly, he broke off the relationship with Sheila. Garrow explains that “for black politicians in Chicago, he writes, a non-African-American spouse could be a liability.” In other words, it seems that Obama broke up with the woman because he didn’t feel he could be married to a white woman and still be a successful politician.
Sheriff Clarke, who is married to a Caucasian woman, took umbrage at this. “See, I’m comfortable enough in my blackness that I didn’t have to stick my finger in the air and see which way the racial winds were blowing when I proposed to my wife,” he writes. “I never look at her and see a white woman. But apparently, Obama is so keenly aware of race that he was willing to sacrifice this woman’s relationship on the altar of his ambition.”
He went on to accuse the former President of “being on a lifelong chase seeking the approval of others in his unending search for self identity and has struggled forever with trying to figure out who he is.”
Garrow’s assessment of Obama has quoted by the conservative media since its publication: “While the crucible of self-creation had produced an ironclad will,” he wrote, “the vessel was hollow at its core.” But Sheriff Clarke disagrees. “I don’t think he’s hollow at the core. I think he’s full of racial strife, bitterness, insecurity and self-promotion.”