From the timing of it it looks like Newt McPherson, a 19 year-old mechanic living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, had a shotgun wedding in September 1942 when it was discovered that 16-year old Kit Daugherty was pregnant. The marriage lasted three days and was over long before their baby, Newt Gingrich, was born. It would seem, then, that Newt Gingrich should be able to relate to someone like Barack Obama Jr., whose father abandoned him at a young age. Maybe Newt has had dreams of his father, the mechanic. Maybe he has wondered why his father didn’t want to help raise him. What I don’t think Newt has done is make every political decision with an eye to finishing his missing father’s unfinished business.
But, for some reason, that’s what he’s now accusing the president of doing.
Citing a recent Forbes article by Dinesh D’Souza, former House speaker Newt Gingrich tells National Review Online that President Obama may follow a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview.
Gingrich says that D’Souza has made a “stunning insight” into Obama’s behavior — the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.”
“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”
“This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president,” Gingrich tells us.
“I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true,” Gingrich continues. “In the Alinksy tradition, he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve . . . He was authentically dishonest.”
We all know that the president wrote a book entitled Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Anything contained in that book is obviously not a secret. Millions of Americans have read it. And a typical review of the book doesn’t even mention any discussion of colonialism. But Dinesh D’Souza has a different interpretation (that Gingrich considers a ‘stunning insight’):
Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.
We might ask D’Souza if the House of Representatives during the mid-1990’s was ruled by a mechanic from Harrisburg of the 1940’s. A seducer of children and a deadbeat dad. Does Newt abandon his wives in their greatest time of need in order to continue his father’s practice of doing the same?
These are cruel questions to ask, but then is it not cruel to refer to the president’s father as a “philandering, inebriated African socialist”? Barack Obama Sr. did meet a sad fate, as retold by his college friend and current Hawai’ian gubernatorial candidate Neil Abercrombie:
Although he didn’t say it at the time, Abercrombie privately feared that the relationship [between the president’s parents] would be short-lived. Obama was one of the most ambitious, self-focused men he had ever met. After Obama was accepted to study at Harvard, Stanley Ann disappeared from the University of Hawaii student gatherings, but she did not accompany her husband to Harvard. Abercrombie said he rarely saw her after that.
“I know he loved Ann,” Abercrombie said, but “I think he didn’t want the impediment of being responsible for a family. He expected great things of himself and he was going off to achieve them.”
The marriage failed. Stanley Ann filed for divorce in 1964 and remarried two years later, when her son was 5. The senior Obama finished his work at Harvard and returned to Kenya, where he hoped to realize his big dreams of taking a place in the Kenyan government.
Years later, Abercrombie and another grad school friend looked up their old pal during a trip through Africa.
At that point, the senior Obama was a bitter man, according to the congressman, feeling that he had been denied due opportunities to influence the running of his country. “He was drinking too much; his frustration was apparent,” Abercrombie said.
To Abercrombie’s surprise, Obama never asked about his ex-wife or his son.
Obama Sr. died in a car crash in 1982. He had seen his son once since leaving him for Harvard. It should be noted that Kenya only won its independence from the United Kingdom in December of 1963. It shouldn’t be seen as surprising that a man of Obama Sr.’s intelligence would hope to help lead the newly independent government and prove that Africans were capable of efficient self-governance. I don’t know why this is supposed to be indictment of the son or the father. It’s certainly a better ambition than being a serial homewrecker.
It’s sad that Newt Gingrich has gone certifiably insane. Maybe it was something in his upbringing.
