"Spengler" defends himself

There's a raging debate in the conservative world on whether David P. Goldman aka "Spengler" went too far in a blog post about Obama as the Third World anthropologist.

He defends himself here:

John Podhoretz excoriated me for a characterization of Barack Obama that has earned wide if not universal acceptance among conservatives. Surely he protests too much. John is a very good journalist; if he had read my essays rather than react to a one-line reference to them in a blog post, I am convinced he would have come away with a different impression.

On pages 38-39 of his new book Conservative Victory, for example, Sean Hannity approvingly quotes my two-year-old sketch of how Obama’s family background cultivated a hostility to the United States:

But it’s been suggested that one of Obama’s voluntary relationships is more revealing of his radicalism, anti-Americanism, and anti-capitalism than all of the others: his choice of marital partner. The columnist known as Spengler, writing for the Asia Times, quoted Alexandre Dumas: “When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman.” In Obama’s case, wrote Spengler, there have been two principal women in his life: his late mother and “his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama’s women reveal his secret: he hates America.”

Michael Ledeen has had some things to say about this as well.

I also parsed Michelle Obama’s Princeton undergraduate thesis and reviewed Obama’s own writings, citing in particular this passage from Dreams of My Father, writing in July 8, 2008:

. . . As we walked back to the car, we passed a small clothing store full of cheap dresses and brightly colored sweaters, two aging white mannequins now painted black in the window. The store was poorly lit, but toward the back I could make out the figure of a young Korean woman sewing by hand as a child slept beside her.

The scene took me back to my childhood, back to the markets of Indonesia: the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betel nut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms . . . I saw those Djakarta markets for what they were: fragile, precious things. The people who sold their goods there might have been poor, poorer even than folks out in Altgeld [the Chicago housing project where Obama engaged in community organizing]. They hauled fifty pounds of firewood on their backs every day, they ate little, they died young. And yet for all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust. It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself.

This Romantic notion about the authenticity of Third World people as opposed to the alienation of Americans comes right out of his mother’s doctoral dissertation, on the struggle of Indonesian blacksmiths to survive in a globalized market. It is true, as John says, that one could have picked up this sort of ideological orientation at an American university. That, presumably, is where Ann Dunham absorbed the left-wing views that took her to Indonesia. But there is something more: Obama spent four formative years in Indonesia and was raised by an anthropologist with a fierce ideological attachment to the Third World. It is one thing to acquire a general ideological view, and quite another to feel an existential connection to the struggles of the Third World.

Goldman is a first class intellectual AND he knows how to gain attention for a magazine that could have become a relic with the death of its founder Father Richard John Neuhaus.

The debate itself is interesting. Carry on.