Obama: The ‘anti-colonial’ interpretation

last updated 8 January 2015

Is Newt Gingrich just pretending to be crazy—“or has he actually gone around the bend?” asked Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. The former House speaker said last week the reason President Obama’s actions are “so outside our comprehension” is that they reflect his “Kenyan anti-colonial” worldview. The idea isn’t original; Gingrich was merely quoting conservative author Dinesh D’Souza, whose recent cover story in Forbes argues that Obama hates corporations because he’s acting out the Marxist fantasies of his late Kenyan father, who left the family when little Barack was 2. “What’s next?” asked Kathleen Parker, also in The Washington Post. “Obama is an extraterrestrial pod deposited on Planet Earth to occupy a human shell?” Underneath all the pseudo-academic mumbo jumbo, D’Souza’s “theory” is nothing more than old-fashioned race-baiting: Why, of course Obama doesn’t get us. He’s a “ticked-off African.”

No need to “freak out,” said David Weigel in Slate.com. D’Souza is an irrelevant little hater who’s learned to get attention by poking liberals in the eye. In one of his loony books, D’Souza posited that the Left’s promotion of homosexuality and feminism was “responsible” for the 9/11 attacks. His nonsense should simply be ignored, but liberals can’t resist his bait. That’s why Gingrich seized on the anti-colonial thesis; “within hours, he was condemned by every Democrat with blogging software,” which, of course, only endears the ever-ambitious Newt to fellow conservatives. Gingrich may be hoping to deflect attention from a recent magazine profile that charts his three marriages in unflattering detail, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. So rather than resist his party’s lunatic fringe, Gingrich has signed on to the notion that “the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.”

Laugh if you like, said Matt Bai, also in The New York Times, but this kind of thinking is no longer limited to Birthers and white supremacists. In fact, the characterization of Obama as a sinister, secretive Other is now mainstream Republican thought. “With every new swipe at President Obama’s exotic background,” the implication is that Obama can’t relate to average Americans because he’s “neither suitably Christian nor American in his values.” With the midterm elections less than two months away, expect to hear “constant innuendo”: He’s not one of us.