How Not to Understand Obama

When I first heard about Dinesh D’Souza’s theory that President Obama can best be understood through the framework of Kenyan anticolonialism I thought it was a joke. It seemed like it’d make a clever, table-turning satire of pseudo-academic pretensions. But the D’souza turned the article into a book and it became clear that he was serious (at least serious enough to put his name on a silly theory in the service of selling books to the Obama-haters).

Most conservative have merely averted their gaze in attempt to avoid having to acknowledge this hot mess. But at The Weekly Standard , Andrew Ferguson takes an in-depth look at all that is wrong with the D’Souza’s pet theory.

Readers will not be shocked that D’Souza’s paradigm easily passes D’Souza’s test, thanks to the author’s misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation. The misstatements range from the very small to the very large. As “further evidence that this anticolonial reading is on the right track,” he cites Obama’s press conference after the Gulf oil spill.

“Time and again,” he writes, Obama “condemned ‘British Petroleum’—an interesting term since the company long ago changed its name to BP. Given our anticolonial theory, it’s no surprise that Obama wanted to remind Americans of what BP used to stand for.”

Right you are, Holmes! Except .??.??. I’ve read the transcript of the press conference, and Obama didn’t make a single reference to British Petroleum—a name which, in any event, is commonly used by many people of a certain age (including me) who are sworn enemies of anticolonialism. D’Souza makes many errors of this sort, citing facts that aren’t facts in support of an otherwise unsupported conclusion. He says that Obama, in his memoir Dreams from My Father, never mentions his father’s drunkenness. Obama mentions it often. Indeed, D’Souza misreads the entire memoir: Far from admiring his father and emulating him, Obama makes his disillusionment with his father one of the themes of his own life story.

And where facts are missing altogether, faulty reasoning bolsters the case. “Wonder why Obama went to Harvard?” D’Souza slyly asks. “Here is a clue: It is the leading academic institution in America. And here’s another: His father went there.” Forget that neither of these facts is a clue, technically. Surely the first assertion is enough to adequately answer the question without recourse to the second, which is simply gratuitous as well as conjectural. But D’Souza always sees absence of evidence as evidence of something or other.