Phyllis Schlafly reviews Dreams of My Father:

"With his new all-black identity, Obama stews about injustices that he never personally experienced and feeds his warped worldview by withdrawing into a 'smaller and smaller coil of rage.' He lives with a 'nightmare vision' of black powerlessness.

"Obama says that the hate doesn't go away. 'It formed a counter-narrative buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people -- some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.'

"Obama's worldview sees U.S. history as a consistent tale of oppressors and oppressed. He objects to the public schools because black kids are learning 'someone else's history. Someone else's culture.'

"He even criticizes his white grandparents, who worked hard to give him a privileged life. Their motives are a mystery to Obama because they came from the 'landlocked center' of the United States, which, he asserts, is full of 'suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty.'

"Obama grew up in Hawaii, the exemplar of a melting pot of races, yet he sees it as a place of 'aborted treaties and crippling diseases brought by the missionaries.' Although his mixed race was not a handicap in Hawaii, he whined that 'we were always playing on the white man's court ... by the white man's rules....'

"Obama immersed himself in the writings of radical blacks: Richard Wright, W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. Obama's favorite became Malcolm X.

"Obama scarcely knew his father, yet he wrote: 'It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.'

"Obama described his happiness in going to Kenya: 'For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide.' He felt he 'belonged' and had come home. Apparently, the only other place he felt at home was in Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church in Chicago.

"Obama rejects racial integration because it is 'a one-way street' with blacks being 'assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around.' Does he think America would be a better country if whites were assimilated into African culture?

"There is absolutely nothing in this book that expresses pride in or love of or appreciation of America. In 442 pages of introspection extending over his life as a teen, undergraduate and law student at prestigious institutions, community organizer and working adult, he doesn't say anything positive about American government, culture, society, freedom or opportunity.

"Obama's refusal to wear an American flag pin on his lapel sounded too trivial for a campaign issue. But since there is nothing in his book about respect for the flag, or the republic for which it stands, maybe the flag-pin flap does indicate his disdain for patriotism.

"In his autobiography, Obama accepts the view that 'black people have reason to hate.' His later book is called 'The Audacity of Hope,' but his autobiography, which he has never disavowed, should be titled 'The Audacity of Hate.'"


Obviously, I don't like Jeremiah Wright, but I do think he honestly communicates what he thinks. I believe him when he says that Barack is saying whatever he needs to say to get elected.