lost in melb.
05-08-2017, 01:48 PM
....."Garrow writes how Obama and Jager met in mid-1980s Chicago, moved in together and talked about marriage “all the time”. He continues: “In their evenings at the spacious apartment on South Harper, Barack read literature, not history, while Sheila had more than enough course readings to occupy her time. And, of course, there was another dimension as well. Barack ‘is a very sexual/sensual person, and sex was a big part of our relationship’, Sheila later acknowledged.”
In the winter of 1986, according to Jager, Obama asked her to marry him. But when the couple visited her family home, Obama met her father and his best friend – both conservative Republicans. It did not go well. They talked politics and, at least in the view of the friend, Mike Dees, Obama “ended up getting beat up”. Jager’s father came out against the marriage.
The following year, according to Jager, Obama changed and gained a sense of manifest destiny. “He became someone quite extraordinary … and so very ambitious, and this happened over the course of a few months. I remember very clearly when this transformation happened, and I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into our relationship, he already had his sights on becoming president.”
Discussion of marriage dragged on, Garrow writes, but “it was affected by what Sheila describes as Barack’s ‘torment over this central issue of his life’, the question of his own ‘race and identity’. The ‘resolution of his “black” identity was directly linked to his decision to pursue a political career’ and to the crystallization of the ‘drive and desire to become the most powerful person in the world’.”
The book claims that even after Obama met Michelle Robinson, a law firm colleague, he continued to see Jager irregularly for a year (“I always felt bad about it,” Jager says). And it strongly implies that his preference for Michelle, an African American, over Jager, who is half-Dutch and half-Japanese, was politically motivated......"
In Garrow’s telling, Obama made emotional judgments on political grounds. A close mutual friend of the couple recalls Obama explaining that “the lines are very clearly drawn. . . . If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.” And friends remember an awkward gathering at a summer house, where Obama and Jager engaged in a loud, messy fight on the subject for an entire afternoon. (“That’s wrong! That’s wrong! That’s not a reason,” they heard Sheila yell from their guest room, their arguments punctuated by bouts of makeup sex.) Obama cared for her, Garrow writes, “yet he felt trapped between the woman he loved and the destiny he knew was his.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/07/obama-biography-stirs-controversy-with-tales-of-politics-sex-and-a-rising-star
In the winter of 1986, according to Jager, Obama asked her to marry him. But when the couple visited her family home, Obama met her father and his best friend – both conservative Republicans. It did not go well. They talked politics and, at least in the view of the friend, Mike Dees, Obama “ended up getting beat up”. Jager’s father came out against the marriage.
The following year, according to Jager, Obama changed and gained a sense of manifest destiny. “He became someone quite extraordinary … and so very ambitious, and this happened over the course of a few months. I remember very clearly when this transformation happened, and I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into our relationship, he already had his sights on becoming president.”
Discussion of marriage dragged on, Garrow writes, but “it was affected by what Sheila describes as Barack’s ‘torment over this central issue of his life’, the question of his own ‘race and identity’. The ‘resolution of his “black” identity was directly linked to his decision to pursue a political career’ and to the crystallization of the ‘drive and desire to become the most powerful person in the world’.”
The book claims that even after Obama met Michelle Robinson, a law firm colleague, he continued to see Jager irregularly for a year (“I always felt bad about it,” Jager says). And it strongly implies that his preference for Michelle, an African American, over Jager, who is half-Dutch and half-Japanese, was politically motivated......"
In Garrow’s telling, Obama made emotional judgments on political grounds. A close mutual friend of the couple recalls Obama explaining that “the lines are very clearly drawn. . . . If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.” And friends remember an awkward gathering at a summer house, where Obama and Jager engaged in a loud, messy fight on the subject for an entire afternoon. (“That’s wrong! That’s wrong! That’s not a reason,” they heard Sheila yell from their guest room, their arguments punctuated by bouts of makeup sex.) Obama cared for her, Garrow writes, “yet he felt trapped between the woman he loved and the destiny he knew was his.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/07/obama-biography-stirs-controversy-with-tales-of-politics-sex-and-a-rising-star