Obama: “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.”

How the advocate for the poor became the champion of the middle class.

Step back in time to April, 1990. Obama is the first “black” President of the Harvard Law Review, and he begins to attack Middle America. This is the Obama thousands of Americans don’t know . . . yet. “I’m not interested in the suburbs,” he authoritatively tells a liberal reporter. “The suburbs bore me. And I’m not interested in isolating myself.”¹

You see, in Obama’s worldview, the suburbs are full of middleclass types, who lead bo-ring middleclass existences, apparently. They’re the “isolating” folks, like, say, Joe, the plumber, from Ohio (my guess). Or your mum. Your dad. Or your brother, the fireman.

Certainly, Obama knows what he’s doing, as the President of the liberal Harvard Law Review. “I feel good when I’m engaged in what I think are the core issues of the society, and those core issues to me are what’s happening to poor folks in this society.”²

The core issues, evidently, are far away from Middle America. And, the core issue is class warfare. “It’s critical at this stage for people who want to see genuine change to focus locally. And it is crucial that we figure out how to rebuild the core leadership and institutions in these communities,” Obama stresses, at a meeting in a relatively high-end, and isolated Harvard café.³

In Obama’s words, “genuine change” takes place outside the “isolating” suburbs. “I’m interested in organizations, not movements, because movements dissipate and organizations don't," proclaims the anti-suburban warrior.

Harvard’s Obama sees change, then, coming from the liberal, black-majority areas, and most probably a “God damn America” church. 

***

Today, the Senator claims that he loves the middle classes. He loves the suburbs. The suburbs don’t bore him now because it’s – wait a second – election season. He feels their pain. He relates to them!

If this sounds awfully familiar by now, then there’s a reason. Obama’s political life is connected with a radical ideology in all sorts of ways. But whereas Obama, the President of the Harvard Law Review, talks down to the middle classes in public, Obama, the Senator, talks down to Joe Average in the company of posh liberal friends, outside Ohio.

Just before the Pennsylvania Primary, for example, Obama was secretly recorded at a private function in chichi San Francisco, mocking small-town Americans, from the Midwest, because they “cling to God and guns.” In public, the Senator, then, is happy to call himself a Christian. In private, he takes aim at Americans for clinging to their Christian God. In public, the Senator says he supports sporting shooters. In private, however, he mocks them for clinging to their guns, and therefore America’s Second Amendment.

But where does Obama’s disdain for the “boring” suburbs come from? Is it rooted in black liberation theories, and Chicago’s culture of left-wing activism?

In Sprawl, published by the University of Chicago, Professor Robert Bruegmann from the Department of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago offers this interesting perspective (page 97):

Another common explanation of the growth of the American suburbs and the rise of sprawl is that it was caused by white flight fueled by racism. Although no one would deny that race has played a key role in many aspects of American life, it is significant that urban areas with small minority populations like Minneapolis have sprawled in much the same way as urban areas with large minority populations. It is also the case that when they have become affluent enough to do so, African-Americans have been just as willing as their white counterparts to move out of the suburbs. The suburbs they choose are often ones with largely African-American population. This suggests that there is no simple relationship between race and sprawl.

Still, one hears Obama’s simplistic anger. He’s looking for a scapegoat, and middleclass scapegoats are – in some Harvard circles – great punching bags. In fact, they’re like Jewish scapegoats in Trinity United, Obama’s “God damn America” congregation. Or Christians in small-town America. All easy targets.

So, Obama, the upper-class community activist and Law Review President, likes to fight imaginary racists. Americans are uniquely evil, says the Left. Or are they?

Bruegmann also offers this insight (page 98):

Nor is it plausible to suggest that the segregating out by income level, race, and ethnicity is peculiarly American. These kinds of segregation have been visible not just in American cities and suburbs but in cities and suburbs all over the world, particularly when large disparities in income is a major factor.

As a former London-resident, I agree. And, one wonders: how does Obama help the poor? He hangs out with slumlords. How does he conquer racism? He attends a “hate speech” congregation for twenty-years. How progressive. How now. By all accounts, he’s fashionably liberal, and fashionably boring. 

Endnotes

1.  The Intelligencer Record, Tuesday, 17, 1990, Page A-6 (B Edition).

2.  Ibid.

3.  Ibid.