According to one biographer, former President Barack Obama has concealed many things behind his carefully cultivated public image.
David Garrow, author of “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama,” believes that the ex-president’s long-ago letters to his former girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager, contain much that readers would find revealing.
“Barack made it clear to me that he hoped I would never read them — I can put it that way. I think if the letters to Sheila ever become public, I think that will be a signal event,” Garrow told Fox News in an interview published Thursday.
Garrow explained that Obama’s letters would show an “extremely serious and extremely intense” relationship between the former president and Jager.
Obama turned 62 on Aug. 4. People in their seventh decade of life tend to have a few skeletons in the closet. In most cases, public knowledge of those skeletons only whets the appetite for further gossip.
Stories of the former president’s past relationships, however, carry more than tabloid-level interest. They reveal certain qualities that formed a pattern in Obama’s life: opportunism, elitism and phoniness.
Jager told Garrow that Obama twice proposed marriage. She rejected him both times.
The biracial Obama later claimed that the relationship ended because Jager, who has both European and Asian ancestry, did not fit into his emerging “black consciousness.”
For her part, Jager said their breakup stemmed from an argument over Obama’s refusal to condemn a black Chicago official who made anti-Semitic remarks. “I challenged him on the question of black racism,” she said, according to The Jewish Chronicle.
Either way, Garrow noted that Obama’s political ambitions would have made marriage to Jager untenable.
“The one aspect that I will endorse or that is inescapably true is that by 1988, he knew he wanted to run for public office in Chicago,” Garrow told Fox.
“And he knew … that having a wife like Sheila Jager, half-Dutch, half-Japanese, would not cut it in black Chicago. … Having a non-black spouse 25, 35 years ago was an active political problem for a black candidate,” the biographer said.
Thus, Obama’s subsequent marriage to Michelle Robinson, whether politically motivated or not, certainly had opportunistic elements to it.
Furthermore, the Obamas’ fantastic wealth and celebrity status have given them an elitist vibe that is a far cry from their modest roots on the South Side of Chicago.
“There’s no resemblance between their lives today and who they were 20 years ago,” Garrow said. Black Chicagoans, he added, “could see this sort of ‘desire to hang with celebrities’ thing building” during Obama’s presidency.
Above all, the former president has always struck many of his detractors as something of a fraud. Revelations of personal details merely confirm that impression.
Last week, for instance, Garrow made news when he told Tablet magazine that in letters to Alex McNear, another old girlfriend, Obama confessed to having “repeatedly fantasized” about homosexuality.
Likewise, in a “Tucker on Twitter” episode posted in June, Tucker Carlson made a cryptic remark about Obama’s private conduct.
“By 2008, it was obvious to anybody who was paying attention that Barack Obama had a strange and highly creepy personal life. Yet nobody ever asked him about it,” Carlson said.
Ep. 2 Cling to your taboos! pic.twitter.com/45AeVdtwOu
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 8, 2023
Former President Donald Trump enjoys the support of millions for exactly the opposite reason. For good or ill, Trump always strikes us as authentic.
Meanwhile, the more we learn about Obama, the less authentic he seems.
