Barack Obama and the Breakdown in Family

By Linda Chavez

"Barack Obama, the Illinois freshman senator who hopes to occupy the Oval Office, strikes me as a man uncomfortable in his own skin. I say that having just finished reading Obama's first book, 'Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,' written before he decided to enter the political world and was therefore less careful about revealing his own doubts, fears and confusion.

The book, a combination of strikingly lyrical prose interspersed with mundane liberal platitudes, describes Obama's search for identity.

Throughout the book, Obama is obsessed with race. But it is not the usual preoccupation with racial discrimination, though he occasionally invokes this as well. Instead, Obama imbues race with almost magical qualities. Race defines character, culture, history, even personal fortune.

But with all his endless fixation on race, Obama never fully comes to grips with the single fact that is responsible for his own confusion about who he is. Obama was abandoned: first by his father, a Kenyan undergraduate who met and married Obama's mother while on a scholarship at the University of Hawaii, and then by his mother, who remarried after Obama's father left, divorced again, and sent Obama to live with his grandparents. " Read more.