[...] One of the reasons a lot of Americans find Obama oddly foreign is
that he had an oddly foreign childhood: his formative years were spent
in Indonesia. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born there. The
rest of Obama's childhood was spent in Honolulu, a Pacific Ocean
capital soaked in East Asian culture.
What's this got to do with Britain, or indeed with Europe? Plenty.
Obama is the first US president who was raised without cultural or
emotional or intellectual ties to either Britain or Europe. The British
and the Europeans have been so enchanted with 'America's first
black
president' that they haven't been able to see what he really is:
America's first Third World president.
[...]
What the Obama administration has near-wiped from the president's
personal history is that his only childhood links with America were as
a schoolboy in a fashionable private school in Asia-dominated Hawaii,
where he was raised by his white, bank executive grandmother.
Chicago is not Obama's homeland. It never was his formative influence.
The president's world view is more aligned with that of Indonesia.
You can be sure the gift Obama gives the President of Indonesia will be
something more than the dvd box-set of old Hollywood movies he gave to
Gordon Brown. The US president's manner on the trip to Indonesia will
be more the manner he showed to the King of Saudi Arabia last year. The
king received a deep bow, something never done by any US president
before. Obama also kow-towed to the Emperor of Japan and to the Chinese
premier.
[...]
The president actually feels that the US Constitution, which grew out
of Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights, is 'inadequate.'
Indeed, Obama has stated that, because the US Constitution guarantees
only 'negative rights' -- that is, establishes what the US Government
may not do to individuals or to the sovereign states -- instead of
giving people guarantees of food, shelter education and health care and
the rest, it is 'inadequate.'
[...]
Obama has made it clear he despises both the US Constitution and the
British tradition from which it springs.
