If I had a dollar for every time the media have pointed out that Barack Obama is the nation’s “first African-American President-Elect” this past week, I’d be able to bail out AIG single-handedly.
Since election night, it feels as though there’s been non-stop, wall-to-wall, absolutely breathless reporting of the amazing firstness of it all.
“The nation’s first African-American President Elect has given his first press conference!”
“The nation’s first African-American President-Elect has made his first visit to the Oval Office!”
“The nation’s first African-American President-Elect is digesting his first burrito since becoming the nation’s first African-American President-Elect!”
Come January, the media will be able to drop the irksome “-elect” part of the phrase, and luxuriate in the full power and majesty of “President Obama.”
From now on, everything that happens – the inauguration, the first hundred days, the first veto (if there is one), the first state dinner, the first administration scandal (if there is one), the first international crisis (you know there will be one) – will be another thrilling opportunity for the media to bring out the phrase, “The nation’s first African—“
Well, you know who he is, and of course electing our first black president is a significant event in American history.
Yet one senses that the eager recitation of Obama’s many firsts is mostly an excuse for the mainstream media to relive the amazing fabulousness of this cool guy’s totally awesome election victory.
Yet there’s interesting selectivity about which of Obama’s “firsts” deserve media attention. For instance, American news organizations have not been eager to look very deeply into the African half of Obama’s African-American identity.
It took a British newspaper, the Times, to discover that Obama’s Kenyan aunt Zeituni Onyango has been living for the past five years in public housing in Boston.
Zeituni attended Obama’s 2004 swearing-in ceremony for the U.S. Senate, and has defied a deportation order to leave the United States.
Obviously, Barack Obama is not the first American president-elect to be embarrassed by the antics of his relations. But he’s surely the first whose foreign aunt lives illegally in the country that elected him. That’s a first.
Obama is surely to be the first American president for whom bulls were sacrificed in an African village. He is the first in whose honor the people of Kenya will take an annual holiday.
He’s the first president whose father was Muslim, and whose half-brother converted a few years ago to Islam. Again, Barack Obama is not his brother’s keeper, to coin a phrase, but he is our first president in two centuries to have Islam in the family. That’s something new.
It is not bad manners to mention these things. Obama himself has written freely about them, and rather nicely, too. In his memoir, he recounts many days spent with Aunt Zeituni, whom he met when in 1985 he traveled to Kenya to explore the African branch of his family tree.
In the epilogue to the 2004 paperback edition of his memoir, Obama says of his half-brother Roy, now Abongo, that “his conversion has given him solid ground to stand on, a pride in his place in the world.” These details – unlike Zeituni’s whereabouts, until recently – are not secrets.
To many Americans, the unusual aspects of Obama’s family make him a more compelling character. For some, his exotic background can only add to his aura of postmodern glamour.
In a biography of Obama for young adults, “Yes We Can,” written by Garen Thomas, the author calls Barack Obama “truly a citizen of the world.”
Up until now, Americans have been content with electing presidents who are citizens of the United States. A citizen of the world in the White House? That really is a “first” worth talking about.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.