One of the most remarkable aspects of Barack Obama – yet curiously, during the campaign, one of the least remarked – is that he’s the first American president to have no apparent affinity for Europe.
For three centuries, Americans have understood that our principal geographical roots lie in Europe – specifically in Great Britain. That’s not to disparage important cultural contributions from anywhere else, but to recognize what’s true. Our institutions, literature, language and law all come from the U.K.
Politically, we’ve stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Britain for nearly a century, through hot and cold war: Against Nazi aggression, against Soviet tyranny, and more recently against Islamic terrorism.
However messy our national origins, what with rebellion against King George III and the burning of the White House in 1812, and despite occasional prickliness on both sides, our bonds of cultural affection have been tight.
Winston Churchill called ours a “special relationship” in 1946, and so it has remained, through the eras of Reagan and Thatcher, through the Bushes and Blair — until now.
“There’s nothing special about Britain,” a top Obama administration official snappishly told London’s “The Daily Telegraph” last month, during the near-disastrous visit of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Obama embarrassed Brown by canceling their joint press conference. He gave the cheesy gift of a packet of DVDs that can’t even be played on UK machines to a British leader whose eyesight is poor.
This week, as the White House was decamping to London for the G-20 summit, staffers helpfully delivered a handout to the traveling press corps explaining that Great Britain — our staunchest ally! — is a country “slightly smaller than Oregon.”
In a way, none of this should really come as a surprise.
Anyone who has read Obama’s memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” will know that the American president has never harbored any great fondness for Europe.
Fresh from his community organizing days in Chicago, Obama spent three weeks traveling through the continent’s great cities– London, Paris, Rome, Madrid – and the experience left him cold.
Characterizing himself as “a Westerner not entirely at home in the West,” Obama writes that the entire time he felt “edgy, defensive, hesitant with strangers.”
“It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful,” Obama writes, “It just wasn’t mine.”
It was only when Obama arrived in Africa that he felt any cultural affinity, any stirring of his deeper chords. It was in tribal Kenya that he felt himself coming alive, engaged, and responsive.
It was also in Kenya that the future president immersed himself in imagining the awfulness of British colonial rule. He speculates, in the memoir, how an old silent Kenyan waiter has “something in him [that] still says the white man’s ways are not his ways” even though “the old ways are broken.”
Obama describes gazing with distaste at white American and European tourists enjoying Nairobi. “I felt them as an encroachment, somehow; I found their innocence vaguely insulting… a bedrock confidence in their own parochialism, a confidence reserved for those born into imperial cultures.”
While in Kenya, the young Obama drank in tales about his grandfather, a goat farmer who went off to the city and came back wearing “strange skins,” that is, white men’s clothing, and who eventually worked overseas as a cook to a British captain. This mode of employment horrified the young Barack, causing “ugly words to cross [his] mind: “Uncle Tom. Collaborator.”
Fair enough, you might say. A man’s entitled to his opinion. Yet when that man is president of the United States, there may be ramifications that involve the rest of us.
Shortly after taking office, Obama returned to the British embassy a bronze bust of Winston Churchill that had been sent as a gesture of solidarity after September 11th.
In our president’s worldview – as evidenced by his own memoir – Winston Churchill was not the hero who rallied and saved wartime Britain. He was a warlord in a colonial system that disfigured Obama’s African homeland and maltreated his grandfather.
The snubs and embarrassments meted out to poor Gordon Brown do not seem so shocking, in light of this.
Obama is indeed a new kind of American president: One with no apparent liking for the culture that gave rise to our own.
The United States began as an English colony. Our law and literature spring from English traditions. Our principal language – still – is English. And for the first time, we have a president who does not much esteem this historical link.
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.
