Just so we’re clear, when Roger Cohen “raises” the issue of Obama’s half-brother in China, he is doing to ward off the inevitable Republican smear machine’s attacks, but when anyone not blatantly shilling for Obama “reminds” anyone about his diverse family connections it is obviously an effort to…smear Obama.  Got it?  Cohen justifies his column this way:

I’ve been thinking about this because not enough has been written about Obama’s family.

That’s right.  If only someone would have made some effort to write about Obama’s family, the difficult task would not fall to Roger Cohen.  Maybe this someone could have written a book.  (What makes even less sense about all this is that Cohen obviously knows about the book and even remarks on it later in the column.)  Now, in fairness, Cohen is finally responding to the danger I was describing in past months that comes from his fans’ fixation on Obama’s diverse background.  But to say that “more needs to be written,” when lengthy discussions of Obama’s biography have been included in every single candidate profile and half of the news stories about him, is really another way of saying, “We Obama-boosting pundits need to start framing Obama’s biography in ways that will guard against the obvious criticism that we now know is coming.”  A smarter move would have been to emphasise the American part of Obama’s biography.  Less interesting as a topic of cafe conversation?  Undoubtedly, but politically much better for Obama.  Well, it’s too late for that now, so it’s time to put a good spin on what Cohen and other pro-Obama pundits assumed was an obvious asset that is already becoming a liability, and so we get this new column. 

A few months ago, Obama’s wonderfully “globalised” personal history had a narcotic effect on political writers on the coasts, but these days it is becoming clear that being regarded as “globalised” may not be an asset in a country where a majority regards globalisation to have been, on the whole, harmful to them.  If Romney was the face of economic globalisation, Obama has become the personification of the cultural side of globalisation, thanks in no small part to the constant agitation of his supporters that people see him this way.  When this is presented to an electorate anxious about economic dislocation and cultural change, I can think of few things that would be potentially more damaging for a candidate.

The dangers of this to Obama, who was already likely to have difficulty generating broad appeal because of the identitarian aspects of mass democracy, have been obvious for a long time.  As I said in November:

What Ignatieff said, and what Cohen is arguing, exposes Obama to a rather fierce backlash if people begin to believe it: having “internationalism in the veins” may imply some kind of hybridity that reduces the person’s connection to his country (this is the “vaguely French” attack against Kerry taken to the nth degree), and simultaneolusly identifies a policy perspective with ‘otherness’, which unwittingly hints that this “internationalism” is not really fully American.  Many of the arguments advanced in Obama’s favour along these lines are rather recklessly identifying in Obama things that I am not sure that he would even say about himself.  Armed with quotes about his being a “globalised leader,” you can just imagine what his opponents would say in a tough general election fight.  Obama’s actual policy positions on immigration, for example, will be hard enough for him to overcome in a general election (should it somehow come to that) without foreign observers taking about how agreeable he is to foreigners.  The attack ads write themselves. Remember Kerry’s ill-fated boast about all of the foreign leaders who supported his election? This does not play well in most parts of America.

Cohen, who has been blissfully oblivious to this problem in his past pro-Obama columns, suddenly worries:

But you can already see the headlines: Obama has brother in China! You can hear the whisperings about a polygamous father.

Really?  I have heard and read more about Romney’s great-great grandparents along these lines than I have ever heard anyone “whispering” about the senior Obama.  Of course, as Cohen must understand, once he has raised these things in a neutral or positive context he has introduced them into the discussion.  He and those pro-Obama pundits like him who keep obsessing on this aspect of Obama have made it fair game.  They are the ones, just as much as people who insist on mentioning Obama’s middle name, who seem preoccupied with this part of the candidate, almost to the exclusion of everything else, and they are among the first to be scandalised that someone has not responded with the same rapt glee that they have.  You could count the number of people who knew about his half-brother Mark, aside from people who have made the effort to buy and read his first book, in the low thousands before this column–now it is front and center on the New York Times op-ed page.  With enthusiasts like this, Obama doens’t need critics.

But, not to worry, Cohen tells us.  Why?  Well, unlike four years ago the voters are not going to fall for this sort of rhetorical attack again:

But things are different. Less fearful, Americans are less willing to be manipulated. They’ve backed Obama this far in part because they’re sick of the narrow American exceptionalism of Bush’s divisive rule.

Of course, it then becomes rather important to consider who “they” are.  Essentially, the voters who are most inclined to see Obama’s diverse background as a problem, rather than as an exhibit of multiculturalism in action (or, more precisely, who see multiculturalism in action as the problem), are also the ones who haven’t supported him in the nominating contest, and some of them within the Democratic Party seem unwilling to support him in the general as well.  I don’t know where Cohen gets the idea that Americans are less fearful.  On the contrary, anxiety and fear are greater now than perhaps anytime since 2003, even if the fear is not caused by the conventional terrorism alarmism that worked in the past.  If voters were less easily manipulated today by the “politics of fear” (a redundant phrase, since everyone casts electoral choices in terms of fear and danger), Clinton’s “3 a.m.” ad would have had little or no effect whatever.

Cohen also misunderstands the consequences of the psychology of the public over current economic woes:

Never before have U.S. fortunes been so tied to the world’s. Americans see that. When your mortgage is packaged into some ingenious security that’s sold to a German bank before the scheme unravels and you lose your house, the globe looks smaller.

People who say things like this seem to think that the globe’s “smaller” appearance will not lead to a backlash agains international economic ties and against symbols of interdependence.  How you interpret the world getting “smaller” in this way is to a large extent the way to tell whether you are what Brooks called a “progressive globalist” or a “populist nationalist.”  Those who regard this as a generally desirable, even laudable, development are the globalists, which leaves the other 60-70% of the population who are to one degree or another uneasy or unhappy about one or more aspects of the globalists’ preferred policies and their general cultural outlook.  Obama gets the globalist vote of the high-income and highly educated professional class, and he wins globalist sympathies in both parties, but except for his less-than-persuasive (and possibly entirely dishonest) opposition to certain elements of NAFTA he shows no ability to relate to the concerns of the “populist nationalists” who form a much larger bloc of voters in both parties.

There is a reason why all major Democratic, and more than a few Republican, candidates kept mentioning indebtedness to foreign countries and energy independence.  It wasn’t necessarily because they intended to do anything about either of these, but because they know that most people don’t want to hear about inextricable interdependence but want ways to extricate America from such dependence, and a lot of them absolutely hate the status quo of relying on so many imports and having so much of our debt held by non-Americans.  This is not a people in the mood for bridge-building, but moat-building and bridge-raising.

Cohen quotes Obama’s Muslim uncle (remember, Cohen is helping Obama!):

My Islam is a hybrid, a mix of elements, including my Christian schooling and even some African ways. Many values have dissolved in me.

That is not reassuring to very many.  Globalisation puts many Americans (and many others around the world) on guard because of its capacity for mixing things and creating hybridity.  For most people, having many values dissolving inside of them is not desirable, but rather a sign of profound confusion and disorientation.  Most people don’t want values that dissolve and mix together–dissolution of one kind or another is usually one of the things they are trying to combat with their embrace of whichever “values” they take as their own.  Indeed, the dissolving effects the processes of globalisation have on one’s cultural values are some of the things that make most people so wary of it, in part because it does provide them with cheaper goods and greater variety.  The profusion of choices, the plentiful options that globalists believe is the obvious argument in favour of globalisation, strike people who wish to preserve their cultural values as a constant barrage of threats.  I think it is fair to say that globalists literally cannot understand this, or when they grasp it they immediately dismiss it as ridiculous, but it is the fundamental fact that drives anti-globalisation politics here and everywhere around the world.

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