[okie01]

Another observation about this Non-threatening Black persona.

Until he assumed the persona, purportedly at Harvard, Obama had made no mark upon his environment.

Recall that, while we've been treated to a few (precious few) recollections by his classmates at the private school in Hawaii, seemingly nobody remembers him from his days at Occidental. No classmates, no faculty, nobody.

Similarly, at Columbia. There is almost no trace of his matriculation. I believe the Times rounded up and interviewed a single roommate (a Pakistani, now doing time for drug-dealing), whose memory of Obama was less than clear. Otherwise...nothing. No classmates remembered him, no faculty, no record of him in the school newspaper or the annual.

One might conclude that, until he formulated and perfected the Non-threatening Black persona, Obama really was a nobody.

Which adds another whole layer to the psychological profile...

[nathanbedford]

You might be on the something here, okie.

Before Harvard Law School Obama was dissolute without significant achievement and, as you observed, without making great impression. Today, as I pointed out, he is abstemious in his habits (apart from an occasional stolen cigarette), by all appearances content in this marriage, and possessed of a great charisma. What happened?

Was there an epiphany? George Bush experienced one and John McCain says he also experienced one while in the Hanoi Hilton near-death. Do either of Obama's biographies recite such an incident?

Can we assume that his new persona came as a function of his ideology if no single epiphany is involved? In other words did he contrive a persona for himself by extrapolating the Saul Alinsky Marxist formula? I keep coming back to the parallels to EST to which I alluded in my earlier posts. This 1970s pop psychology phenomenon was in the business of tearing people's psyches apart and replacing them with a formulation crafted by EST. We referred to these people as EST-holes because they were nearly zombielike in their new personas. But once transformed, they never lacked for self-confidence.

What happened to Obama?