The Roots of Obama's Rage
by Curtis Bowers

President Obama is an enigmatic figure for both supporters and detractors. Pundits have called him everything from a civil rights leader to political messiah to closet Muslim to radical socialist. Author Dinesh D'Souza offers a provocative alternative to explain the 44th President's duplicitous rhetoric and puzzling policy decisions: Barack Obama is an anti-colonialist committed to reducing what he views as America's oppressive global dominance and extraordinary consumption.

Most Americans cannot comprehend such a point of view. We have been extraordinarily generous with our treasure and our military to help so many other countries. D'Souza contends that Obama has embraced a worldview inherited from his father, a drunken socialist Luo tribesman who came of age during Kenya's struggle for independence from Britain. The son is stuck in those struggles of his father.

Britain is no longer a colonial power, so the anticolonialists have targeted the United States as a substitute for their former colonial owners and redirected their bitterness and envy against us. According to the neocolonialist mindset, America is a bully plundering the resources of poorer nations. Cutting America down to size means dramatically lowering our standard of living by reducing our consumption of resources that are alleged to belong to other nations.

D'Souza argues that the anti-colonial paradigm is more than speculation into the President's psychology and emotions. It also best explains Obama's rhetoric and policy positions such as his reaction to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, his priorities for his nuclear treaty with Russia, and the Afghanistan war.

An anti-colonial fixation also makes sense of minor incidents. Shortly after assuming the presidency, Obama strangely returned to England a bust of Winston Churchill that was in the Oval Office. D'Souza suggests that, for Obama, Churchill represented the misdeeds of British imperialism, particularly in India and Africa.

Much of this disconcerting theory is drawn directly from Obama's own book Dreams From My Father. D'Souza tells how the son came to internalize the beliefs and goals of the father who abandoned him shortly after his birth. Obama wrote, "My fierce ambitions might have been fueled by my father . . . by my unspoken desire to somehow earn his love, and by my resentments and anger towards him."

D'Souza's thesis presents a persuasive argument, based on Obama's own words, for why the President is intent on shrinking American wealth and world leadership.

(Regnery, 2010, 258 pp., $27.95)