Ridiculous Commentary on Obama in Midweek

Recently returned to Hawaii where I found the local radio stations referring to Barack Obama as good old "Barry". I wasn't lucky enough to get a glimpse of him during his recent visit here--he just left yesterday, but a friend of mine Carol Chong whose son goes to Punahou got a picture of Obama on her cell phone while he was walking around the campus with Michelle. Apparently, he wanted to show her the Punahou athletic complex, but they wouldn't let him in so he had to wait outside for like three minutes before the security gave him the okay.

Perusing this week’s Midweek—a rag, I know, but one that nonetheless captures the opinions of all walks of life in Hawaii and includes some decent columns, I’m struck by the vaguely anti-Punahou sentiment surfacing in relation to Obama.

Bob Jones disagrees with his AP-writer friend who says, “Obama’s leap in life [was] because of his Punahou education”. Jones (whose own daughter, Brett Jones, graduated from Punahou) felt the need to say, “I don’t think it meant a damn thing to what he is today or what he’ll be doing tomorrow.” I’m baffled. Would any other local paper in America be writing that the high school education of one of its residents was irrelevant? True, Obama’s days at Punahou were not his golden years. During his time at Punahou, Obama’s basketball coach (my AP-Government teacher) was known to call Obama the N-word, one of several incidents which unleashed all kinds of teenage male black angst in Obama. As he writes in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father”, these turbulent years of trying to find his identity as a young black man paved the way for the work he later did in Chicago serving the communities there. I also remember reading somewhere that despite his experimentation with drugs in high school, he was also the kid who pulled together an A-paper the night before it was due. So between the angst and the basketball, apparently there were also some academics in there. To say “It didn’t mean a damn thing to what he is today” is a strech.

One Midweek reader Jill Rethman felt compelled to write a letter (“He’s No Lincoln”) in response to columnist Dan Boylan’s comment, “I’m not about to elevate Obama to Lincoln status yet” (what Rethmen interpreted as “a backhanded comparison to Abraham Lincoln”). As I read the letter, the Punahou elitist in me couldn’t help but wonder how much Lincoln Rethman had actually read, how much Obama she had actually read and also how much media outside of Midweek she had actually read. Because if I understand Boylan’s initial comment correctly, he was disagreeing with the general buzz comparing Obama to Lincoln, that is, agreeing with Rethman and in effect making the publication of the somewhat long letter a complete absurdity.

The commentary seems to be highlighting a general desire to like Obama but not too much and certainly not because of his affiliation with his alma mater.