Mau-Mauing Obama and Nodding to the Birthers

As the candidate most likely to aver that the stars really are “God’s daisy chain” Mike Huckabee is already the Madeleine Bassett of the not-yet-officially-existing Republican Presidential campaign. That’s enough reason to wish him ill. Now there’s more: beneath that jovial southern-aw-shucks exterior lurks a Class A Idiot. From a recent radio interview:

MALZBERG: Don’t you think it’s fair also to ask him, I know your stance on this. How come we don’t have a health record, we don’t have a college record, we don’t have a birth cer – why Mr. Obama did you spend millions of dollars in courts all over this country to defend against having to present a birth certificate. It’s one thing to say, I’ve — you’ve seen it, goodbye. But why go to court and send lawyers to defend against having to show it? Don’t you think we deserve to know more about this man? HUCKABEE: I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough. And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American. When he gave the bust back to the Brits — MALZBERG: Of Winston Churchill. HUCKABEE: The bust of Winston Churchill, a great insult to the British. But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.

Obama grew up in Kenya? That would obviously be Mombasa, Hawaii then. Jesus wept. Dave Weigel says Huckabee should be credited with ignorance, not malice and he probably has a point. Then again, to be fair to Huckabee, plenty of British people who should know better believe this tripe too. The “Obama Disses Churchill” nonsense was a scoop brought in by my old chum Tim Shipman and it was, yes, a grand wee story. But even as a fun thing for a Sunday newspaper it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Yet it has lived and thrived well beyond its shelf-life, spawning and nurturing a ridiculous, cockamamie view of the 44th President and his worldview. 

The notion that Obama holds some kind of unusual animus towards Britain is entirely deranged and if he doesn’t subscribe to the Cult of Churchill that’s a small point in his favour too. Obama may lack obvious Atlanticist influences or instincts but this is scarcely unusual. The British press – especially, I am afraid, on the right – loves wetting its knickers any time a new President is elected, fretting that they won’t make the “Special Relationship” the centrepiece of their foreign policy and all the rest of it.

Bill Clinton’s less than wholly happy days as a Rhodes Scholar were supposed to have soured him on Britain too while George W Bush’s experience of Britain was largely limited to happy times getting plastered in Perthshire. I recall concern that – at the time of their election – neither of these Presidents were sufficiently keen on the “Special Relationship”.

And you know what? It didn’t matter. American presidents, by and large and like leaders of almost all other countries, pursue their notion of the national interest. There’s precisely no reason to suppose that Obama views the United Kingdom as anything more or less than it is: an important and reliable ally but not the most important country in the world as far as the United States is concerned. There’s no need to be too precious or too sentimental about these things. He doesn’t have to be one of those Americans who dreams of living at Brideshead.

As for Huckabee, Jonathan Bernstein puts it well:

This is where birtherism gets tricky. In its wildest forms, birtherism is about a massive conspiracy to install a conscious, deliberate enemy of the United States in the White House. It’s nice that Mike Huckabee doesn’t subscribe to that. But in its more plausible, and presumably more popular forms, it’s really just a way of saying that Barack Obama isn’t a “real” American.

Pushing the entirely phony Kenyan anti-imperialism idea is basically just as nutters and destructive as believing that relatively benign version of birtherism. What matters to most birthers isn’t really whether Barack Obama is literally eligible for the presidency; it’s the idea that he’s somehow anti-America.

Quite. Jonathan Chait piles on:

Apropos of Mike Huckabee’s quasi-endorsement of the “Kenyan anti-colonialism” theory of Barack Obama, there’s something I’ve been wondering about this. The theory holds that Barack Obama, through his father, acquired a worldview twisted by opposition to British colonialism. But the people most enamored of this theory are also highly enamored of the Tea Party, which is steeped in worship of… opposition to British colonialism!

Wouldn’t this theory mean that our Founding Fathers were also twisted by opposition to British colonialism? Or maybe the idea is that we had a right to throw off the British yolk, but the Kenyans should have put up with it, because the British occupation there was so much more benign.

The obvious answer is that the 13 Colonies made a dreadful and unnecessary blunder back in 1776 And All That. Just as we may well have disengaged too swiftly from some of our other colonies, so perhaps we left America sooner than we should have. If Huckabee wants to make this argument during the Republican Primary then he will at long last have something to say that will be both entertaining and worth watching. And of course if Obama did grow up “hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather” then he’d be quite an old-fashioned type of (non-Irish) American…

INSTANT UPDATE: Per Ben Smith, Huckabee’s people say he “mis-spoke” and meant to say Indonesia, not Kenya. But that’s weak toast since the bigger part of it is not about Obama’s childhood but his supposed attitudes. Also of note, and often forgotten (including by me on this occasion) the infamous Churchill bust is apparently no longer in the Oval Office but it is still in the White House – the residence to be specific. Massive snub!  UPDATE: Thanks to Con Cabbie for putting me right: it’s now in the British Ambassador’s residence. Not sure why I’d got that wrong/confused. Still, it remains an utterly trivial episode.