Important note:

The following article reflects what the author believes, based on a combination of facts, speculations, instincts, observations, and experiences. The author does, however, make certain assumptions here about the candidate’s birth that have not been proven – and which perhaps will never be proven or are incorrect. The reader is free to agree or disagree.

The known facts about the candidate’s life are presented in the “Obama Timeline,” which can be found on this website.

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Observing human nature is, for some people, one of the great pleasures of life. Of particular interest is how man’s conscious mind interacts with the automatic processes of his subconscious. The psycho-epistemology of Barack Obama warrants review as we approach the Presidential election, to better understand what makes him tick, why people would vote for him, and how he would act if ensconced in the White House.

Getting to understand the current Barack Obama, Jr. first requires an examination of his past.

Barack Obama Jr. was born on August 4, 1961. His mother was a young white college student at the University of Hawaii, Stanley Ann Dunham. Her father, Stanley Armour Dunham, had wanted a son, and thus gave his name to his daughter – an only child. Not surprisingly, she chose to be called Ann.

Obama’s father was Barack Obama, Sr., a student from Kenya. He met Ann Dunham at the University of Hawaii, where they were both studying Russian. Obama was age 24 when Ann became pregnant. She was only 17. They may or may not have gotten married.

In the summer of 1961, Obama took Dunham to Kenya so she could “meet the parents.” Obama, Jr. was born in either Hawaii or Kenya. If he’d release his original birth certificate we’d know, but he won’t.

In 1963, before Barack, Jr. was two years old, Barack, Sr. deserted Ann and his son. He headed to Harvard University for more schooling, and then returned to Kenya, where he served as a bureaucrat in the government. The young communist was known for complaining that his government wasn’t socialist enough.

Ann Dunham wasn’t too keen on the United States or its capitalist system any more than Obama, Sr. (birds of a feather), and she then latched onto another foreigner, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian. Dunham married Soetoro in 1966, when Obama was 5, and Soetoro soon headed back to Indonesia. Dunham packed up son Barack, Jr. and took him to live with Soetoro, in 1967.

Soetoro adopted Obama, making him an Indonesian citizen. Barack Obama, Jr. became Barry Soetoro, an Indonesian and an ex-American.

Dunham was an atheist who resented America. She likely also resented her father for naming her Stanley, and she no doubt hated his capitalist ways as well. (He was a furniture salesman.) She may not have been too fond of her mother, either. (She was a bank vice president.)

Soetoro was a Muslim, but he wasn’t the most ardent mosque-goer. Still, he took young Barry with him to pray, and enrolled him in a school where he was taught to memorize the Quran in its original Arabic.

Dunham apparently wasn’t too thrilled with motherhood, and in 1971 she shipped 10-year old Barry back to Hawaii to live with his white grandparents. Dunham then dumped Soetoro one year later. She remained in Indonesia, more or less, which she used as a home base while working for organizations like the Ford Foundation. She traveled around the world sampling exotic life in distant, decidedly not American, cultures.

In Hawaii, Barry spent considerable time hanging out with Grandpa Stanley’s drinking buddy, Frank Marshall Davis. Davis became his mentor, and Barry was with Davis at his Honolulu cottage on most evenings. Davis was a writer, with several published books of poems. He was also a communist, having been investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee and chased out of Chicago by the FBI.

Davis taught Barry all about the evils of America and capitalism, and how tough it was to be a black man in a white man’s world. He did not paint a pretty picture. Young Barry must have thought he’d be lynched if he made a wrong move or comment while buying a candy bar at the corner store. “Don’t trust whitey” was Davis’ main lesson. Lesson two was socialism. All the other lessons were variations on the first two themes. Barry learned well.

Obama headed to Occidental College in California after graduating from high school in Hawaii. He experimented with drugs, wasn’t much of a student, and read black power books that had been suggested by Davis.

After two years at Occidental, Barry moved on to New York, Columbia University, and William Ayers (the son of Tom Ayers, an old friend of Davis from his Chicago days).

Barry Soetoro switched back to the name Barack Obama, Jr. A connection to black Africa was, after all, better suited to the political climate of the 1980s.

After Columbia, Obama moved to Chicago (as did Ayers), and started working as a “community organizer” – or, more properly, a “community activist” or “community agitator.” He learned from Ayers, and his fellow followers of Saul Alinsky, that a violent revolution was not the way to turn America toward socialism - Ayers had tried that and ended up being chased by the FBI for a decade. Instead, the idea was to work from within the system. Turn in the hippie clothes and put on a business suit. Don’t work from the top down, work from the bottom up. Above all, don’t be frightening. Tell them what they want to hear, and get them to willingly let you expand government power and control over their lives.

Working from the bottom up meant telling everybody in the community how miserable their lives were (even if they weren’t), and persuading them to do something about it. “You’ll never save enough money to buy a house and follow the white man’s rules. You need to change the rules!” Obama thus instructed people on how to march on banks, stage sit-ins in bank lobbies, and picket outside the homes of the greedy bank presidents who followed an antiquated concept called “lending standards.” The government stepped in, forced banks to lower lending standards, made Fannie Mae buy up risky loans, and – well, you know the rest.

In 1992 Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham, died. Ann Dunham decided the time was right to tell her son the truth. Dunham admitted to Obama that his father was not the communist goat-herder-turned-bureaucrat in Kenya. Obama’s father was actually the communist writer and mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, who had died in 1987.

Whoa! Why the secret? Ann Dunham could not let her father know that his 55-year old, married, best friend and drinking buddy had gotten his 17-year old daughter pregnant. Obama, Sr. became the fall guy.

The Kenyan hadn’t been too nuts about being a father again. After all, he still had a wife and kids back in Kenya he had deserted, and his resume was starting to look less than admirable. But he sucked in his gut and said, “Okay, but let’s call him Barack, Jr.”

After giving birth in Kenya, Dunham immediately returned to Hawaii with big Obama and little Obama, and had the birth registered in Honolulu. Not too long afterward, Obama, Sr. learned of the hoax and said, “I’m out of here.” Dunham continued the charade for 30 years, because an absent father from Kenya beats the truth – which only Ann, her mother, and Davis knew.

When Dunham sent Obama from Indonesia back to Hawaii in 1970, Davis was more than willing to be Obama’s tutor because, after all, he was his father. And what better revenge for having been named “Stanley Ann Dunham” by a white, Christian, American than to burden him with a black grandson who could recite the Quran in Arabic with a first-rate accent.

Finally, after Grandpa Stanley was buried, Barack knew the truth - but that only made it worse for him. First he was Barack Obama, Jr. Then he was Barry Soetoro. Then he was Barack Obama, Jr. again. He might have been Frank Davis, Jr. if the truth had been owned up to at the beginning. That calls for some serious soul-searching – maybe even a book.

Obama started working on “Dreams From My Father.” More than one person has no doubt wondered why Obama gave a whit about the dreams of a drunken communist in Kenya who deserted him when he was not yet two years old. You need no longer wonder. The “Father” in “Dreams of My Father” is Frank Marshall Davis, and the dreams Obama feels obliged to follow are the establishment of the society longed for by Davis, a socialist government in the United States, black power, and punishment for the white people who kept him from doing whatever the hell it was he wanted to do. (Davis’ resentment of white people did not prevent him from marrying a white woman and having sex with under-age white girls. Perhaps that was his way of “sticking it to” the white establishment.)

While writing “Dreams From my Father” (with the help of Pentagon-bomber friend William Ayers, who was a spoiled rich white kid who pretty much considered and still considers himself a persecuted black man), Obama had to continue the charade of the Kenyan father. His political career depended on it. One can run for office as someone who “struggled to rise above his simple African roots” more easily than can someone whose father was a sex pervert, child molester, and communist who – like Ayers - had fled from the FBI. (Obama seems to have a penchant for connections to people who the FBI has found worth watching.)

Obama’s mother was an atheist, Obama, Sr. was a Muslim, Soetoro was a Muslim, and Davis was an atheist. Obama, Jr. no doubt can be excused for having been a little confused. He complicated things further by becoming a community agitator in Chicago, where the members of the community were Christians who asked, “Why don’t we ever see you in church?” To get in their good graces, Obama decided to start attending church. As luck would have it, the church he selected was Trinity United Church of Christ, where its Pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, preached fiery sermons that most would consider anti-American, anti-white, and anti-Semitic.

Obama says he’d never paid attention to what Wright was saying, or he would have done something about it. Well, Obama’s wife was certainly paying attention. Apparently Michelle let Obama sleep during Reverend Wright’s roaring tirades. Obama must be one sound sleeper. (Obama’s friend Oprah heard Wright’s sermons and left his church because of them. Obama must not have noticed her absence.)

Community organizing wasn’t rewarding enough for Obama, so he decided it was time for him to change the world. He easily became an Illinois State Senator (Republicans don’t win in Chicago), where he pretty much did nothing but vote “present” for his first seven years in the state capitol. Then, in a flash of activity, he got a boat load of bills passed. The bills were mostly written by other senators, but Obama got credit because a helpful Senate President forced Obama’s name as the sponsor, enabling him to get credit – and a reputation to use in his run for the U.S. Senate.

Chicago being Chicago, no Democrat has to worry about winning an election, he just has to win the primary. His opponent’s embarrassing divorce records were conveniently leaked to the press late in the campaign. Slam dunk for Obama. He then easily beat his Republican opponent, and suddenly he was in the U.S. Senate, alongside prominent Democrats like Clinton and Kennedy, and former KKK leader Robert Byrd.

Obama barely got his senate seat warm when he decided to run for President. Again, the November election should be easy (everybody hates President Bush and will thus hate the Republican nominee as a result) – it’s that darn primary standing in the way. What was an enterprising young socialist to do? Rely on free, adoring publicity from the leftists in the media. Duck soup. Sorry, Hillary, that’s what you get for playing by the rules and assuming that children accompanying their parents would not get votes in the caucuses.

But what does all this have to do with the psycho-epistemology of Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. alias Barry Soetoro alias Barry Davis? Obama is one mixed up dude. Obama was born to a young woman who did her best to have relations with black men and foreigners just to annoy and anger her father. The man Obama thought was his father deserted him before he could get to know him. His step-father lasted slightly longer, but he eventually deserted him too. A few years later his own mother deserted him. What did he do to deserve that?

No doubt he wasn’t sure what he did to deserve that, but he had to blame it on something. He couldn’t consciously blame it on himself – that’s certainly a tough punishment to swallow. His mother, Ann? Did she desert him because he was black? His father, Barack, Sr.? Did he desert him because he was white? His stepfather? Did he desert him because he was both black and white? Frank Marshall Davis? He couldn’t even bring himself to admit he was his father.

A young man seeking his identity experiences the four most significant adults in his life shoving him aside. That is not good for one’s psyche. But the mind is a powerful instrument. It does not easily lend itself – at least consciously - to blaming oneself, especially when that is not where the blame should be directed. But it is also difficult to blame and hate a mother, father, stepfather, and another father. What to do?

Obama has to put the blame somewhere. Racism is the most logical place. The fault must lie with white America. He was shunned because of his race. That was what Frank Marshall Davis drummed into his impressionable teen-age mind.

What, after all, does Obama know about white people, the people Davis taught him never to trust? What white people has Obama known? Certainly he has not surrounded himself with the most admirable members of white society. Who have Obama’s white associates been? A mother who was pregnant and unmarried at the age of 17? Drug dealers in college? Pentagon bombers on the lamb from the FBI? Corrupt Chicago politicians? The corrupt Governor of Illinois? Influence peddlers like Tony Rezko? Power elites of the Democrat Party, like Howard Dean? Keith Olbermann?

The only admirable white people who were ever close to Obama may have been his mother’s parents. But Stanley has been dead for 16 years, and Obama never seemed to show much love or respect for his grandmother – despite having raised him and put him through college. He pretty much threw grandma under the bus when flailing for some kind of excuse for pretending not to be influenced by Jeremiah Wright.

Obama believes that America, and especially white capitalist America, is evil. He has to do something about it, to repair the damage done to him, to insure that no other young black man ever has to meet his same, disadvantaged fate.

Of course, Obama never was very disadvantaged, at least from a financial standpoint. He attended the best private school in Honolulu. (Heck, he lived in Hawaii, which is a far cry from being in Joe Biden’s toughest-place-in-America Scranton, Pennsylvania.) He attended Occidental College, then Columbia University, then Harvard Law School. He took a trip to India, Pakistan, and Indonesia. He worked at a law firm. He was a state senator. He did not live a life of destitution. His was not the hard-scrabble life he and his wife make it out to be.

Obama, Sr. was a bureaucrat in the Kenyan government who studied in Hawaii and Harvard. He certainly wasn’t in the bottom portion of Kenyan society. The well-educated Lolo Soetoro worked for a major oil company, and earned enough so that wife Dunham didn’t need to work.

Grandpa Stanley managed a furniture store. Grandma Madelyn was a bank vice-president. They lived in a nice high-rise condo in Honolulu and shelled out the dough for much of Obama’s education. They weren’t poverty cases.

But Obama’s political career requires that he be the son of a poor goat-herder and a farm girl from Kansas. Neither the mass media nor the Obama campaign mention that the candidates’ parents met while studying Russian, or that they were both socialists.

No, Obama needs to portray himself as a humble man who understands what it is to have a tough life – while he whines about the high price of arugula and his wife has $400 lobster and caviar lunches on the campaign trail.

Obama wants to place himself in the Oval Office, yet he has virtually no executive or management experience. He spent practically half his life being a student, and the other half running for elected office. He had one “normal” job, working at Business International Corporation in New York, which he said taught him the “coldness of capitalism.” Otherwise he has been a community organizer, a lawyer, and a politician.

Obama’s experience as an “executive” involves his being on the boards of the Chicago Annenberg Connection (CAC) and the Woods Fund. In both positions his primary function seems to have been doling out millions of dollars in grants to non-profit organizations that many would refer to as leftist. Obama and Ayers whizzed though perhaps $100 million at the CAC in order to “improve Chicago schools.” (Ask any Chicagoan if that money was well spent.) Money from the Woods Fund went to places like Reverend Wright’s church and ACORN.

Obama certainly has persuasive skills, but he has no executive skills. He knows how to rile up a crowd. He assembles a group of people and does his best to tell them how miserable their lives are and he makes sure he blames someone other than them. Then he tells them they have the power to change their lives – but he must be the instrument of that power.

The skill with which Obama delivers a speech is obvious when one merely reads it. On paper, his speeches are a sophomoric mish-mash of clichés and silly sentiment. He says nothing. But when he delivers the speech, the crowd hears something special. Each person hears what he wants to hear. But Obama will not be able to deliver on all his lofty promises. Those who would not even listen to his speeches will be disappointed if he is elected. Those who listened but heard what they wanted to hear will be disappointed when they do not get it.

A good campaigner is not necessarily a good chief executive. Executive skills require making decisions. Obama is incapable of making difficult decisions. He receives daily e-mails from staffers telling him what questions to expect and how to answer them. He has advisors numbering in the hundreds. His decisions have already been made for him. They have been made by the people who bought and paid for his candidacy: the unions, the trial lawyers, the environmentalists, the abortion supporters, the beggars – both individual and corporate - waiting for their hand-outs, the big-government advocates, the anti-Israel lobby, and the European socialist governments.

Obama is not an expert at anything but memorization and manipulation. He knows enough about a lot of things to fool a lot of people. Everyone knows someone like that. But most of those people haven’t got enough power to cause much damage to others. Obama may be given the power.

Obama has somehow been able to convince people that he has the skills to solve everyone’s problems. How does he do that? By telling them that they are not the cause of their problems. He intentionally removes responsibility from them. The cheering crowds have done nothing wrong to deserve their terrible fate. It is the fault of someone else. It doesn’t matter where the blame is directed, it can change from speech to speech - the white man, the bankers, the Republicans, Wall Street, the oil companies, the establishment – the blame always belongs somewhere else. The adoring crowds leave the Obama performance feeling good. That is all that matters, because that is all he needs. No one stops to consider how he will solve the problems or who will pay the bill, because Obama has promised he will take care of it and someone else will pay the bill.

Being President of the United States requires decisiveness, a trait Obama has certainly not displayed. He has, in fact, shown the opposite, in his 130 “present” votes in the Illinois State Senate. Voting “present” is a way of avoiding the issue. It also provides future cover. If the legislation proves popular, Obama can say “I did not vote against that bill.” If the legislation proves unpopular, Obama can say, “I did not vote for that bill.” Those “present” votes show that Obama is cunning, but they do not illustrate decisiveness.

Even as a community organizer, Obama avoided decisions and responsibility. He taught the demonstrators the tactics, and then let them engage in the protest marches and sit-ins. They risked arrest; he didn’t. He was above the dirty work. That was for the common folk. He was the gifted orator. His job was merely to inspire. Let someone else do the heavy lifting.

Obama is a classical narcissist, one who has feelings of grandiosity and a need for admiration. He is self-important. He believes he has accomplished a lot, when he has accomplished very little. He exaggerates the positive things he has done, while denying or hiding the negative. He believes he is special, that he must serve some better purpose, and that fate intended for him to be that person. But what he needs to accomplish he will do only by exploiting others. His acts of compassion require other people’s money, time, and effort. He is the master coordinator. He is arrogant. No one may question him. He deserves the credit, the attention, the worship.

Deep in the subconscious of many narcissistic and arrogant people are feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem. To most, that certainly does not sound like Obama. How can someone who demands a football stadium for his nominating convention acceptance speech have low self-esteem and feelings of inadequacy? The answer is that those feelings are in the subconscious; they are not recognized or accepted by the conscious mind. But the subconscious mind nevertheless drives the conscious mind to do what is necessary to alleviate its pain.

The subconscious mind of Obama knows that he is a fraud. But his conscious mind cannot accept that. The conscious mind must distort or hide the truth. If the truth sees the light of day, not only does his campaign collapse, so does his entire being. His entire self must be devoted to maintaining the image and hiding the facts. Nothing can be allowed to interfere; the personal stakes, as well as the political stakes, are simply too high.

This is not a case of minor lies being exposed. This is not the case of someone who tells a fib, is caught in the lie, feels remorse, and then goes back about the process of living. This is a person whose entire life has been a lie. This is someone who has never been able to trust anyone, and who trusts no one. This is someone who needs power to continue the charade. This is someone who can be dangerous.

Lies have become part of Obama’s life. In an appearance at the Saddleback Church in July of 2008, he was asked “the abortion question” – when does life begin? The anti-abortion, Christian audience would have wanted Obama to say, “Life begins at conception.” For him to have answered that way would have been, for him, a lie. Instead, he responded, “That’s above my pay grade.” His carefully calculated answer was meant to suggest he was content to leave those things to God; this was the perfect answer, showing he was thoughtful and “deep.” It was, of course, also a lie. In his entire career he has supported abortion, and has never hesitated to “play God” with the lives of innocent babies, even going so far as to vote against a law that would require giving medical attention to a baby that survives an abortion. Obama, not God, decided those babies should be left to die, unattended, in a cold, stainless steel hospital pan.

Obama, in his eyes, does not need to tell the truth. In his eyes, he is above the law. Two weeks before he announced he would run for President, he paid off $400 parking tickets that went back as far as his days at Harvard. He paid them only to remove his disregard for the law from the list of possible campaign issues. (And because laws shouldn’t have to apply to him, he was able to escape the late fees and penalties an ordinary citizen would have been required to pay.)

It is not enough for Obama to be a high-priced lawyer with his Harvard degree on the wall. He must have more. He must also prove to Barack Obama, Sr., to Lolo Soetoro, and to Ann Dunham that he is worthy of the love that they refused to give him. “How dare you have abandoned the future President of the United States? The problem most certainly could not have been with me – look what I have achieved!” It is not even enough for Obama to be President of the United States. He must prove himself further by accomplishing the socialist goals and dreams of Frank Marshall Davis.

Although Obama needs to pursue the dreams of Davis, he cannot admit his relationship with him. To do that would destroy both the phoniness of his candidacy and the reality of his past. To protect his political life, he cannot acknowledge Davis; but to protect his psychological life, he must embrace Davis. Ironically, Obama’s psyche was shaped by people who had disowned him, and now, to keep his political career alive, he must disown his own father.

Don Fredrick

October 26, 2008

Copyright 2008, Don Fredrick

Note: Some are of the belief that Obama’s father was neither Barack Obama, Sr. or Frank Marshall Davis, and that his father was the murdered civil rights activist Malcolm X (Malcolm Little). That, too, would explain a lot about the psychology of Obama. Only time - and the release of documents or DNA evidence - will tell…