Where Obama's ideas came from

ALMOST HALF-WAY through his US presidency, Barack Obama will visit Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, on Nov 9 and 10, 2010. A feature of his stop-over will be a tour of Istiqlal, the largest mosque in South East Asia and reputed to be the third largest in the world.

He is also scheduled to visit three other Asian democracies: India, South Korea (G20 Summit) and Japan (APEC Summit).

In the United States, two new books attempt to identify his source of inspiration and belief.

Dinesh D'Souza, president of King's College in New York City, is the author of The Roots of Obama's Rage (Regnery Publishing). In his recent Forbes magazine feature, ‘How Obama Thinks’ (Sep 27, 2010), D'Souza describes Obama as the world’s ‘last anticolonial’ leader.

However, Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg’s new book, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton University Press), reportedly places Obama firmly in the American tradition of “philosophical pragmatism and civic republicanism”.

According to the New York Times (Oct 28, 2010) Loppenberg told a recent seminar in New York: “Adams and Jefferson were the only anti-colonialists whom Obama has been affected by.”

Both books comment on the influence of Obama’s father, the late Barack Hussein Obama, Sr, who was a senior Kenyan government economist.

One significant document authored by Obama Sr has been located to date - “Problems facing our socialism” - a critique of Kenyan government policy on development and alignment published in the East Africa Journal in 1965, two year’s after Kenyan President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta declared the country’s independence from British rule.