Half-brother George Obama is what Barack Obama pretends to be

My Las Vegas-based, internationally syndicated colleague Steve Miller sent me a video last night, which introduces Barack Obama’s half-brother George to the world from faraway Kenya. The video is touted by CNN as the “first televised interview of Obama’s half brother”. While the Democrats were grooming Barack Obama for his Big Night in Denver, CNN must have been tracking down the half-brother who Italian Vanity Fair discovered living in Kenya some two weeks ago. Whether intended that way or not, the George Obama interview, I think is the best thing CNN ever did.

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In a little more than three short minutes, the interview tells the story of an unassuming, plain spoken, humble man with a winning attitude. You don’t have to take my word for it when you can see for yourself here who George Hussein Obama really is. There is a sincerity about him and it is more than a charming smile that makes him disarming. George Obama was only six months old when his father died. The way he speaks and handles himself with CNN reporter David Mckenzie, who after all must have taken him by surprise, is remarkable. There is a testimony to be found in the statement he makes in response to the magazines who portray his lifestyle as impoverished and desperate when he says: “I was brought up well. I live well even now.” George is walking proof that you don’t have to live in a mansion, write a book or run for public office to have worthwhile dreams for the future. George’s dreams didn’t include addressing a nation from a makeshift Ancient Greek Temple on the anniversary of another man’s dreams. George dreams instead of completing his training as a mechanic so he can help his extended family. Without even mentioning the name “Michelle”, George, who grew up in what McKenzie terms “the ramshackle slums of Nairobi”, showed more class than his half-brother’s wife. That’s because he doesn’t blame his lot in life on the country in which he happened to be born. Of his mother country he said with the eloquence of simplicity that no contemporary politician seems to have: “I think I kind of like it here. I’m Kenyan so definitely I’d love to really live in Kenya.” If the media is trying to portray him as a charity case, hinting broadly that the candidate for the US presidency should step in and help, the half-brother of Barack Obama is not asking for help. George Obama is not trying to portray himself as anything other than what he is, a decent, down to earth Kenyan who comes not packaged with the audacity of hope, but packaged as someone who is working toward a better life. While reporters the world over are chasing down stories about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, whether or not he is too close to certain Chicago mobsters, trying to determine whether he will sell America out to radical Islamists, whether he is anti-American at heart, or even just whether there is any substance in his pinstriped suits, his half-brother living a world apart, seems to have pegged him for what he is. Barack Obama may or not be any or all of those things, but the one thing certain about Barack Obama is that he is a crass politician. And God only knows that politicians of every stripe everywhere are letting their people down. In his book, Barack Obama describes meeting his half-brother, still a child, as “painful”. George simplifies the occasion as what it must have been: “awkward”. “I think maybe you don’t have anything to say…it’s like you’re meeting someone for the first time and you have nothing to say.” Asked if he thought Barack Obama would win, he told McKenzie, “He will win because he wants to. In life what you want is what you’re supposed to get.” In real life George Obama is really what Barack Obama pretends to be.