Where did this commitment come from? Barack Obama has always been a man in search of identity; as he writes in "Dreams From My Father," "I was engaged in a fitful, interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself as a black man in America …" And that struggle centered on his father -- a father who abandoned him in childhood, and about whom he knew little. Little, that is, except for two basic facts: Barack Obama Sr. was black, and Barack Obama Sr. was a socialist who sought to "redistribute our economic gains to the benefit of all." President Obama has always attempted to identify with his black father rather than his white grandparents, and he has therefore sought to fill the paternal gap with black racialists rather than moderates of any stripe.
The Van Jones story isn't about another radical federal employee or even about President Obama's addiction to executive authority (he has appointed over 30 czars with whom he meets regularly, but he has held just one cabinet meeting since his inauguration). The Van Jones story is about our president: a man who fills the void in his emotional past with "authentic" black men who have no interior struggle for definition. President Obama has incessantly injected himself into racial matters that require no clarification (see Henry Louis Gates Jr.); he has turned every debate into a racial debate (see his 2008 campaign, which repeatedly referenced his "funny name" and the fact that he does not look like the "other presidents on the dollar bills"). He does so out of convenience -- few will argue openly about race with a prominent black man, no matter how extreme. More than that, however, he obsesses about race out of insecurity.
President Obama's pathologies are playing out before us on a national stage. Unfortunately, the policies and appointees his pathologies produce are not merely wrongheaded -- they are dangerous. How much racial polarization and economic and international instability must we endure to fill the hole that Barack Obama Sr. left in his son's heart?