Erstellt am: 13. 1. 2012 - 22:00 Uhr

The Making of a Global President

A Saturday Reality Check Special exploring the people and places which influenced Barack Obama as he was growing up and shaped the man who Americans chose to be the first black president of the United States.

US election year is underway. The Republicans have started their campaign and after caucuses in Iowa and the New Hampshire primary, Mitt Romney has emerged as the frontrunner. President Barack Obama formally announced his bid for re-election in April 2011. Others have also declared their intentions to seek the Democratic nomination, but we’re not really expecting to see a real challenge, are we? Four years ago today, Democratic hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton faced each other in a TV debate. Clinton was ahead in the polls. Ten months later history had been made.

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But what made the man who Americans chose as their leader? What was it about him that gave him the edge at that particular point in history? What were the influences that shaped his as a person and gave him the kinds of insights and skills for which he has now become well known? Think, for example, of the landmark “New Beginning” speech he delivered at the University of Cairo on June 4th, 2009 or the fact that he won 56% of the female vote, exceeding the normal Democratic advantage. These are the kinds of questions that biographer Dr. Dinesch Sharma addresses in his book “Barack Obama in Hawai’i and Indonesia: the Making of a Global President”.

In this week’s Reality Check Special we hear from Dr. Sharma, who is a cultural psychologist, about his investigation into the first 18 years of Barack Obama’s life and how it helps to understand the forces that influenced him. Sharma visited the places where Obama spent his childhood and teenage years and interviewed people who knew him. “These years fundamentally shaped the traits for which the adult Obama is noted: his protean identity, his nuanced appreciation of multiple views of the same object, his cosmopolitan breadth of view, and his self-rooted "outpost" patriotism” writes Sharma who was also “looking at the facts on the ground in terms of the social and historical factors on the ground that drove the American electorate to choose this man at this point in history”.