“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
Whatever you think of their politics, give Barack and Michelle Obama one thing: They always seemed to be happy together. They always beamed at each other as they took their regular—expensive—vacations overseas at taxpayer expense.
But the most extensive biography ever written about the Obamas drops a bombshell on these phony photos: Barack Obama settled on marrying Michelle because he thought it would make him more electable when he ran for president.
A biographer hints that Barack Obama’s real love was a woman named Sheila Jager, who is half-Dutch and half-Japanese.
The two lived together in Chicago when they were students, talked about marriage “all the time” and had a passionate affair. “Sex was a big part of our relationship,” Jager told Obama biographer David J. Garrow.
Garrow interviewed 1,000 people who knew the Obamas, and the book he wrote, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, is 1,461 pages of pure dynamite.
Garrow became the first person to reveal that Barack proposed to Jager twice and met her parents in 1986.
They objected because Jager was only 23 years old, but Obama would develop some politically motivated objections of his own: Barack changed his mind about marrying Jager, because he knew it was considered “a problem for a black politician to be married to a white woman,” Garrow said.
When an interviewer asked Garrow point-blank if “the decision to choose Michelle over Jager was a politically calculated move that was aimed at helping his future aspirations as a politician,” Garrow shot back, “Without a question.”
“Barack concluded that he couldn’t pursue a political future if he married Sheila Jager,” Garrow said.
“That is so powerfully clear in so many things Sheila remembers from their relationship,” Garrow told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
He said Obama learned from a black state senator named Richard Newhouse that “everyone in the local black community believed that he couldn’t pursue a further political life because he had a white wife.”
Obama wanted power so bad he could taste it—and he wasn’t going to make the same mistake, so Jager had to go.
Jager, who is now a professor of East Asian Studies at liberal Oberlin College in Ohio, said politics started to overwhelm their romance—because Obama had his sights set on becoming president 21 years before his historic election.
“I remember very clearly when this transformation happened, and I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into our relationship, he already had his sights on becoming president,” Jager told Garrow. “He became…so very ambitious.”
Barack started seeing a woman named Michelle Robinson—but he still saw Jager on the side. He cheated on Michelle for the first year they were together.
But he was struggling with his own racial identity, deciding he had to consider himself 100% black.
Marrying Michelle became the “resolution of his black identity” and “was directly linked to his decision to pursue a political career,” Jager told Garrow.
After his marriage, Obama promoted his own career at his family’s expense—because Michelle was against him being involved in politics. She suggested he become a high school principal instead.
“He enters all of those campaigns over Michelle’s objection,” Garrow said.
Michelle had to raise his newborn girls, because Barack said he was too busy with more important business in the state’s capital.
The author, David Garrow, isn’t some right-wing hatchet man. He’s a Pulitzer Prize winner who calls himself “progressive Bernie Sanders liberal,” and “a very active member of the Democratic Socialists of America.”
It’s going to be hard to call him a sexist or racist, since he wrote the biography of Martin Luther King Jr. and another book praising the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.
“I’m a professional historian, so my ‘feelings’ don’t loom very large at all,” Garrow said about the Obama book. “It’s the factual record of what he said and did.”
And Garrow took no prisoners. He said black frustration with Obama was justified.
“After he was elected in 2012, he could have done more for the black community of America,” Garrow said, but “he didn’t do so.”
Instead, Republican Donald Trump brought black unemployment to a historic low.
Garrow is especially hard on the Obamas’ lavish lifestyle after they left the Oval Office—charging $400,000 to give one of his long-winded speeches and renting a luxury mansion in D.C. for $22,000 a month.
Barack Obama has it all—all except the woman he loved, Garrow said.
Garrow’s book gives a sad portrait of a man who sold out the people closest to him for political power.
Barack Obama would have been better off if he married Jager and became an inner-city principal—and so would America.
Frank Holmes is a reporter for The Horn News. He is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”