Under false colours

‘With time,’ writes David Remnick, ‘political campaigns tend to be viewed through the triumphalist prism of the winner.’ Never more so, perhaps, than in Remnick’s idolatrous new biography of Barack Obama, which presents the First Black President’s ascension to the White House as nothing less than a glorious saga.

Deeply read — if not rooted — in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Obama is said to have derived his spectacular political success from the great and martyred prophet Martin Luther King, Jr and King’s closest disciples, especially John Lewis. In this account, by the editor of the New Yorker, Obama’s life journey began, metaphorically, on 7 March 1965, in the middle of the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, when hundreds of black marchers, led by Lewis and Hosea Williams, were halted by state troopers, reinforced by a deputised white mob, who bludgeoned and tear-gassed the demonstrators as they knelt and prayed.