by Bryan H. Wildenthal (July 20, 2024)
(See Copyright & Permissions Note on Vita & Contact page. Updated October 29, 2024. See also my August 15 and October 11 essays on Vance.)
Just to be clear, I didn’t invent the term “Faux-Bama.” But I haven’t seen any previous use of it to describe the Republican vice presidential nominee, so perhaps it’s my coinage in that sense.
Senator Vance, like a previous Republican vice presidential nominee, might exclaim: “That was really uncalled for, senator!” (Ok, nitpickers, overlook that I’m not a senator.) But I could reply, like Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, the 1988 Democratic vice presidential nominee, debating Senator and future Vice President Dan Quayle (minutes 58-59 in the linked video): “You’re the one … making the comparison, senator!”
Vance’s Comparison to Obama: Take 1
Vance’s supporters are now eagerly comparing him to former President Barack Obama. Vance himself launched the comparison more than seven years ago with the lack of shyness typical of ambitious politicians, in a New York Times opinion essay on January 2, 2017, entitled “Barack Obama and Me.”
You can’t make this shit up!
Obama was, at the time, concluding two successful terms as only the fifth president since the Civil War — after Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan — to be elected twice (or more in FDR’s case) by absolute majorities of American voters.
Vance was then a 32-year-old less than four years out of law school, author of one book (a memoir largely about himself, naturally) and a contributing opinion writer for the Times — bet he wishes he could erase the latter line on his resume!
Former President Donald Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen didn’t invent the “Faux-Bama” moniker either. But Cohen made what appears to be the most prominent use of it when he described in 2020 how Trump in 2012 created a video with an Obama look-alike actor he pretended to “fire” in a parody of his TV show “The Apprentice.” (Again, can’t make this stuff up.)
As far as I can tell, this sardonic nickname was first used in 2009 by Bryan Farrell on the progressive website Waging Nonviolence. He was describing an Indonesian Greenpeace activist who posed as the newly elected President Obama to call for stronger action on global warming.
In Fairness, a Legitimate Comparison in Some Ways
In fairness, there are some points of comparison between Obama and Vance. Both come from financially modest backgrounds (more so in Vance’s case), struggled with the pain of absent fathers, and achieved crucial tickets to success with degrees from elite law schools (Obama at Harvard, Vance at Yale). Each won election as U.S. senator from a big midwestern state. And both were nominated for national office on major party tickets.
As Vance noted in his 2017 Times piece, both he and Obama also published youthful memoirs that were well-reviewed by many — though some have criticized Vance’s 2016 book as mediocre and superficial in its social, economic, and political analysis, and the 2020 Netflix film based on it has been widely panned as unwatchable dreck.
I haven’t read Vance’s book or seen the movie. My higher priority lately has been to read more about his political beliefs and principles — or lack of same — and what that and his support for Trump’s return to power portend for American democracy. For starters, read this excellent overview by Zack Beauchamp at Vox — and prepare to be very afraid. It is also curious to contemplate Vance’s evolution from harsh critic of Trump in 2016 to the MAGA sycophant he has now become.
In fairness (again, trying hard here), Vance’s 2017 essay had some kind and thoughtful things to say about Obama, whose “example,” Vance said, “offered something no other public figure could: hope.”
Vance seemed to reveal some emotional vulnerability. He linked himself — superficially and debatably — with both Obama and former President Bill Clinton as having shared “unstable” childhoods raised by “a single mother” with support from “loving grandparents.”
Vance wrote: “I wanted so desperately to have what [Obama] had — a happy marriage and beautiful, thriving children. But I thought that those things belonged to people unlike me, to those who came from money and intact nuclear families. For the rest of us, past was destiny. Yet here was the president of the United States, a man whose history looked something like mine but whose future contained something I wanted. His life stood in stark contrast to my greatest fear” (that he, Vance, might sabotage himself with a “sex scandal” as he viewed Clinton as doing).
If that seems just a bit weird … well … yeah.
Vance concluded that he would “miss” Obama as president, in a personal if not political sense, and labeled it “one of the great failures of recent political history that the Republican Party was too often unable to disconnect legitimate political disagreements from the fact that [Obama] himself is an admirable man.”
With partly credible but partly preposterous analysis, Vance noted: “Part of [that] … comes from this uniquely polarized moment in our politics, part of it comes from Mr. Obama’s leadership style — more disconnected and cerebral than personal and emotive — and part of it (though a smaller amount than many on the left suppose) comes from the color of his skin.”
Hmm, so … many Republicans demonized Obama in part because they just couldn’t stand the fact that he was cool and cerebral?
I don’t think so, senator.
Vance’s Comparison to Obama: Take 2
What I’d really like to focus on is the fourth-to-last paragraph of Vance’s 2017 essay, in which he ventures his most direct comparison of himself to Obama.
It’s a disarming paragraph — many have noted how charming and disarming Vance can be — because he concludes it by saying he “benefited … from the example of a man [Obama] whose public life showed that we need not be defeated by the domestic hardships of youth.” To which I’d say, well, yeah … but … plenty of Black men overcome “hardships of youth” or enjoy comfortable or even wealthy childhoods only to struggle the rest of their lives (unlike White men such as Vance or myself) with systemic and deeply entrenched racism.
Even Obama as president struggled with that (which Vance partly conceded, as quoted above). Consider all the multivarious attacks leveled by rightwing Republicans against liberal presidents and presidential candidates over the decades from McGovern to Carter to Mondale to Dukakis to Gore to Kerry to Biden to both Clintons.
How strange and puzzling — not — that of all those politicians only Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris have been dogged by “birther”-type conspiracy theories that they are somehow fundamentally foreign and un-American. Could it be that has something to do — and is it really “a smaller amount than many on the left suppose” — with “the color of [their] skin”?
Vance and Trump
A prime promoter of the racist birther fantasy about Obama was, of course, the man whose return to power Vance now eagerly supports. Trump has never apologized for his promotion of it and indeed blatantly lied about it in two very important ways when he finally, belatedly, and tersely abandoned it in 2016 — when, of course, he had every political incentive to drop the issue.
We should also recall Trump’s blatantly racist 2019 attack on four Democratic women in Congress in which he urged them to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came” — an attack incoherent as to the three born in the United States and no less outrageous as to the one born outside this country.
By his own account, Vance was evolving into a strong supporter of Trump during that very same time. One of the members of Congress Trump attacked is an immigrant and another is a daughter of immigrants; the mother of a third was born in Puerto Rico. It is glaringly obvious that their actual or perceived immigrant status was central (along with the non-White status of all four) to Trump’s attack, which was both racist and anti-immigrant.
Vance’s own wife is a daughter of immigrants from India. I can relate to that. My own husband is from India; he immigrated at age 27 and became an American citizen at 36.
We have reached a fascinating sociocultural moment in America in which two of the most prominent people in politics — the incumbent Vice President and quite possibly future President of the United States, and the wife of the man running to replace her, quite possibly a future First Lady of the United States — are both Indian American women lawyers and children of immigrants.
Look, I’m glad to stipulate — and in fact I believe — that Vance is not personally racist or anti-immigrant. He clearly loves and admires his accomplished and impressive wife.
Vance’s politics are what concern me. Why does he have no compunctions about supporting a presidential nominee with a clear and unapologetic record of racist and anti-immigrant statements? The foregoing are notoriously far from the only examples!
Vance and His Own Words
Vance himself has made statements and taken positions, as a writer and politician, that raise legitimate questions about his willingness to appeal to racism.
For example, Vance not surprisingly has taken offense at racially insensitive commentary on his wife. An intriguing profile of her influence on his life and career, published during his 2022 Senate campaign, quoted him denouncing a cartoon that mocked his criticism of the name change of the baseball team formerly known as the Cleveland “Indians” (referring to American “Indians” or “Native Americans”).
The cartoon invoked Vance’s wife’s (obviously different) identity as an Indian American, which I agree was wrong and out of bounds. (Update, Oct. 29, 2024: Hypocrisy Alert! Watch Vance tell Puerto Rican Americans and many others to just get over it already with regard to incomparably far more offensive racist jokes directed at them.)
But why was Vance going out of his way to attack the salutary and long-overdue name change in the first place, given the racially offensive and stereotypical nature of the former name and mascot? Must we be so naive or polite as not to suspect a cynical political appeal to White racial resentments?
Vance, at best, was quick to attack racism against his own wife while seeming to be indifferent to the racist and deeply harmful stereotyping of American Indians. (The term “Indian” itself is perfectly acceptable and actually more commonly used by “Native Americans” themselves, as I’ve learned over decades of teaching a relevant law course. But most American Indians strongly object on multiple well-founded grounds to using that or related terms as sports team names or mascots.)
And what did Vance mean in another New York Times opinion essay, “Why Trump’s Antiwar Message Resonates With White America“? Discussing the “burden” of America’s “humiliation” in the Iraq War, Vance claimed that “while no racial group has a monopoly on military service, white enlistees make up a disproportionate share of those wounded and killed in action.”
(Vance, in that essay published in April 2016, discussed his own decision to enlist in the Marine Corps after high school. He served in Iraq in a public relations unit. He noted he did not see any significant combat.)
Furthermore, Vance claimed in that essay (my emphasis), “the people who made [George W.] Bush president,” that is to say, Bush’s overwhelmingly White political base (the same MAGA base that now supports Trump), “are the same people who sent their children to fight in [Bush’s] wars.”
Fair enough that many of Bush’s rightwing supporters — many of them less educated and low-income — did send their kids into the military to fight America’s overseas wars.
But they certainly weren’t the only ones!
Plenty of low-income and less educated Black and Latino parents — overwhelmingly Democratic in their voting patterns, mostly not part of Bush’s base and still mostly not part of the Trump-Vance base today — also sent (and still send) their kids into the military! Still, I understand Vance would argue his essay’s focus was on White voters and why they supported Trump.
It was strangely grudging of Vance to concede that Whites do not have “a monopoly on military service.” That’s putting it mildly!
The proportion of Blacks in the overall American population has remained steady at about 12% for decades, while non-Hispanic Whites have declined from about 80% in 1980 to a bit less than 60% today. A Pew Research Center report noted that as of 2017, the year after Vance’s essay, “while the majority of the military is non-Hispanic white, black and Hispanic adults represent sizable and growing shares of the armed forces.”
Specifically, from 2004 to 2017, the percentage of racial and ethnic minorities in the military (mainly Blacks and Latinos) grew from 36% to 43% as the non-Hispanic White percentage dropped from 64% to 57%.
And where did Vance get his claim that many White soldiers not only gave their lives or suffered grievous injuries in Iraq (obviously true), but also “make up a disproportionate share” of wartime casualties?
First, in fairness, a widely publicized 2005 report did indicate a slightly higher percentage of non-Hispanic Whites among American military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan (71%) as compared to the overall percentage of non-Hispanic Whites in the active duty and reserve forces (67% according to that report, slightly higher than the 2004 figure reported by Pew).
That 2005 report also noted, however, that the White percentage of military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan (post-2001) was substantially lower than during the Korean War (80%), Vietnam War (86%), or first Persian Gulf War (1990–91) (76%).
A more recent analysis of all military deaths from 1980 to 2022 indicates that 77% were White (apparently including Hispanic Whites), while 17% were Black and 6% Native American, Asian American, multiracial, and “unknown.”
Note that the latter study indicates the Black percentage of military deaths during the last four decades is more than 40% higher than the Black percentage of the overall American population.
Vance’s broad 2016 claims — that (1) Whites “make up a disproportionate share of those wounded and killed in action” and (2) overwhelmingly White Republican voters are “the same people who sent their children to fight” in America’s recent wars — do not hold up very well.
Such claims are easily read as racially loaded appeals to White resentment. They selectively focus on White military service and sacrifices while downplaying the actually “disproportionate” military service and sacrifices of non-White Americans.
Perhaps Vance would not repeat such claims today. I hope not.
Vance’s Comparison to Obama: Take 3
Let us now return to that fourth-to-last paragraph in Vance’s 2017 “Obama and Me” essay, in which he most directly compares himself to America’s first (and so far only) Black president.
Vance writes that after his childhood and young adult struggles with poverty and family instability, he “achieved something roughly similar to the president’s early, personal accomplish-ments: a prestigious law degree, a strong professional career and a modicum of fame as a writer.”
But what exactly did Vance do with his university and law school degrees as compared to what Obama did with his?
Obama attended Occidental College before transferring to Columbia University and earning his bachelor’s degree there in 1983. After working for five years, he went to Harvard Law School in 1988 and graduated in 1991. Vance attended Ohio State University on the G.I. Bill and earned his bachelor’s degree there in 2009. He then went to Yale Law School, graduating in 2013.
Let’s focus on what the two men did between earning their university degrees and each of their first runs for the U.S. Senate: the years 1983–2004 for Obama and 2009–22 for Vance.
Obama worked at several brief jobs after university but primarily, from 1985 to 1988, he went to the impoverished South Side of Chicago and worked as a community organizer. He didn’t change the world but by all accounts his work was diligent and productive.
After earning his “prestigious law degree” at Harvard, Obama went back to Chicago and married his wife, Michelle, who was from the South Side herself. They had two daughters. He was a law professor at the University of Chicago, 1991–2004 (part-time most of those years). For six months in 1992, he led a successful voter registration campaign. He also worked, 1993–96, for a small Chicago law firm focused on civil rights and economic development.
And in 1995, just before he turned 34, Obama published his own youthful memoir. It was not a big seller at the time. Vance has bragging rights there. His 2016 book (whatever its merits), published when Vance was almost 32, was immediately a bigger sales success.
Obama’s political career began modestly in 1996 with his election to the state legislature, where he served eight years. He was not bankrolled by any billionaire. Many Trump-Vance supporters probably think he was launched in politics by someone like George Soros (a favorite rightwing whipping boy). But, just for the record, he wasn’t. (This is in striking contrast with Vance, as we will see.) Obama ran in a Democratic primary for Congress in 2000, but was soundly defeated.
Based largely on his good reputation earned in the legislature and his community work in Chicago, and boosted by a lucky series of withdrawals of major competitors, Obama in 2004 won election as U.S. senator from Illinois. In another lucky break, Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry chose Obama to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. The speech was a big hit and the rest, as they say, is history.
As noted, Obama got some lucky breaks and he skillfully took advantage of them. But he was never a politically “made man.” On the contrary, he was always, fundamentally, the insurgent and the outsider, both in his failed run for Congress in 2000 and his improbable Senate victory in 2004, and again in his even less probable victory against Hillary Clinton (part of the then-dominant first family of American politics) in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary campaign.
Vance leans heavily into his personal story as a young man rising from deeply troubled hardscrabble origins in southern Ohio. He no doubt deserves great credit for overcoming the odds and whipping his life into shape with service in the Marine Corps, educational success, and an apparently happy family life (he and his wife have three children).
After earning his “prestigious law degree” at Yale, Vance worked at several short-term jobs including clerkships for a U.S. senator in Washington D.C. and a federal district judge in Kentucky.
But in stark contrast to Obama’s return to Chicago, Vance did not settle again in Ohio for several years and he has never returned to work in the impoverished community from which he came.
Instead, during 2016–17, Vance went off to San Francisco to become a venture capitalist millionaire, at the VC firm owned by Peter Thiel, an extremist rightwing Silicon Valley billionaire.
As reported by Business Insider, “Vance attributed ‘pretty much’ his entire career to [Thiel’s] mentorship. If not for Thiel, he said, ‘I probably would have been doing something else’.” The article notes, however, that “Vance doesn’t appear to have made much of an impact at [Thiel’s VC firm]. He started the job two months before [his memoir] was published, and former coworkers told Insider that he was away much of the time, promoting [it]. ‘It never seemed like he was even working,’ one said. ‘It felt like his full-time job was the book.’ In an interview at the time, Vance laughed about his contribution to [the firm]. ‘How useful I’ve been on that front is probably debatable,’ he said. [He] lasted less than a year … and … didn’t close a single deal.”
In 2017 Vance finally did return to Ohio and seemed to find more success after joining another VC firm. In 2019 he co-founded a third VC firm. He became wealthy in the process.
In 2017 Vance also launched a nonprofit, “Our Ohio Renewal,” supposedly to fight the opioid epidemic. But it never raised much in the way of funds or accomplished anything meaningful. Ohio’s largest anti-opioid coalition never heard of it.
It appears pretty clear that Vance’s nonprofit was simply a stalking horse for his run for U.S. Senate in 2021–22. As Business Insider reported, it commissioned opinion polls and “spent more on ‘management services’ provided by its executive director — who also serve[d] as Vance’s top political advisor — than it did on programs to fight opioid abuse.”
Vance launched his Senate run with big-money backing. As Business Insider reported: “In May [2021], Thiel wrote a $10 million check — Vox reported it was the ‘biggest political bet’ of his career — to Vance’s political-action committee. … Some of the biggest investments that came out of Vance’s brief career in venture capital turned out to be for Vance himself.”
Vance’s Senate run disrupted the work of the VC firm he co-founded in 2019 and touted “to portray himself as a job creator,” according to Business Insider. “Under … what are known as ‘key man clauses,’ VC funds like [Vance’s] are sometimes forced to stop making investments, or even shut down, after a critical executive … steps away from the firm. … [O]ne of the fund’s investors said [it] had promised him Vance wouldn’t abandon the firm for politics. ‘I was personally disappointed,’ the investor told Insider, ‘after they said exactly this wouldn’t happen’.”
It appears doubtful Vance could ever have waged a viable campaign in the competitive Senate primary without Thiel’s crucial early backing. The second crucial factor in Vance’s primary victory was the endorsement he landed from Trump himself. Even so, as the New Statesman reported, he “only managed to scrape through the Republican primary … with a slender 32 per cent of the vote.”
Vance’s general election victory was similarly unimpressive. Trump carried Ohio by 8 points over President Biden in 2020, a more difficult year for Republicans. In 2022, with inflation raging and Biden deeply unpopular, Vance defeated his Democratic opponent by only 6 points with 53% of the vote.
As the New York Times recently reported, “Vance was [also] helped in that race” by “media relationships,” of which the “most important … have been with [Tucker] Carlson, the former Fox News host” and several others.
This backing from the rightwing “media ecosystem” ensured (my emphasis) that in political terms, just as in his personal business career — and again in stark contrast to Obama — “Vance was a made man.”
“Neoreactionaries” and “Monarchists”
It is doubtful that many rank-and-file Republican voters in Ohio or elsewhere are aware of exactly how weird and extreme some of Vance’s political ideas are — or those of his billionaire backer Peter Thiel or others Vance has invoked as political influences.
The future of American democracy may depend on whether all American voters pay attention and learn about it.
As Zack Beauchamp summarized in his recent Vox article, Vance has declared that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, “he would have carried out Trump’s scheme … to overturn the election results. [Vance] has fundraised for January 6 rioters.” He has “called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump.”
“Vance said that Trump should ‘fire every single mid-level bureaucrat’ in the U.S. government and ‘replace them with our people.’ If the courts attempt to stop this, Vance says, Trump should simply ignore the law. ‘You stand before the country, like [President] Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it,’ [Vance] declares.”
As Beauchamp notes, “Vance [was] referring to an 1832 case, Worcester v. Georgia, in which the Supreme Court ruled” in favor of Cherokee Indian “legal rights to land ownership. Jackson ignored the ruling, and … allow[ed] whites to take what belonged to Natives. The end result was … the Trail of Tears.”
I know this case and history well, having taught it for the past 28 years in my course on American Indian Law. The Trail of Tears was an act of genocidal mass murder in which about one fourth of the members of the affected tribes (more than 10,000 people) died on forced marches to Indian Country in what is now Oklahoma.
As Beauchamp notes: “For most Americans, this history is a deep source of shame: an authoritarian president trampling on the rule of law to commit atrocities. For Vance, it is a well of inspiration.”
Beauchamp notes that “Vance has cited Curtis Yarvin, a Silicon Valley monarchist blogger, as the source of [Vance’s] ideas about firing bureaucrats and defying the Supreme Court.”
“Monarchist”? Most readers will probably do a double-take at that. Didn’t Americans bleed and die on battlefields 250 years ago to free themselves from the curse of monarchy? Who the [bleep] is Curtis Yarvin?
An earlier Vox article by Andrew Prokop, in 2022, profiled Yarvin, who has also gone by the online pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug,” and his influence on Vance, Peter Thiel, and Blake Masters, another Thiel acolyte who thankfully lost a competitive U.S. Senate race in Arizona.
As the New Statesman noted, “Masters also vociferously opposes same-sex marriage,” yet even though Thiel backed Masters, “Thiel himself” (like me, I would note) “is gay and married to a man.” Vance also opposed same-sex marriage during his 2022 Senate campaign and rejected as a “bizarre distraction” legislation to protect marriage equality.
That probably doesn’t concern Thiel, since unlike gay Americans of lesser means, his billions allowed him to effectively purchase citizenship in liberal New Zealand, his apparent escape hatch after he destroys democracy and the rule of law in the United States.
For the third time in this essay, you just can’t make this stuff up.
As Prokop described, Yarvin is a “neoreactionary” — a fascinating contradiction in terms — a “computer programmer and tech startup founder [who] has laid out a critique of American democracy,” “elite academic institutions,” and the U.S. government.
“Besides Vance and Masters,” Prokop noted, “Yarvin has had a decade-long association with billionaire Peter Thiel” — Vance’s patron and paymaster — “who is similarly disillusioned with democracy and American government. ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,’ Thiel wrote in 2009, and [in 2022] he declared that Republican members of Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment … were ‘traitorous’.”
In sum, Yarvin is an extremist rightwing weirdo.
As Prokop described, Yarvin, compared to other far-right computer nerds, has “spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the U.S. government could be toppled and replaced — ‘rebooted’ or ‘reset,’ as he likes to say — with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm. Yarvin argues that a creative and visionary leader — a ‘startup guy,’ like, he says, Napoleon or Lenin” (!!!!!), “should seize absolute power, dismantle the old regime, and build something new in its place.”
Most “preferable,” Yarvin has suggested, “would be a government run like most corporations — with one leader holding absolute power over those below, though perhaps accountable to a ‘board of directors’ of sorts.” Yarvin “admits that ‘an unaccountable autocracy is a real problem’.” Ya think?
Rational people with a grip on reality can only feel contempt for Yarvin’s puerile ravings. Enjoying a privileged life in the liberal democracy he plots to overthrow, this ungrateful spoiled brat is apparently ignorant of basic facts and history undergirding his own field of work. He might want to review the reality that the internet as we know it would not exist without the funding and support of the U.S. government and “elite academic institutions” — the great American universities which for all their flaws are the envy of the entire world.
But apparently Vance takes Yarvin (“Moldbug”) seriously!
As Beauchamp notes, Vance himself is “an open admirer of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a rightwing politician who has systematically torn his country’s democracy apart. Vance praised Orban’s approach to higher education in particular, saying … ‘we could learn from [him] in the United States.’ The [Orban] policies in question involve … impos[ing] state controls over universities, turning them into vehicles for disseminating the government line.”
So Thiel thinks “freedom” and “democracy” are not “compatible”? It is a banal and commonplace insight, of course, that there are indeed tensions between those concepts and ideals, which are complementary but not the same — as any high school or undergraduate student of politics learns.
But if universities are reduced to being mouthpieces of authoritarian governments, we will assuredly have neither freedom nor democracy.
I think these “neoreactionary” authoritarians — Vance, Masters, Thiel, Yarvin, and all their ilk — should have gone with President Biden this past June to honor the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings.
On June 6, 1944, thousands of young Americans and allied soldiers died on the beaches for the democracy and the freedom these venture capitalists and their “monarchist” gurus would throw out with the morning trash.
For my part, I’ll never forget my mother breaking down in tears while gazing out at the endless headstones of one of the military cemeteries in Normandy when we visited in 1977. Her father, my grandfather, served in the Pacific during World War II in the U.S. Army Medical Corps (he came home alive and lived until 1987).
Vance’s Comparison to Obama: 4th and Final Take
Paraphrasing Lloyd Bentsen in 1988:
Senator Vance, we knew Barack Obama (and know him still).
Obama was a president, as you noted in 2017, who gave us hope.
Senator, you’re no Barack Obama.
The Skeptical Professor 