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When Barack Obama dreams of his late father, what does he dream about? Today we learn from Politico (by way of No Left Turns) that Obama Sr. wrote an article in 1965 for the East Africa Journal discussing the promise of and problems with socialism in post-colonial Africa. According to Politico, the 43-year-old essay reveals much "not only about the senior Obama's grasp of economic theory but also the iconoclastic politics that, his son would later write, sent him into the spiral of career disappointment that concluded with his death in 1982 in his native Kenya."

But what, if anything, does it tell us about Barack Obama, Democrat and candidate for president of the United States?

The fact that Barack Obama Sr. was a leftist is hardly news. The article is a critique of Kenyan economic policy from the left. Obama argues, essentially, that "African socialism" may not be African or socialist enough. Shocking, but true.

(As an aside, this story -- esoteric though it may be -- should throw a little more cold water on one aspect of this "secret Muslim" nonsense: the assertion that Obama Sr. was a "radical Muslim." Fiddlesticks. There is plenty of Marx and zero Muhammad in the essay. That is, if anyone cares to notice.)

At first blush, I'm inclined to agree with Julie Ponzi, who is "not sure that it is fair to pin the views of an absent father onto his son or to suggest as some bloggers have that this paper is a missing link in understanding the development of Barack Obama’s political thought."

Blogger Greg Ransom, however, does make an interesting case for why Obama Sr.'s essay matters and what it may mean.

"If there is a mystery at the heart of Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father," Ransom writes

one thing is not left a mystery, the fact that Barack Obama organized his life on the ideals given to him by his Kenyan father.  Obama tells us, "All of my life, I carried a single image of my father, one that I .. tried to take as my own." (p. 220)   And what was that image?  It was "the father of my dreams, the man in my mother's stories, full of high-blown ideals .." (p. 278)  What is more, Obama tells us that, "It was into my father's image .. that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself."  And also that, "I did feel that there was something to prove .. to my father" in his efforts at political organizing. (p. 230)

So we know that his father's ideals were a driving force in his life, but the one thing that Obama does not give us are the contents of those ideals.  The closest he comes is when he tells us that his father lost his position in the government when he came into conflict with Jomo Kenyatte, the President of Kenya sometime in the mid 1960s; when he tells us that his father was imprisoned for his political views by the government just prior to the end of colonial rule; and when he tells us that the attributes of W. E. B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela were the ones he associated with his father and also the ones that he sought to instill in himself.  (p. 220)  This last group is a hodge podge, perhaps concealing as much as it reveals, in that it contains a socialist black nationalist, a Muslim black nationalist, a civil rights leader, and (at the time indicated in the memoir) an imprisoned armed revolutionary.

Interesting, but not entirely persuasive. Contrary to Ransom, it seems to me that Obama's "hodge podge" actually reveals more than it conceals -- Obama was raised by a left-wing family and naturally gravitated to, studied and revered black revolutionaries. He talks about reading Frantz Fanon, for heaven's sake! That's all fairly clear from his memoir, but I might not be considering what the casual reader would take away from Obama's book. In that respect, Ransom's exhaustive tour through the book might be useful.

Except the only people likely to embrace Ranson's project are like-minded conservative critics.  Ultimately, I think Ransom and other conservatives risk instilling the elder Obama's essay with more significance than it deserves. Obama Sr.'s article merely sheds a little more light on a picture that has been emerging for months now. Michelle Obama's much-discussed public statements as well as the inflammatory preaching of Jeremiah Wright revealed the picture and put it in focus.  Obama's late remarks on the bitterness of rural America further solidify it, as does the ongoing story of Obama's ties to Tony Rezko.

And what does the picture show? Obama, far from being a post-partisan savior, is a conventional left-winger tempered by Chicago politics. Is he a "secret Marxist" then? Probably not. But seen this way, Obama suddenly seems much less inevitabl. It's certainly enough to embitter a man.