An Article by:

Steve Hammons

Originally published in the AmericanChronicle.com

http://americanchronicle.com/articles/53747

The recent controversial remarks from Cincinnati radio personality Bill Cunningham about Barack Obama at a McCain rally can be instructive about the Cincinnati region and Ohio.

I was born and raised in the Cincinnati area, was given the mandatory Ohio history classes in school and later went to college in southern Ohio at nearby Ohio University in Athens, a couple of hours east of Cincinnati.

The Cincinnati and southern Ohio region has a unique history that may be relevant in the run-up to the Democratic primary and the 2008 elections. This history and current flavor of the whole state might also be of interest.

We know that Ohio has been in the news during recent elections. Concerns about questionable election processes in Ohio have been part of this.

After Cunningham made his comments at the McCain rally, another Ohio politician followed him to address the crowd … former Congressman Rob Portman who represented the Cincinnati area.

Portman has been mentioned as a possible vice-presidential running mate with McCain, and a possible presidential candidate in 2012.

SPECIAL ELECTION

Portman left his congressional seat in 2005 to take a position in the George W. Bush administration as U.S. trade representative, which carries the rank of ambassador.

From 2006 to 2007, he took another position in the Bush administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget. He currently is working at a law firm in Cincinnati.

What is interesting is that when a special election was held for Portman’s congressional seat in 2005, the solidly Republican-voting area almost elected another attorney and Marine Corps Reserve major who had served in Iraq, and was running as a centrist Democrat.

That person was Paul Hackett, and during the campaign he said that he had opposed the Iraq war, yet felt it was his duty to volunteer to serve there.

In the congressional race in August 2005, Hackett, who notably opposed gun control, gained attention by referring to George W. Bush as a “chicken hawk” for avoiding combat service in Vietnam during that war.

Hackett also said Bush made “stupid” remarks such as “bring it on,” challenging insurgents in Iraq to attack U.S. troops there.

Hackett reportedly bluntly stated about Bush, “I’ve said I don’t like the S.O.B.”

Hackett’s opponent, Jean Schmidt, strongly supported Bush and the Iraq war.

Hackett lost by about 3,500 votes, getting about 48 percent of the vote in a district that routinely elected the previous Republican congressman there by about 70 percent.

This was a very surprising development in southwestern Ohio.

Obama’s stance on the invasion and occupation of Iraq may resonate in Ohio, where many active duty and reserve Army and National Guard personnel have been killed and wounded. Active duty Marines and Marine reservists from Ohio have also been killed and injured in high numbers in Iraq.

GEOGRAPHY AND DEMOGRAPHICS

The hilly country of southwestern Ohio around Cincinnati is very much like southern Indiana next door and northern Kentucky, just south across the Ohio River.

If you go further east, the southern neighbor becomes West Virginia and southeastern Ohio is considered part of the Appalachian region, as the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains start there. There is coal mining in this region.

Many people in southern Ohio speak with a slightly or markedly southern-type accent.

An ancient glacier that flattened central and northern Ohio stopped just short of the still-hilly southern part of the state.

In that flat central Ohio area, there are plenty of farms, small and medium-size towns with the state capitol of Columbus right in the middle.

Northern Ohio has a lot of the industrial areas around Lake Erie that have had historical links with Detroit and other centers of the old “rust belt” regions.

Many people here speak with a somewhat northern type of accent.

There are many good union people in Ohio. Sometimes their social and political views are centrist and they might find positions and candidates of either major party to be valid.

Some Ohioans who have benefited from unions and have a middle class or even upper middle class economic status are educated enough to know that the struggles of the union and labor movements over the decades resulted in the benefits they have now.

Some realize that the social, economic and political forces in America that supported or opposed working people and the unions were associated in certain patterns with the two major political parties. Some Ohioans who have benefited from unions may not fully understand this history.

Obama’s efforts and results in Ohio will be related to many of these these factors.

OHIO HISTORY AND ETHNICITY

Will Obama’s mixed-ethnicity be a factor? Probably. There are not too many Ohioans who had a father from Kenya, Africa.

Although Ohio is not as diverse as Hawaii, where Obama mostly grew up, raised by his grandparents from Kansas, there is some interesting ethnic and historical background.

Today, you can find people of virtually every ethnic background living in Ohio.

Italian-Americans in northern Ohio, German-Americans in southwestern Ohio, you name it. People from Eastern Europe often came to work in Ohio’s steel mills and mines.

In the early 1800s, Germans were a dominant ethnicity that settled early Cincinnati.

There reportedly were German or even Nazi sympathizers there before and during U.S. entry into World War II.

At the same time, some local German-Americans, including some distant relatives of mine, thought about changing their very German names to avoid problems during the war years, such as being thought of as “the enemy.”

It could be that some German-Americans in Cincinnati then went overboard the other way, feeling that being a “super American patriot” required certain political and social positions.

Going further back in history, during slavery, for a period of time, laws provided that escaping slaves who crossed north of the Ohio River into southern Ohio could not be returned to slave owners and were, as a practical matter, free.

Subsequent laws required escaping slaves to reach Canada to be free from slave catchers.

Amish and Quakers are found throughout areas of Ohio. The Underground Railroad was very active in southern Ohio during the slavery era. Some Quaker relatives of mine, according to stories and rumors, were involved in the Underground Railroad in the rural areas of southwestern Ohio.

There is a problematic element here. Next door in southern and central Indiana, the KKK is quite strong and active. This is also an aspect of the region in general.

My grandfather told a story about a relative of ours who, decades earlier, had run for sheriff in Kentucky. One night the KKK came to visit him, white robes and all. They told him if he was not on board with the KKK, he would not get elected.

He apparently told them he was not on their side … and he did not get elected sheriff.

Many people entering southern Ohio in the 1800s and 1900s were migrating from the Appalachian Mountain regions in Kentucky, such as some relatives of mine, and from elsewhere in the Appalachian region.

In more recent decades, many Appalachians chose to escape the poverty, oppression and violence of the coal-mining regions. Cincinnati was a center for these escapees too.

Among these migrating groups were people who were mixed-ethnicity European and Native American Indians such as the Cherokee whose native lands were in the Appalachian region.

Many early explorers in the 1700s had intermarried with the Cherokee and generations of mixed English-Scottish and Cherokee families lived in the region.

In the years before the 1839 “Trail of Tears” forced march west, and the confiscation of Cherokee lands and homes, many mixed-ethnicity families blended into the mainstream society, with only a few family stories or suspicions remaining about the Indian connections in the family tree, such as my own family.

Another interesting aspect of Ohio is that after the American Revolution, many Revolutionary War veterans and their families moved over the mountains to settle in eastern Ohio. Today, in the cemeteries of southeastern Ohio, you can find the gravestones of many who fought in the American Revolution.

Ohio University, where I went to college, was founded by Revolutionary War veterans.

I am happy to say that I had ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War and were associates and relatives of George Washington and the other American leaders of that period.

I also recently learned that, according to a genealogy researcher in the family, Obama and I are distantly related too.

How do all of these and many other cultural, ethnic, geographic and historical elements fit together in our current political landscape as we approach the Democratic primary and then the general election?

We will soon be finding out.

Obama will probably have significant support in Ohio from a wide variety of people.

I bet that many Ohioans will be thinking long and hard about Obama, about the invasion and occupation of Iraq, about the direction our country has been going in for the last few years and about themselves and their core beliefs, deep down inside.

Tags: democracy, ohio, politics, race, race relations, society, sociology, Steve Hammons
Categories: Commentary, Society, Democracy, Politics, Sociology, Steve Hammons
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I had never imagined that such a thing as Super-delegates could exist in the Democratic Party, until the media finally illuminated for the public this vile aspect of the Party structure; a component to the Democrat’s primary process that is exemplary all of the worse values and qualities that have defined the ethos possessed by the privileged factions in this country, who have endeavored – since this Nation’s inception – to monopolize its political institutions as much as possible while, nevertheless, maintaining a façade of democracy.

These anti-democratic patterns of political behavior – which spawn from ideological convictions that are so deeply entrenched that they qualify as genetic coding: the building blocks of American sociality – are embraced by a status that regards itself as uber-citizens: Those who possess self-alleged prowess and mental fitness enabling them not only to politically advocate their own interests, but to represent others in the process, despite the absence of any consent on the part of those for whom the elitist camp of surrogates will speak.

The core of elitist collaborators, who ultimately control, to a large measure, the American system of government, relish the opportunity to insert complexities into the political operations of this country. This amounts to a hierarchical inter-grouping of political decision-making bodies that distance – through the unnecessary multiplication of entities – the lowest common denominator of the American citizenry from the institutional spaces in which the final determinations, deciding the posture of American governance, are ultimately worked out.

Take for instance, the use of proportionate voting on the part of the Democratic Party. When analyzed in isolation from a detached perspective, this appears to be a relatively simple and straight forward reform that is designed to increase the influence of those who are not members of electoral majorities; providing an alternative to the more conventional American electoral practice in which the winner takes all. However, when purveyed within a scope that includes other provisions, such as the practice of valuating the votes of particular districts in some States higher than the votes cast in other districts in the same State: a device used to reward geographically defined populations that have demonstrated higher levels of electoral support for past Democratic Presidential Candidates – we are quick to fine that no concise and generally intellectually accessible description of the primary processes can possibly be constructed.

To cite another example of these excessively complicated processes, the State of Texas affords citizens the opportunity to vote twice in the Democratic Primary: once through a type of caucusing; the other instance by means of a primary ballot. I would endeavor to go on in further detail describing the primary selection practices, however, in order for me to do so, I would be pressed into conducting extensive investigations; a less than inspiring research project that would involve reading state party bylaws and state statutes as well as the National Democratic Party’s Bylaws, so that I could eventually interrelate all of the various stipulations, emanating from different bodies, when arriving at some sense of the applicable procedures that ultimately dictate how this ridiculous carnival is performed.

Because of this condition – what we can call political scholasticism – an inquiring layman, who is struggling to come to terms with the Primary selection process, will soon find himself lost in the convoluted mesh mash of procedures belonging to this social construct that is awash in a sea of obfuscation. In fact, I would venture to suggest that an accurate and precise conception of these complexities can only be rendered by the Party-hack-scholastics; some of whom were, in part, responsible for crafting this monstrosity. By extension, it surely is not spurious to suggest that there is a circuitous motivation inducing these insider-hacks into concocting what amounts to some kind of esoteric electoral alchemy: If one can monopolize the production of gold by virtue of a mastery of an arcane knowledge, then he would surely want his practices to remain opaque; or else, the precious metal could be produced by most anybody and it would fail to retain its special value.

It would be partially reassuring if the Democratic Primaries were an anomaly when understood comparatively within the full scope of institutions and practices comprising American politics and governance. Unfortunately, however, ranging back to the very inception of the United States, we can trace the same sort of Byzantine procedures, creating the same types of obscure and sometimes convoluted governing practices. To cite an obvious exemplar, consider the Electoral Delegates: super-voters entrusted with the capacity of choosing the President. Collectively, this body – which qualifies as an appendix in the sense that it is utterly extraneous to a democratic polity – counts as a democratically superfluous sub-aggregate, whose political Prerogative procedurally preempt the Popular Will of the Citizenry: The common denominator that could, otherwise, in a more authentic democratic environment, select the President independently and directly; whereby a majority or, even, a plurality of votes cast would act as the final adjudicator when selecting a candidate for the High Office.

The institution of the Electoral College, concocted by our Constitutional Founders, marks a latency in our sociopolitical history: a subtext that follows a pattern in which the uber-citizenry – those feigning the embrace of democracy while, concurrently, enacting political obstructions serving to compromise the Popular Will – has persistently committed to praxis a political philosophy that essentially boils down to a doctrinaire attachment to a Tory exceptionalness. Taking into consideration this pattern of elitist, anti-democratic conduct on the part of the privileged few in our Country’s history, one might ponder why there appears to be no resistance to this muffled, semi-tyrannical hegemony in our society.

First off, it should be mentioned that there have been popular insurrections against the American elites and the conditions they have endeavored to impose by virtue of the networked coordination of their economic and sociopolitical influences. The most salient instance of rebellion among American Plebes consisted of the formation of various Farmer Alliances and the People’s Party they would come to conjointly form.

However, despite the poignancy of the first Populist Movement during the final decades of the Nineteenth Century, this episode in American sociopolitical relations has been predictably left relatively untreated by our educational institutions. This lack of attention to an extraordinary event in American history is understandable, due to the fact that the Agrarian Revolt does not fit into the preemptive interpretive pattern organizing how we are supposed to conceptualize the course of American history. A thorough study and understanding of the People’s Party would expose contradictions to the Whiggish orthodoxy that enforces a dogmatic interpretation of American history in which democracy is in a state of perpetual improvement.

Therefore, the aforementioned question – why no rebellion to sociopolitical elitism? – is in need of reformulation: There have been a few, sparse uprisings to the old guard of American sociopolitical relations. However, why do we fail to treat these instances of American history hermeneutically? We neglect to come to an understanding of these instances according to their own terms and their own political self-understandings, along with the related complaints that they leveled against sociopolitical institutions that they regarded as oppressive; exploitative; unfair; or unfitting for a democracy to instantiate.

Rather, such incidents of insurrection find themselves excluded from the historical alacrity that is directed upon what are conventionally conceived as American sociopolitical accomplishments. In other words, historical events that are contrariwise to the established ideological order are treated as transient deviations; inconsequential digressions, diverting consciousness away from the core thesis embodied by the American Experience: An overall process that tells of advancement and ongoing maturation of American Society and of the American State, as they evolve into a more democratic condition. I would venture to assert that it is almost an Aristotelian metaphysics of political history: The American nation-state possesses an essence that is tantamount to its potentiality that it strives to actualize, which translates into a course of events where the essence of America protrudes and emerges; a process that parallels the advancement of perfecting democratic polity.

The Whiggish character of American historical orthodoxy, however, cannot be attributed with the function of the sole antecedent precipitating the compliant and obedient dispositions that have been all too pervasively exhibited by American Plebes. In order to understand the submissiveness among American Plebes, we need to direct our attention upon another factor; one whose presence is nearly ubiquitously represented by the portraits of our governing elites offered to us by mass media.  We are incited to a state of awe in relation to our institutions of political power by virtue of the fact that our media representations - due to the competition for ratings - are dramatizations of events; not objective reports of the events that have transpired that are of social significance.  From the epic framework in which corporate journalism is packaged, we are induced into believing that our politicos are heroes in the sense attribute to the term by the Ancient Greeks:  Apart from their mortality, they are godlike.  Consequently, we see the elites who govern us not only as competent, but as transcendent, as well.

This necessity is reinforced by the arcane procedures and practices that have come to litter – and, in fact, dilute – American systems of democratic participatory polity. By creating a situation whereby the elites are the limited few who actually possess an operational understanding of the processes through which political decisions are made – whether in the party primaries; or, to cite another example, the parliamentary conventions of Congress – they incite participatory reticence on the part of outsiders – who have neglected to pass through the socializing institutions through which the Power Elite transmits its esoteric knowledge and reproduces itself. Thus, we arrive in our analysis at the concept, wonkish: a self-congratulatory expression chattered in self-reference by the governing elite. This terminology’s meaning essentially boils down to the following definition: a state of public policy expertise.

The professionalization – (a concept that is most always predicated with the notion of expertise) – of politics resembles the historically recent trends in the rest of our society. Especially in the decades following the Information Revolution – which happened to transpire in a time span that overlapped with a movement in the American Academe toward the hyper-specialization of its professionalized disciplinarity – American governance has evolved into a condition that is sometimes referred to as technocracy. This political state can be characterized as one were the ability to formulate and administer public policy has become the province of technocrats in society; a form of plutocracy in which the common masses of citizenry no longer possess the knowledge and ability to fully participate in their political and governmental affairs. The task of governance has become highly compartmentalized, technical, and esoteric; whereas, seemingly, the only members of society who possess the necessary skills to govern are those trained in the specialized knowledge pursuits that are related to public policy concerns.

The propagation of this class of public-policy-technocrats – which includes the politicians who are trained in the lawmaking rituals from which earmarks and other benefits are procured for constituencies – is justified by the following chimera: In order to administer government, one must possess the technocratic specializations associated with being a Wonk; or else, he would buckle under the enormity of the intellectual, technical challenges he would face, and he will be rendered impotent, incapable of effecting the desired outcomes from participation in the processes of polity and public administration.

To quickly dispel such an polemic that insists upon the necessity of a technocracy in our society, we can refer to recent history: The FBI, following the 9/11 Tragedy and the scrutiny it incited – which was directed upon the agencies of the Federal Government that were previously thought to be protecting us from such calamities – it was found that the FBI possessed an antiquated information technology infrastructure; a partial explanation of the nearly unbelievable inability for the FBI “to Connect the dots.” In short, the FBI’s organization of information had yet to embrace mechanisms and processes associated with the informational economy and its digitalization of documents, that can, subsequently, be manipulated through computational machineries in order to find and establish relational values between and among the various types of information, which, subsequently, can be used in order to adduce inferences regarding additional parameters. Although this seems nearly inconceivable, the FBI’s manipulation of information was actualized, for the most part, in the deployment of pre-digital technologies, involving FBI employees sorting various document types, whose embodiment took the form of ink on paper, into filing cabinets.

It should be mentioned, there was some sort of computerization extant within the FBI. However, the dumb terminals provided to agents where practically left in their state of dumbness, because one could not use them to retrieve – through some effective search engine algorithm – materials relevant to the subject, or topic, that was being addressed by an FBI agent. As a result, the nodes belonging to the FBI’s informational networking – a system, which had, in some extensively qualified capacity, crossed the digital divide; or, at least, had attempted to accomplish as much – was never endowed with the intelligence – or smartness – that is associated with terminals that constitute the nodes belonging to an advanced informational network. It is only through the role assumed by a machine, acquiring a position within many linkages through which information is transferred in and throughout a network, that it becomes a useful tool for an agent looking to increase or intensify his knowledge and understanding of a topic by relating relevant information types to other information types.

As one can anticipate, the FBI, following the revelations related to the antiquated condition of its information management, set out to create an information architecture that was in line with contemporary technologies and procedures. However, the problem with the subsequent efforts made by the FBI, when working to modernize itself, can be characterized through the following: It was the FBI that was left in charge of the project. Consequently, after spending millions upon millions and expending valuable time and man-hours when attempting to install an information management system, the FBI finally had to report to Congress that the entire project had failed; could not be salvaged; and, therefore, had to be scrapped entirely.

Despite their follies, they persist in their arrogance, and continue to adopt a paternalistic posture in their relationship to the common citizenry. The present Administration –impervious to any scrutiny or oversight – continues to treat us like fools, constantly informing us of the attacks upon the domestic United States that it has thwarted; all the while refusing to disclose any convincing evidence to justify such fear mongering. Making it all the more ironic, the Bush Administration has failed to competently perform is duty to protect the American Public, not once, but on three occasions: the 9/11 Tragedy; the hyper-actively and impetuously devised invasion of Iraq; and the national shame and humiliation that was Hurricane Katrina. Nevertheless, despite their ostensible incompetency, these instances of failure are simply submitted through the ordinary propaganda assembly lines – where they are reassembled, packaged up, and refurnished – only to be publicized within the same garbled mess as all of the rest of the fear mongering and baiting with which we are unceasingly bombarded.

This audacity on the part of those who claim to know better than others know for themselves is justified by what amounts to a plutocratic apologia: The popular will of the unrefined and vulgar American people constitutes a threat to the vested interests of those who are endowed with the prudence and sound judgment necessary to advance not only their own interests, but, additionally, the long term interests of the nation as a whole.

This is the type of thinking that spawns absurdities such as “Trickle-down economics:” a theory of convenience, which Naomi Klein has revealed in some of her weblog writings to be a device deployed to obfuscate unbridled greed on the part of corporatists and, more generally, the ownership class in society; economic elitists who were in need of an intellectual diversion so that the swelling of class antagonisms, fomenting among those suffering under supply-side tax reforms, could be assuaged.

Although it might seem unfair to lump together, under the rubric of uber-citizens, elitist factions such as the Clintonian Political Machinery with the neoconservatives who currently control the Executive Branch of Government, we need to remember that the differences between neocons and neoliberals are all too scarce. There remains a thematic congruency between the two uber-factions; a convergence comparable to the opposing sides of a coin: The antithetical representations – where one side is emblazon with the head; the other side, the tale – that, despite their surface distinctions, continue to be of the same ilk; formed within the same mold; and made out of the same alloy.

In fact, both the Clintonian Third-way neoliberals – who feign empathy with the plight of American labor suffering from free-trade – and the neoconservatives – who do not even bother to express acknowledgement of such hardships – share in the same condescending rhetoric that is used to dismiss voices, emanating from the masses, that raise objection to American trade policies. The elitist corps have fashioned a rhetoric with pejoratives, such as neo-populism, that they use when disdainfully depicting the sociopolitical interpretations and reactions to socioeconomic conditions produced by the populace; which stand in contradiction to the uber-citizenry’s self-allegedly detached and rationally disposed estimates of current affairs and their overall significance within larger historical chains of events; narratives that are structured according to the Whiggish premise that American social conditions are always advancing toward a better state.

So, the final consideration that I shall make in this unwieldy chain of criticisms upon the conditions under which we, as Americans, suffer, can be put simply as follows: For how long are we to entertain this carnivalesque side-show hyper-real-democracy before we impose a realist aesthetic upon this charade and expose this chicanery for what it is?

Tags: clintons, corporations, corporatism, economics, government, neo conservatism, neoconservatism, politics, power, Russell Coles Blog, self governance
Categories: Commentary, Economics, government, Russell Cole's Blog, self-governance, Power, Politics, Corporations, neoconservatism
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An Article by:

By Steve Hammons

As Barack Obama continues to move ahead in the Democratic presidential primaries, we note that ethnic background and gender still seem to be playing important and interesting roles.

The many domestic and foreign affairs issues we face, such as the candidates’ positions on the invasion and occupation of Iraq, are also key parts of the debates and campaigns.

According to recent surveys and demographic studies, Hillary Clinton’s support, in part, comes from white women and older Democrats.

Reasons for this seem obvious.

Some white women see one of their own and feel that giving her support is appropriate. They identify with her. This seems like a natural response.

Older Democrats may feel comfortable with “another Clinton” and, should we say it? – they might feel more comfortable voting for an all-white candidate. This may be a factor for some Democrats with lower educational levels, which is also a group supporting Clinton to some degree.

Obama gets support from younger voters and increasingly from men. Since Obama is a relatively young father of two young kids, these voters might naturally identify with him. His youthful manner might also be attractive.

Men probably identify with him not just because he is a male, but because he is a male who appears to be admirable and a “regular guy.”

INVASION, OCCUPATION OF IRAQ

Some of the main differences between Obama and Clinton, of course, are their positions and actions regarding the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Many Americans now believe that intelligence information was inaccurate about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There is significant evidence that indicates this was intentional on the part of some people within the Bush administration and those connected to it.

Many people believe that the Bush administration was willing to send our troops to Iraq, to die and be terribly injured, for access oil, to assist other governments in the Middle East and to “finish the job” that former president George H.W. Bush wisely did not undertake – invading and taking over Iraq.

Some researchers say there were those in and associated with the Bush administration who wanted to pour monies of the U.S. Treasury into war profiteering and those who wanted to establish permanent U.S. bases in Iraq to influence and police the Middle East region for decades to come.

It has been said that there were Bush administration people and others who wanted to show they were “macho” – the “chicken hawks” – even though few of them had ever served in combat environments themselves. Many even avoided military service in Korea and Vietnam.

Other aspects of the invasion and occupation seemed to indicate the huge egos and incompetence of those associated with the Bush administration.

The deceptive and dishonorable nature of some of these players also seems evident to many people.

We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This has been, in large part, borrowed money. There are many hidden costs as well.

The Bush administration’s Iraq fiasco has nearly broken our Army, Army Reserve, National Guard and has broken the bodies, minds and spirits of many good American soldiers, Marines and their families.

According to some research, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including children, have been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Many more have been terribly injured.

Though she may not have intended all of these results, this is what Hillary Clinton supported when she voted to authorize military action by the Bush administration against Iraq.

This is what Barack Obama opposed.

STIRRING THE MELTING POT

Obama’s support includes African-Americans. This is not surprising since his father was from Kenya, Africa.

Obama’s father and mother were divorced when he was two years old.

After the divorce, his father went on to get a Ph.D. from Harvard in economics and then returned to Kenya to pursue a career there.

Obama spend formative childhood and teen years in Hawaii, and was raised by his mother and her parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, who were originally from Wichita, Kansas.

Obama has noted that his grandfather, Stanley Dunham, joined the Army in WWII after Pearl Harbor and served under Gen. George Patton in Europe. ObamaR