Obama’s tight Pakistani circle at college & Romney’s Desi choice

Obama with his Pakistani friend Sohale Siddiqi in Obama’s 109th St. apartment, 1981

Obama had a lot of Pakistani friends; Maraniss writes that if Obama and his girlfriend socialized as a couple, “it was almost always with the Pakistanis.” Obama appeared to identify with his friends as fellow non-Americans. “For years when Barack was around them, he seemed to share their attitudes as sophisticated outsiders who looked at politics from an international perspective,” Maraniss writes. “He was one of them, in that sense.”

But Obama was ambitious. Appalled by the “dirty deeds” of “Reagan and his minions” (as he wrote in “Dreams from My Father”), Obama became increasingly interested in, as Maraniss writes, “gaining power in order to change things.” He couldn’t do that as an international guy hanging around with his Pakistani friends; he needed to become an American.

So he did. One of those Pakistani friends, Beenu Mahmood, saw a major change in Obama. Mahmood calls Obama “the most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his own identity,” according to Maraniss. The time after college, Mahmood says, “was an important period for him, first the shift from not international but American, number one, and then not white, but black.”

Disclaimer this is from the Romney campaign website; I wonder if “the site references I used, give some inkling to my ideological leaning.” If anything though knowing even more about President Obama’s Pakistani circle (they used to introduce him as the “first black President of the United States) now makes me super-inclined to support him in the reelection.

Finally would Nikki Haley be a good running mate for Mitt Romney (personally my gut feeling goes with her rather than Bobby Jindal)?