AHC: Both Obamas in charge at the same time
- Thread starter Plumber
- Start date
(One quick look on Wikipedia later)
Seems to me the thing you'd have to do is get rid of Obama Senior's feud with President Kenyatta.
Seems to me the thing you'd have to do is get rid of Obama Senior's feud with President Kenyatta.
I was thinking that Kenyatta dies in the riot when he attended Tom Mboya's funeral. Seems like Kenyatta had Mboya shot so he could keep being President. After this, Kenyatta's allies lead to a crackdown but eventually they are overthrown. I could imagine Obama as one of the rebel leaders who comes to prominence after the overthrow, but this is all very vague...
I have to admit that when I saw the title, I thought that you were going to try and make Michelle Speaker of the House or something.
Japhy
Banned
Well for one thing if your father is the leader of another country, there will always be questions of divided loyalty, and certainly it would help empower what IOTL would become the Birther Movement.
Paul V McNutt
Banned
Good point, this whom thread makes me wonder what kind of. Rrletionshop Barack jr would have devloped with his father
Honestly I think if he actually got to know who his father was (a womanizer, a drunk, abandoner of multiple children) he would not have developed such a fondness for him. I compare Barack Jr's view of his father to Theodore Roosevelt's view of his father. Despite Roosevelt having grown up knowing his father, Roosevelt Sr. did die when Jr. was a young adult. So Teddy never got to know his father adult to adult. Teddy looked up to his father and admired him almost as some infallable being because he never got to know his father as a flawed adult.
Barack Jr. has a similar situation. He never knew his father well, and his father died in his early adulthood, never getting to know him as a flawed individual. He had heard stories of his father's flawed behavior, but he never took it to heart because he never saw it himself.
I think we might see a different Barack Obama Jr. today if his father was alive. In fact, the only reason Barack Jr. went to Africa in the first place was because he heard of his father's death. Up until that time, his only real memory of his father was Barack Sr.s visit to Hawaii when Jr. was about 10. I think Barack Jr. would come to resent his father more if he lived.
OP only said they had to be in office at the same time, not that they'd have to still have the same name.
In OTL there was lots of (nonsensical) talk that Obama had divided loyalties. It would be much worse if his father was a national leader of another nation.
Sure, but what if Obama Sr. only gets chosen President of Kenya after his son's President of the US? Knowing absolutely nothing about Kenyan politics, I could imagine them doing something like that to cultivate good relationships with the US. (Or to publicly snub the US, if Obama Jr. is as estranged from his father as IchBinDieKaiser suggested.)
He would be more estranged if is father had lived, but the severity of this estrangement would very depending on how well he knows his living father, or if he decides to just ignore his father's existance. I don't know which is more likely.