Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America's First Postmodern President

by Jack Cashill

  In Obama’s account, as in the standard progressive retelling of American history, facts are bent to serve a larger purpose. In the litany above, Obama bends one fact beyond the breaking point. In reality, more than 99 percent of Hawaii’s Japanese and Japanese Americans were not interned. After the horrors of Pearl Harbor, the American response suggested not racism or oppression, as Obama implies, but enlightened restraint.

  After hitting the mainland Obama surrounded himself with leftists well versed in the knowledge too big to handle. “I chose my friends carefully,” he writes in Dreams. “The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.” With his new friends, Obama discussed “neocolonialism, Franz [sic] Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy” and flaunted his alienation.

  The literary influences Obama cites include radical anti-imperialists like Fanon and Malcolm X, communists like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and tyrant-loving fellow travelers like W. E. B. Du Bois. “Joseph Stalin was a great man,” Du Bois wrote upon Stalin’s death in 1953. “Few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.”

  In Dreams, Obama gives no suggestion that this reading was in any way problematic or a mere phase in his development. He moves on to no new school, embraces no new worldview. At least five of the authors he cites—Wright, Fanon, Hughes, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin—Bill Ayers cites in his writings as well. (As an aside, both Obama and Ayers misspell Fanon’s name in the same way, as “Franz.”)

  Obama unwittingly gives the game away in Audacity. When scolding his fellow liberals for not facing up to current international threats, he writes, “It’s useful to remind ourselves that Osama bin Laden is not Ho Chi Minh.” No, of course not. In Hyde Park, Ho is the kind of murderous thug kids still look up to, sort of like Che, just not cute enough to put on a T-shirt. In 2008, some Obama campaign workers in Texas proudly tacked Che posters to the wall, blissfully unaware that communist executioners lack red-state crossover appeal.

  Not surprisingly, given his inputs, Barack Obama has embraced a vaguely Marxist, postcolonial view of the capitalist enterprise. In the 2004 preface to Dreams, written after his keynote speech at the Democratic convention, he describes an ongoing “struggle—between worlds of plenty and worlds of want.” America, he implies, prospers only at the expense of the rest of the world, a zero-sum fallacy common among those who refuse to understand the way free enterprise works.

  “I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side,” Obama continues. When the powerless strike back, the powerful respond with “a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware.”

  By equating Chicago with the third world, Obama endorses the link between racism and imperialism, the presumed motive for America’s involvement in Vietnam. Later in Dreams, he makes this point more explicitly when he talks about righteous insurrections in “Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta.” For the left, racism at home parallels imperialism abroad, one or both of which must inevitably underwrite the capitalist adventure.

  To be fair, the “Detroit” and “Mekong Delta” references—the whole preface, for that matter—are more likely to have come from Bill Ayers’s pen than Obama’s, but if so, Obama surely felt comfortable with Ayers’s conclusions. And from all evidence, even after two years as president, he still accepts the left’s relentless anticapitalist, anti-American agitprop as “knowledge.”

  THE WORD-SLINGER

  As much as I disagreed with Ayers on the issues, I had to admit that Fugitive Days was well written, so well written, in fact, that I thought he too must have had a ghostwriter. For whatever reason, one sentence caught my attention. It reads, “I picture the street coming alive, awakening from the fury of winter, stirred from the chilly spring night by cold glimmers of sunlight angling through the city.”

  The sentence reminded me of one I had read in Dreams. I pulled out my dog-eared copy and thumbed through the highlighted passages until I found this one: “Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds.”

  These two sentences struck me as similar in their poetic flow, their length, and their gracefully layered structure. When I ran them through a simple test available on Microsoft Word, the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), something of a standard in the field, they tabulated nearly identical scores. The Fugitive Days excerpt registered a 54 on reading ease and a twelfth-grade reading level, the Dreams excerpt a 54.8 on reading ease and a twelfth-grade reading level as well. Scores can range from 0 to 121. Hitting a nearly exact score mattered at least enough to keep my attention.

  Another little thing that struck me was the word midafternoon. I had never used that particular locution. Although more expansive dictionaries include the word as written in Dreams, it was distinctive enough that my Microsoft Word program underlined it in red, meaning misspelled or not a word. None of this would have mattered much save that Ayers used midafternoon, too, as in “I had the thing mostly memorized by midafternoon.”

  At this point, I had my first eureka moment, albeit a dumb one—Gosh, I thought, they both live in Chicago. They must have shared the same ghostwriter! As I continued reading Ayers’s memoir, however, I began to sense a real stylistic difference between the two books: Fugitive Days is infused with the authorial voice in every sentence. It is fierce, succinct, and tightly coiled throughout. “What makes Fugitive Days unique,” wrote Edward Said in a blurb, “is its unsparing detail and its marvelous human coherence and integrity.” If “integrity” means sticking to one’s guns regardless of facts or fashion, there is no denying what Said says. Say what one will about Ayers, he did live an eventful life at a dramatic moment.

  At that time, September 2008, I had no idea that Ayers was an accomplished writer and editor, but he is. By this point in his career, he had written three mainstream books on his own and, importantly, edited or co-authored at least twice as many more. His style and tone remain consistent throughout his books and articles, and there can be little doubt that he wrote them himself.

  Ayers’s affection for language dates back at least to his days in the Weather Underground. “We were ill-equipped gunslingers,” he writes in the introduction to the 2006 book Sing a Battle Song, “and we became word-slingers instead.” He clarifies: “The Weatherpeople were all talkers—we already loved words and we read widely.” In this same passage, Ayers observes that words “tumbled from us in a crazy flash flood.” In Dreams, as it happens, “words tumbled out of [Obama’s] mouth” as well, and memories come in a “flood.”

  Although the media were at pains to minimize the connection between Ayers and Obama—Remnick dismisses as “preposterous” the notion that the two “were ever close friends or shared political ideas”—there was enough known about their relationship by September 2008 to suggest a motive for Ayers’s involvement in Dreams. Stanley Kurtz had been doing yeoman research on this subject for the National Review.

  As Kurtz reported, the then little-known Obama assumed the chairmanship of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) only months before he launched his first state senate campaign in 1995. The Annenberg Foundation had breathed the CAC to life that same year with a $50 million grant to be matched by $100 million from other sources. The money was to fund educational reform projects.

  Ayers was the co-founder and guiding force behind this massive slush fund. Not surprisingly, as often happens, the money Republicans like Annenberg earned, progressives like Ayers and Obama spent. Ayers’s own radical projects received enough funding to raise eyebrows even within the CAC. As a chairman more than a little indebted to Ayers, Obama seemed indifferent to possible conflicts of interest as he happily signe
d off on Ayers’s adventures.

  When Ayers helped launch the Obama campaign in September 1995 with a fund-raiser chez Bill and Bernardine, it was surely more than the neighborly gesture that both Ayers and Remnick suggest. Kurtz more accurately pegs the fund-raiser as “further evidence of a close and ongoing political partnership.”

  In the spirit of fairness, Kurtz asked the Obama campaign to respond to his findings, and the campaign did so in some detail. The spokesperson minimized the relationship between Ayers and Obama, cited the Annenberg fund’s Republican genesis, and claimed, rather boldly, “Ayers had nothing to do with Obama’s recruitment to the Board.” As even the Obama-friendly Remnick concedes, however, “Ayers helped bring Obama onto the Annenberg board.”

  Kurtz would slice and dice the Obama rebuttal into a thousand little pieces and prove, through the board’s own documentation, that the CAC “was largely Ayers’s show.” What caught my attention about this budding relationship was the timing. Ayers maneuvered Obama onto the board in February 1995. He hosted a campaign kickoff for Obama in September 1995, and Dreams was published in June 1995. Michael Milken was sent to the slammer for collusion on less evidence.

  Those inclined to believe that Ayers was prepping Obama for the presidency, however, inflate the vision of both Ayers and Obama. Although seriously calculated, Dreams is too revealing in too many troubling ways—drugs, Jeremiah Wright, Frank Marshall Davis—to boost an aspiring presidential candidate. More likely, Ayers thought he was grooming a future mayor of Chicago.

  “I met [Obama] sometime in the mid-1990s,” Ayers would later tell Salon. “And everyone who knew him thought that he was politically ambitious. For the first two years, I thought, his ambition is so huge that he wants to be mayor of Chicago.” Obama friend Cassandra Butts traced that ambition back at least to Harvard. “He wanted to be mayor of Chicago and that was all he ever talked about as far as holding office,” she would tell Chicago reporter David Mendell, author of the valuable 2007 biography Obama: From Promise to Power.

  The young Obama was modeling his career on that of his political hero, the late Chicago mayor Harold Washington. Washington had moved from the Illinois state senate to Congress to the mayoralty. Dreams roots Obama in the Chicago experience and in the progressive tradition thereof. As such, it seems finely calibrated to attract the black/lakefront liberal coalition needed for a Democrat not named Daley to achieve high office in Illinois. As Chicago mayor, Obama could have been very helpful to the parochial power broker Ayers. As the president of our “marauding monster” of a country, Obama causes him only a mess of philosophical and emotional problems.

  Eight weeks shy of a hugely consequential election, no one was even raising as a possibility what to me now seemed probability—Ayers helped Obama write Dreams. Kurtz, for instance, would write that Ayers had emerged as “a sort of father-figure” in the radical community, one who routinely helped edit the collections of “like-minded authors,” but neither he nor anyone else at National Review was hinting Obama might be one of those authors. I seemed to have uniquely chanced upon a genuine October surprise. The only problem—rather a major one—was that no one else could see it.

  POETIC TRUTHS

  It just so happened that Barack Obama was not the only black icon in his neighborhood to write a bestselling memoir. Boxing great Muhammad Ali produced one long before Obama, and he too with more than a little assistance. In Ali’s case, that assistance has been well documented by black scholar Gerald Early.

  According to Early, the Nation of Islam oversaw the entire production of The Greatest: My Own Story. The NOI newspaper’s Marxist editor, Richard Durham, taped any number of conversations with the nearly illiterate Ali or between Ali and others and then gave them to an “editor” for writing. That editor was a young Toni Morrison. Ali’s is surely the only boxing autobiography ghosted by a future Nobel Prize winner. NOI honcho Elijah Muhammad’s son Herbert reviewed every page. As one might expect, Ali’s Muslim helpmates rendered his story poorer, tougher, and blacker than the truth would bear.

  The editing collective had no use for Ali’s white ancestors, his middle-class home, his loving parents, his Olympic gold, the glorious reception in hometown Louisville, the generous white sponsors, and the inevitable pink Cadillac. The true story did not make anyone angry enough to dial 1-800-FARRAKHAN. So for The Greatest, Ali and his handlers had to imagine a grievance ugly enough to undo Ali’s obvious blessings. For symbolic reasons, they zeroed in on the Olympic gold.

  In the approved NOI version, Ali, wearing his gold medal, stops at a Kentucky diner to duck an impending rainstorm. The manager, true to stereotype, has no use for the man the whole town just honored, gold medal or no gold medal. “We don’t serve no niggers,” he drawls ominously.

  “Suddenly I knew what I wanted to do with this cheap piece of metal and raggedy ribbon,” says Ali. He heads toward a bridge over the Ohio River. To reach the bridge, though, he and a buddy have to fight their way past the local racist motorcycle gang. The gang dispatched, Ali throws the medal into the river. True to form, the New York Times described The Greatest as “honest” and “very convincing.” Ali’s sidekick Bundini Brown knew better. “Honkies sure bought into that one,” he would tell Sports Illustrated. In reality, the instinctively patriotic Ali wore the medal until the gold rubbed off.

  As I was coming to believe, whoever guided Obama steered him toward a grievance narrative like Ali’s, if not quite as obvious or extravagant. Unlike Ali, however, Obama occasionally acknowledges the slightness of his racial traumas. Still, he revels in describing them. The most dramatic of these has the nine-year-old Obama visiting the American embassy in Indonesia. While waiting for his mother, he chances upon “a collection of Life magazines neatly displayed in clear plastic binders.” In one magazine, he reads a story about a black man with an “uneven, ghostly hue,” who has been rendered grotesque by a chemical treatment.

  “There were thousands of people like him,” Obama learned, “black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.” Obama’s attention to detail is a ruse. Life never ran such an article. When challenged, Obama claimed it was Ebony. Ebony ran no such article, either. Among the thousands of black people I saw in Newark, New Jersey, where I lived at the time, I never saw anyone so disfigured. Besides, in 1970, black was beautiful.

  Most of the racial slights Obama recounts in Dreams—and there are several—seem equally counterfeit and even more trivial. On one occasion a tennis coach touches Obama’s skin to see if the color rubs off—and this in a state where whites are in the minority, mind you. On another mystifying occasion, Obama barely refrains from punching out a white school chum because the kid makes a sympathetic allusion to Obama’s outsider status. On a few occasions, Obama scolds his mother for romanticizing the black experience, and then, of course, he chastises his grandmother Madelyn Dunham, aka Toot, first in the book, and later before the world, for daring to let a black panhandler intimidate her.

  Remnick concedes that many of these grievances are “novelistic contrivances,” but if Obama “darkens the canvas” or “heightens whatever opportunity arises” to score a racial point, he does so, according to Remnick, “obviously” because he is going “after an emotional truth.”

  Shelby Steele, who is biracial himself, has seen these kind of “truths” played out around him from the time he was a boy in a still-segregated world. In his underappreciated 2008 book, The Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, Steele dissected Obama’s soul with more precision than anyone has before or since, and he did so before Obama had won a primary. The book’s subtitle, by the way, only seems to suggest a miscalculation on Steele’s part. The “win” does not refer to the election.

  Obama’s dilemma, as Steele sees it, is that in his quest to seem an “authentic” black man, Obama feels compelled to exaggerate the state of black victimization. Rather than fix
ing problems, many of which are spawned within the black community, the newly authentic Obama fixes blame. When Obama has attempted to tackle moral issues, some more seemingly authentic black leader can be counted on to whittle Obama down to size.

  “I wanna cut his nuts off,” said Jesse Jackson, almost on cue, when in July 2008 Obama gingerly addressed the issue of parental responsibility. Despite his accidentally televised threat, Jackson somehow stayed on the Obama campaign, and Obama got back to blaming the government. Obama’s deterministic approach to racial issues, says Steele, “commits him to a manipulation of the very society he seeks to lead.”

  Unfortunately, Obama did not look to Shelby Steele as a potential mentor, and although he did look to Frank Marshall Davis, Davis died before he could instruct the lad in the art of memoir writing. The contrast between Dreams and Davis’s own memoir, Livin’ the Blues, is stark. Growing up in small-town southern Kansas in the early years of the 20th century, Davis endured more racist crap in a given day than Obama endured in his entire life.

  As a high school basketball player, Obama was known to pout when benched, thinking his race the reason why. Davis suffered no such confusion. When white schoolmates threw a rope around his neck and played at lynching, he knew the reason why. Yet Davis exaggerates his gripes not at all and exonerates the whites around him when exoneration is due. Unlike the doggedly humorless Obama, Davis writes about his life with a comic flair and a healthy sense of the absurd.