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

by Jack Cashill

  Warmest regards,

  Patrick (Juola)

  Shortly before I talked to Juola, an experienced systems designer named Ed Gold had volunteered to run a QSUM scan on multiple excerpts from both memoirs. He reported in after my conversation with Juola. Although I shared Gold’s conclusion with my readers, I cautioned them about the reliability of such studies.

  “I have completed the analysis,” Gold had written me, “and I think you will be pleased with the findings.” In assessing the signature of sample passages from Dreams, Gold found “a very strong match to all of the Ayers samples that I processed.” Like Juola, Gold recognized the limitations of the process and of his own resources.

  Going forward, I took Juola’s advice and plowed on the old- fashioned way. Helping me now, though, were literary Hardy Boys and Nancy Drews from throughout the world. In time, I would receive useful tips from correspondents in Australia, Switzerland, Israel, South Africa, Hawaii, and all over the mainland, some from within the academy, many from without. Most preferred anonymity. Almost to a person, they cited the same reason—the media hell that had rained down on “Joe the Plumber.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In early October 2008, a correspondent sent me an unusual clue from an unexpected source, Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi now serves as the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, an appropriate posting as his background is nearly as contrived as Said’s. Once considered a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization and typically designated as a “Palestinian-American,” Khalidi was born in New York to a Saudi diplomat and a Lebanese American Christian. That the Saudi father was born in Jerusalem apparently gives the American son Palestinian griping rights. In reality, I have better claim to speak for the IRA than he does for the PLO.

  Khalidi achieved some small notoriety during the 2008 campaign. In April of that year, Peter Wallsten of the Los Angeles Times wrote a lengthy article titled “Allies of Palestinians see a friend in Obama.” The article pulled some of its information from a video shot at a 2003 farewell dinner for Khalidi. Khalidi, who had spent several years at the University of Chicago, was leaving for New York.

  At the dinner, reportedly attended by Ayers and Dohrn as well, Obama thanked Khalidi and his wife for the many meals they had shared chez Khalidi and for reminding him of “my own blind spots and my own biases.” Obama hoped that “we continue that conversation—a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table … [but around] this entire world.”

  Wallsten acknowledged that during this “celebration of Palestinian culture” some of the guests made hostile comments about Israel. One recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism, with the implicit threat that Israel “will never see a day of peace.” Another compared “Zionist settlers on the West Bank” to Osama bin Laden. If worse had been said, or if Obama had applauded these comments, the world beyond the Los Angeles Times newsroom would not be allowed to know.

  The Times, which endorsed Obama for president, steadfastly refused to share the videotape despite the demand by the McCain camp and others to release it. “A major news organization is intentionally suppressing information that could provide a clearer link between Barack Obama and Rashid Khalidi,” said McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb. Times spokeswoman Nancy Sullivan blew Goldfarb off. “As far as we’re concerned, the story speaks for itself,” she responded. The Times would add no details beyond what had appeared in Wallsten’s April article.

  As for myself, I was less interested in Rashidi’s relationship with Obama than I was in his relationship with Ayers. Khalidi does not shy from admitting the latter. He begins the acknowledgment section of his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire, with an eye-popping tribute to his own literary muse.

  “First, chronologically and in other ways,” writes Khalidi, “comes Bill Ayers.” Unlike the calculating Obama, Khalidi had no reason to be coy about this relationship. He elaborates: “Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family’s dining room table to do some writing for the project.” Khalidi did not need the table. He had one of his own. He needed help from the one neighbor who obviously could and would provide it.

  Chicago’s Hyde Park was home to a tight, influential radical community at whose center was the charismatic Ayers and wife Bernardine Dohrn. Remnick calls them collectively “the Elsa Maxwell of Hyde Park.” In this world, the couple’s terrorist rap sheet only heightened their reputation. With all due respect to Sarah Palin, Obama likely saw them less as “pals” than as surrogate parents. Dohrn and Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, were born the same year, 1942. The couple had given up revolution in 1980 for the long, slow march through the institutions. By 1994, if not earlier, Ayers apparently saw a way to quicken that march.

  In October 2008, after reading the Rashidi acknowledgment, I imagined how Ayers and Obama might have proceeded. “I believe that after failing to finish his book on time, and after forfeiting his advance from Simon & Schuster,” I wrote, “Obama brought his sprawling, messy, sophomoric manuscript to the famed dining room table of Bill Ayers and said, ‘Help.’”

  In his book Barack and Michelle, Christopher Andersen contends that Obama was allowed to keep the advance, but otherwise describes what happened much as I had imagined. His level of detail suggests a source very close to the scene. (When I asked, he would not tell me who.) Noting that Obama had already taped interviews with many of his relatives, both African and American, Andersen elaborates: “These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers.”

  For mentors, Obama consistently chose men like Bill Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, and, before them, the communist poet Frank Marshall Davis. They shared their wisdom, and Obama reciprocated as best he could. In 1997, for instance, Obama reviewed Ayers’s A Kind and Just Parent, calling it “a searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.” In 2003, as mentioned, Obama publicly thanked Khalidi for expanding his worldview.

  Khalidi, in turn, publicly thanked Ayers in the acknowledgments section of Resurrecting Empire. When Ayers published his memoir Fugitive Days in 2001, Said was happy to provide a blurb. “For anyone who cares about the sorry mess we are in,” wrote Said, “this book is essential, indeed necessary reading.” To complete this cluster back scratch, in his 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, Bill Ayers walks the reader through his Hyde Park neighborhood and identifies the notable residents therein. Among them are Muhammad Ali, “Minister” Louis Farrakhan (of whom he writes fondly), “former mayor” Eugene Sawyer, “poets” Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and “writer” Barack Obama.

  In 1997, Obama was an obscure state senator, whose one book had netted little acclaim and lesser sales. In terms of identity, he had more in common with Mayor Sawyer than poet Brooks. The “writer” identification seems forced and purposefully so, a signal perhaps to those in the know of a persona in the making that Ayers had himself helped forge.

  The question was often asked during the campaign why Obama would associate with Ayers. The more appropriate question is why the ever-resourceful Ayers would associate with the then-irrelevant Obama. Before Obama’s ascendancy, it was Ayers who had the connections, the clout, and the street cred. He saw the potential in Obama and chose to mold it. As history will record, his creation got away from him.

  REFORMERS

  If Bill Ayers did help Barack Obama write Dreams from My Father, surely a major investment of time and energy, the question has to be asked, why would he do so? The answer may well be found in a 1994 essay by Ayers, whose title befits a former merchant seaman: “Navigating a restless sea: The continuing struggle to achieve a decent education for African American youngsters in Chicago.”

  In “Navigating,” Ayers and his nominal co-author, former New Communist Movement leader Michael Klonsky, offer a detailed analysis of the Chicago school system and a dis
cussion of potential reforms. Curiously, Obama does the same in Dreams. What makes his educational excursion curious is that he had little interest in education. In Dreams, he admits to spending only a few months working on school issues and then while his mind was “elsewhere.” Ayers, however, had been keen on teaching kids even before he started blowing up buildings. In the mid-1990s, his passion for reform inspired him to engineer the rise of a proxy of color who could address problems in ways that he and fellow paleface Klonsky could not.

  It should surprise no one that the analysis offered in Dreams echoes that of “Navigating.” It stands to reason. Each was authored in the same year, 1994. Ayers was clearly the dominant partner in the essay and likely the dominant partner on the book. I found this essay after the November election. I wish I had found it sooner. The parallels are striking. The particular value Obama brought to the partnership, however, can be found not in the many points on which Ayers and the Obama of Dreams agree, but rather on the one in which they at least seem to differ.

  First, the areas of agreement. Dreams tells us that Chicago’s schools “remained in a state of perpetual crisis.” “Navigating” describes the situation as a “perpetual state of conflict, paralysis, and stagnation.” Dreams describes a “bloated bureaucracy” as one source of the problem and “a teachers’ union that went out on strike at least once every two years” as another. “Navigating” affirms that the “bureaucracy has grown steadily in the past decade” and confirms Dreams’ math, citing a “ninth walkout in 18 years.”

  “Self-interest” is at the heart of the bureaucratic mess described in Dreams. “Navigating” clarifies that “survivalist bureaucracies” struggle for power “to protect their narrow, self-interested positions against any common, public purpose.” In Dreams, educators “defend the status quo” and blame problems on “impossible” children and their “bad parents.” In “Navigating,” an educator serves as “apologist for the status quo” and “place[s] the blame for school failure on children and families.”

  Another challenge cited in Dreams is “an indifferent state legislature.” Ayers cites an “unwillingness on [the legislature’s] part to adequately fund Chicago schools.”

  In Dreams, “school reform” is the only solution that Obama envisions. In “Navigating,” Ayers has no greater passion than “reforming Chicago’s schools.” In fact, in that same year this article was written, 1994, the ambitious Ayers co-authored the proposal that would win for Chicago a $49.2 million Annenberg Challenge grant.

  In Dreams, all deeper thoughts on educational reform are channeled through the soulful voices of two older African Americans. The first is “Frank,” the young Obama’s mentor in Hawaii, the real-life poet, editor, and fellow traveler Frank Marshall Davis. In Dreams, Frank makes a spirited distinction between education and training that perfectly mirrors Ayers’s own sentiments. More on this shortly.

  The second goes by the phonied-up name “Asante Moran,” likely an homage to the Afrocentric educator Molefi Kete Asante. In Dreams, Moran lectures Obama and his pal “Johnnie” on the nature of public education:

  “The first thing you have to realize,” he said, looking at Johnnie and me in turn, “is that the public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period.”

  Not surprisingly, Moran’s take on public education aligns perfectly with Ayers’s own. “In an authoritarian system,” he insists, “the entire system is twisted towards mystification and geared towards control.” Ayers, by the way, frets not just about “control,” but about “social control.”

  “The message to Black people was that at any moment and for any reason whatsoever your life or the lives of your loved ones could be randomly snuffed out,” he writes in the full flowering of his paranoid fervor. “The intention was social control through random intimidation and unpredictable violence.”

  In Dreams, Moran elaborates on the fate of the black student: “From day one, what’s he learning about? Someone else’s history. Someone else’s culture. Not only that, this culture he’s supposed to learn is the same culture that’s systematically rejected him, denied his humanity.”

  Precociously Afrocentric, especially for a white guy, Ayers has been making the same case since he first got involved in education. In 1968, as the twenty-three-year-old director of an alternative school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he told the Toledo Blade:

  The public schools’ idea of integration is racist. They put Negro children into school and demand that they give up their Negro culture. Negro children are forced to speak, behave, and react according to middle-class standards.

  In “Navigating,” Ayers echoes the apocryphal Moran, claiming that students who do not meet the idealized “white, working-class, well-fed, able-bodied, English-speaking” model are “met with indifference or even hostility and are deemed ‘unteachable.’”

  By 1994, Ayers had been preaching educational reform for nearly thirty years. Ever since his days in Ann Arbor, he had been promoting “decentralized, flexible, multicultural, small schools.” If his theories remained utopian, his tactics had become hardball Chicago, but not quite hardball enough. One major force still intimidated him: Chicago’s sluggish and self-interested educational bureaucracy.

  Over the years, this bureaucracy had morphed, as Ayers notes in “Navigating,” from being a bastion of “White political patronage and racism” to being “a source of Black professional jobs, contracts, and, yes, patronage.” For reasons both ideological and practical, Ayers wilts in the face of this bureaucracy.

  In none of his writing, in fact, can Ayers bring himself to suggest even the slightest flaw in black culture. Everything, of course, is the white man’s fault. In “Navigating” he seems to echo the black activists who gripe that white assaults on a largely black bureaucracy were based not “on hopes for educational change, but on simple Chicago race politics.” As to the culprits in the city’s race politics, Ayers cites everyone but the black bureaucrats: Mayor Richard Daley, Jr., white businessmen, unnamed “professionals,” Reagan education secretary William Bennett, even “right-wing academic Chester Finn.”

  On this racially tender issue, not so strangely, Dreams tells a different story. Obama openly chides the black “teachers, principals, and district superintendents” who “knew too much” to send their own children to public school. “The biggest source of resistance was rarely talked about,” Obama continues, namely that these educators “would defend the status quo with the same skill and vigor as their white counterparts of two decades before.” As to the claims of these educators, affirmed in “Navigating,” that “cutbacks in the bureaucracy were part of a white effort to wrest back control,” the author of Dreams says teasingly, “not so true.”

  “Not so true”? In these three words one can anticipate Obama’s potential return on Ayers’s investment. Simply put, as an African American, Obama could address sensitive racial issues in ways Ayers could not. Ayers surely recognized this. To advance Obama’s career, it seems, Ayers finished up Dreams, got Obama appointed chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant, and held a fund-raiser for his state senate run in his Chicago home, all in 1995.

  The political calculus behind that ambition helped shape Dreams. This was a careful book written to launch the career of a deeply indebted and highly malleable Chicago politician, maybe even a mayor, one who saw the world through white eyes, as Ayers did, but one who could articulate the city’s real problems in words that Ayers could not—at least not publicly.

  RUSH

  In early October 2008, I expanded my publishing format to include the American Thinker. Although the audience for the latter was smaller than WND’s, the publisher, Thomas Lifson, allowed for longer “think” pieces, and the more words I could assemble in one place, the more convincingly I could make my case.

  Lifson has the kind of background more welcome in the blogosphere than in a conventional newsroom. Raised in a liberal household
in progressive, good-government Minnesota, he rounded into an antiwar activist in late ‘60s Harvard. His eclectic graduate studies included sociology, business, and modern Japan. It was in Japan, as Ralph Nader’s personal ambassador, that Lifson began to question his own political identity. “I got to know some real leftists over there,” Lifson told me. “They were scoundrels.”

  Off and on, Lifson would spend nineteen years at Harvard, acquiring three graduate degrees and teaching in the Harvard Business School, as well as in the sociology department. In Cambridge, the issue that caused him to recalculate his politics was rent control. “It was so counterproductive,” says Lifson. “It was the first time I realized the left could be pathological.” The fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of Eastern Europe, and the opening of the Soviet archives showed him just how intrinsic that pathology was.

  Still, Lifson could not imagine himself as a right-winger, let alone a Republican. “I was in academia,” he laughs, “so I could not be a conservative. It was unthinkable.” As a semi-joke, his wife bought him a copy of National Review. He read it from cover to cover and agreed with everything he read. “That’s when I knew,” he says.

  As a consultant, usually on matters Japanese with major companies throughout the world, Lifson had saved enough to launch the American Thinker in 2003. He has doubled its audience virtually every year since. Although he publishes only about a half-dozen articles a day, the site attracts more than 120,000 daily visitors. As I discovered, if your article is on top, you will get most of that audience, including, occasionally, radio powerhouse Rush Limbaugh.