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

by Jack Cashill

  Millican went on to explain that the studies we had produced were “badly flawed.” The problem was not in the execution, but in the lack of effective controls. To do a thorough job, analysts would have had to compare Dreams and Fugitive Days to multiple contemporary memoirs. Our guys all acknowledged this limitation. None had time or resources to carry out such a study pre-election.

  Neither did Millican. Here a certain timeline comes into play. Fox had called Millican on Sunday, likely late in the day given the eight-hour time differential. Sarah Baxter called me no later than Thursday morning to discuss the stalled negotiations. I remember taking the call in my D.C. motel, and I checked out on Thursday morning. I cite this detail because Millican had told me he did not contact the “relevant journalists” until late on Friday. He apparently misremembered.

  In the three-or four-day window from late Sunday to early Thursday, days heavy with teaching duties and paper preparation, not to mention contract negotiations, Millican managed to prove that there was “nothing that would give Obama any cause for concern.” After a mini-review that allowed no time to even read the books in question, he dismissed the forensic work of three American analysts—one of whom was using Millican’s own software—as “completely unsubstantiated.” And if my guys were modest about their conclusions, Millican was anything but. He came down from Oxford to the London Times as confidently as Moses had come down from the mountain.

  In his front-page op-ed, Millican describes Fox as “sincerely interested in getting to the truth,” but he has nothing good to say about “the Republicans.” He writes, “I was left with the impression that payment for propaganda was fine; but payment for objective research was quite a different matter.” What Millican chose not to see is that the “Republicans” in question were Bob Fox.

  The reader will recall that in a personal email just a day earlier—thank God for Yahoo! Search—Millican had written, “I told [Fox] that if he was to go ahead he should see it as a gamble: not likely to succeed, but potentially with a huge payoff if it did.” Fox had put up five thousand dollars of his own money but could get no takers on the other five.

  The fact that Fox could not muster another 5K suggests that, as far as “Republican plots” go, this was not exactly Watergate. Working out of San Diego, Fox had little pull in D.C., where Republicans were too busy plotting survival strategies to pay attention. If Millican were dangling a “huge payoff” even with slim odds, and Fox had any connections beyond the preoccupied Cannon, money would not have been an issue.

  “Maybe one day I’ll go back and do the analysis in detail, but I doubt it,” writes Millican in conclusion. “I would rather spend my time on serious research questions than on improbable theories proposed with negligible support.” Needless to say, I fired back quickly, but as my conclusion reveals, a Boilermaker writing for WorldNetDaily is at something of a disadvantage against an Oxford don writing for the Times of London.

  No, Peter, that is not good enough. Finish your mother-loving study and then let others have at it. It’s not quite cricket to use the London Times on the eve of the election to establish your “narrative” and then tip-toe off the field…. The evidence of Ayers’ involvement overwhelms the dispassionate observer, and you don’t have to be an Oxford don to see it.

  Millican promptly returned the fire that same Sunday. He posted a piece on PhiloComp.net titled “The Story of an Unlikely Hypothesis (and a Fine Book),” in which he dismissed my theory not just as “unlikely” but as “laughably unsubstantiated.” What he posted, however, was so shabby and slapdash that it had me checking Britain’s famous libel laws before I was halfway through. The posting has since been scrubbed, and I rely here on my own response posted on WND on Monday, November, 3, E minus 1, to remind me of what he had written.

  As I observed, Millican seemed to be a man on a mission, reassuring readers on PhiloComp that they would “be pleased to discover that the probable next leader of the free world did not get his impressive first book written by Bill Ayers.” After an admittedly cursory analysis, he said of my hypothesis, “I feel totally confident that it is false.” The evidence that he advanced to support his assertion, however, would not pass muster in freshman comp.

  Millican began by trivializing the parallel stories in Obama’s and Ayers’s works: “Even if parallel passages were to be found between Obama’s [1995] book and Ayers’s Fugitive Days of 2001, the charge of plagiarism could only be directed at Ayers….” Let me repeat: I found not just parallel passages but detailed and distinctive parallel stories, at least three of them, all of them embarrassingly obvious.

  Millican tried to explain them away by suggesting that Ayers possibly plagiarized Dreams, given that Fugitive Days was published six years after Dreams. If Millican had bothered to read what I had written—or if he had read the books in question—he would have known that two of the parallel stories appear in Ayers’s 1993 book, To Teach. The third parallel story is cited in Ayers’s 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, but has its origins in a 1992 book by black author Reginald McKnight. Ayers apparently knew enough about this story by 1995 to adapt it to Obama’s life.

  About my text-based detective work Millican was fully evasive. He failed to explain, for instance, how Obama, whose seagoing was limited to bodysurfing, managed to mimic at least thirty nautical metaphors—some very sophisticated—used by the former merchant seaman Ayers. He failed to say how or why Obama absorbed Ayers’s postmodern patter and his weary ‘60s weltanschauung, almost to the very word. In his hasty analysis, Millican also chose to overlook the most powerful fact of all, namely that Obama was not a writer, but then again, he may not have noticed. Millican is not much of a writer himself.

  I had not heard the last from Millican. After he erased his errors and added a few wrinkles to accommodate my charges, he continued to send me chatty emails as though we were engaged in some friendly academic debate. After ignoring them for several days, I responded.

  My apologies, but you have confused me from the beginning. Please, when you go to the London Times of your own accord and call the work that we had all done to that point “laughably unsubstantiated” forgive me for feeling slimed.

  When you say of Bob Fox that he left you “with the impression that payment for propaganda was fine; but payment for objective research was quite a different matter,” forgive me for feeling slimed by association.

  Unfortunately, the headline that the Times offered more or less fit the content you provided: Ours was a plot to “tarnish” Obama, based on nothing.

  As for [my charge of your work being] “shabby and slapdash,” when you publicly say of the parallel stories that “the charge of plagiarism could only be directed at Ayers,” when, in fact, all the Ayers’ excerpts made it into print before Dreams, I would think “shabby and slapdash” rather fits and only half way compensates for “laughably unsubstantiated.”

  This is a war of words I did not start. When you enter those charges into the public record unsubstantiated via the London Times with the righteous wind of Oxford behind you, and I leave them un-rebutted, your remarks stand. A private email to you after the first salvo accomplishes nothing. Besides, I am not sure whether I will meet the good Dr. Millican that Bob Fox still swears by or the mean one that trashes us in the London Times.

  Although my flight did not leave BWI until Sunday, November 2, by Thursday I had had enough. I packed up and drove to my ancestral homeland. There I spent the weekend with my oldest brother, Bill, a retired and politically simpatico high school principal, who lived in the McCain-friendly wilds of western New Jersey. Although largely asymptomatic, he was dying of an immune disorder. We hiked the Appalachian Trail that weekend, suspecting there would be no such hikes in the future. There were not. Bill was permanently housebound within months and dead a year later. Before the weekend was through, I was relieved that Washington had had nothing more to hold me.

  History has duly recorded that our collective effort to call attention to Obama’s ap
parent fraud came to naught. On November 4, Barack Obama was elected the forty-fourth president of the United States, though without the help of Kansas and Missouri or my brother’s Warren County. “I began to weep, and felt ashamed, but could not stop myself.” No, that was not me weeping, but Obama. At the end of every major section in Dreams, he weeps. His and Ayers’s characters “sob” a lot, too—on at least four occasions in each of their memoirs. At the end of this major section, I did not have the time for either weeping or sobbing. I still had work to do.

  II

  THE WILDERNESS CAMPAIGN, 2009–2010

  MILLI VANILLI

  I am sure that I was not the only McCain voter who felt at least a twinge of relief when our man lost. I had envisioned four years of Republican drift and dreary presidential compromise, all exquisitely recorded by a vengeful media. The election had also spared me the burden of saving the republic. Without the pressure of a deadline, I could pursue my detective work recreationally and get back to making a living.

  To that end, I arrived in Washington on January 21, the day after the inauguration, to oversee a six-camera shoot of the annual March for Life on the 22nd. Driving in from BWI, I could see that street vendors had turned New York Avenue into an open-air Obama-Mart. My co-producer stopped to buy Obama puppets for his kids. I had to admire the obvious commerce. Like many others, I still retained half a hope that, if nothing else, President Obama could convince the eternally alienated that, yes, they actually could.

  On the eloquence front, the new president got off to an unexpectedly slow start those first few months when, for instance, he told Jay Leno his recent effort at bowling resembled “the Special Olympics or something” or when TOTUS—the teleprompter of the United States—apparently rebelled and had the president thanking himself for being invited to the White House on St. Patrick’s Day.

  On that momentous first day, however, January 20, the president had no teleprompter to blame. There was nothing impromptu about the occasion. And yet, on the National Mall, before some 1.8 million fans, Barack Obama had something of a Milli Vanilli moment. The faithful may have been as oblivious or indifferent to the breakdown as were Fab and Rob’s fans on that awful day twenty years earlier when the pair’s record skipped, but the more astute observers—even the friendly ones—winced. By all rational accounts, the gap between what an inaugural audience expected and what the president delivered had never been wider.

  To be fair, the proverbial “expectations” had been a shade high. As British literary heavyweight Jonathan Raban noted, “No recent inaugural has been as keenly anticipated as Obama’s.” That anticipation derived from Raban’s understanding, a common one among otherwise sophisticated Obama watchers, that Obama was “the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln.”

  Of course, the accepted evidence for Obama’s oversized talent could be found only in Dreams. This was Obama’s “authentic voice,” or so Raban declared. Imagine then his dismay at an inaugural address that suffered from “moth-eaten metaphors,” “faux-antique dialect,” and jarring semantic errors like Obama’s use of the word forbearers when he meant forebears.

  “It was so rhetorically flat, so lacking in rhythm and cadence, one almost has to believe he did it on purpose,” opined Charles Krauthammer, adding, with just a touch of irony, “Best not to dazzle on Opening Day. Otherwise, they’ll expect magic all the time.” Other observers were at least as perplexed. “It is simply mysterious how such tired language could sound appropriate to the ear of Obama the writer,” wrote Michael Gerson in the Washington Post.

  “Not one of his greatest,” conceded Bill Ayers with a postmodern wink to a Free Press reporter. “But I think he intended it that way. I think he was lowering expectations. You know he’s not Superman.” To find a rationale for the speech’s lameness, Raban waxed downright Jesuitical. “What needed to be said had to be phrased in language as well-worn and conventional as possible,” he concluded, “to give the illusion of smooth continuity between Obama’s speech and those of past presidents.”

  There was, of course, a much more plausible explanation for the speech’s failure, but no one in the major media, friend or foe, dared to suggest it: namely, that after lip-synching texts for his entire public career, Obama decided to voice this one largely on his own. Although a “disconcerted” Raban grudgingly conceded that twenty-seven-year-old video gamer Jon Favreau had served as Obama’s chief “ghost” since 2004, he and other true believers refused to probe any further. To even consider the possibility that Obama needed help with Dreams, the holy writ of the Obama canon, was fully taboo.

  Had Raban been paying attention, he might not have been so surprised. Just a week earlier, Ben Smith posted on the Politico blog an article Obama had written in March 1983 while a senior at Columbia. Titled “Breaking the War Mentality,” the 1,800-word article had been published in Columbia’s weekly newsmagazine, Sundial, at the height of the KGB-generated anti-nuke craze. Given its ideological drift, Smith and others focused on its content. They would have more profitably focused on its style. The find represented the clearest sample yet of Obama’s literary DNA.

  Obama was twenty-one at the time and on the verge of graduating from an Ivy League university. Had he been raised by wolves in an Indonesian cave and then unleashed on the Columbia campus a year earlier, the reader might cut him slack for such low-C tripe. In fact, though, he was completing his fourth year of college after spending eight years at Hawaii’s best prep school. His formal training as a writer culminated in this essay. It is unlikely to the point of impossible that he would subsequently improve his skills to the level found in Dreams even if he had worked at it, which he did not.

  When the article surfaced, most commentators, left and right, focused on its politics. The New York Times expressed a sneaky admiration for the piece, to wit, “Barack Obama’s journalistic voice was edgy with disdain for what he called ‘the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country’ amid ‘the growing threat of war.’”

  If, however, the content was no sillier than that generated by the average Columbia senior in 1983, the “journalistic voice” was well below the Ivy norm. This needs to be shown. Forgive me in advance if this exercise seems pedantic, but the problems I cite—such as the five sentences in which the noun and verb do not agree—would have shocked even my mother, and she never got beyond the eighth grade. My comments follow each selected sentence. The italics in all cases are mine.

  The more sensitive among us struggle to extrapolate experience of war from our everyday experience, discussing the latest mortality statistics from Guatemala, sensitizing ourselves to our parents’ wartime memories, or incorporating into our framework of reality as depicted by a Mailer or a Coppola.

  This is your classic dangling participle: the words discussing, sensitizing, and incorporating modify the subject, the more sensitive among us, but three other nouns stand between the participles and the subject. Also, note that incorporating should have an object. It makes no sense as is.

  But the taste of war—the sounds and chill, the dead bodies—are remote and far removed.

  The subject here is taste. The predicate should be is, not are.

  We know that wars have occurred, will occur, are occurring, but bringing such experience down into our hearts, and taking continual, tangible steps to prevent war, becomes a difficult task.

  Another problem with noun-verb agreement. This time the subject of the “but” clause is plural—bringing and taking. The verb should be become—although is would make more sense. The last two commas, both inappropriate, may have confused Obama.

  These groups, visualizing the possibilities of destruction and grasping the tendencies of distorted national priorities, are throwing their weight into shifting America off the dead-end track.

  Here, the participle is placed appropriately, but at sentence’s end Obama throws three awkward metaphors, all clichés, into a nearly indecipherable mix. Also, how does one grasp a tendency?
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br />   Along with the community Volunteer Service Center, ARA has been Don’s primary concern, coordinating various working groups of faculty, students, and staff members, while simultaneously seeking the ever elusive funding for programs.

  Coordinating is another participle left to dangle.

  One wonders whether this upsurge stems from young people’s penchant for the latest “happenings” or from growing awareness of the consequences of nuclear holocaust.

  This whole sentence clunks. Upsurge is the wrong word. Happenings should be singular, but even then it sounds like something Mike Brady would have said to Greg or Marcia ten years earlier.

  Generally, the narrow focus of the Freeze movement as well as academic discussions of first versus second strike capabilities, suit the military-industrial interests, as they continue adding to their billion dollar erector sets.

  The subject is focus, but it is isolated from its predicate by a needless comma, and that predicate should be suits in any case. Erector sets is another cringe-inducing metaphor.

  The very real advantages of concentrating on a single issue is leading the National Freeze movement to challenge individual missile systems, while continuing the broader campaign.

  Here is still another problem with agreement. This should read, advantages … are leading but only if advantages could lead. The last phrase dangles.