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

by Jack Cashill

  Apparently, somewhere along the way Ayers and Obama shared a menagerie. In addition to hogs, both also fix on the water buffalo. At a war protest in the 1960s, Ayers sees a photo of “small boys with bamboo sticks perched upon their backs.” Curiously, in Dreams, Obama also remembers seeing a boy sitting “on the back of a dumb-faced water buffalo, whipping its haunch with a stick of bamboo.” Note that these boys whip the beast not just with sticks, but with bamboo sticks. As it happens, each also talks about birds of paradise, yellow dogs, ducks, hippos, chickens, Cheshire cats, and an African boy’s need to “kill a lion” to prove himself a man.

  Working from Mr. Southwest’s documentation, I wrote that Ayers was fixated with faces, especially eyes. He writes of “sparkling” eyes, “shining” eyes, “laughing” eyes, “twinkling” eyes, eyes “like ice,” and people who are “wide-eyed” and “dark-eyed.” As it happens, Obama was also fixated with faces, especially eyes. He too writes of “sparkling” eyes, “shining” eyes, “laughing” eyes, “twinkling” eyes, and uses the phrases “wide-eyed” and “dark-eyed.” Obama adds “smoldering eyes,” smoldering being a word that he and Ayers inject repeatedly. Obama also uses the highly distinctive phrases “like ice,” in his case to describe the glistening of the stars. To counter this, Levingston comforted Post readers with the notion that “eyes have mesmerized writers throughout history.”

  Remnick does much the same in his book. He repeated this nonsense when he was the in-studio guest on a Chicago radio show. Although I was a call-in guest on the same show, he casually reduced my work to the “notion that [Obama] uses the word eyes a lot.” I had already written twenty thousand or so words on the subject. He had read enough of them to slime me in his book, and still he was able to ratchet up the silliness with me listening in. Mr. Remnick, Hath not a Boilermaker ears?

  What amuses in retrospect are the parallels in my first article on Mr. Southwest’s research that Levingston—and Remnick for that matter—saw but chose not to reveal. Both Obama and Ayers, for instance, use “Mekong Delta” as a synecdoche for Vietnam. Both have scenes in which clueless “State Department” officials—plural—link Indonesia with the march of communism through the archaic, colonial-sounding “Indochina.” Both talk of the West’s “imperial culture.” Both use the phrase “perfectly American” ironically, if not bitterly.

  Isolate any one of these matches, and it means nothing. Multiply it by 759 or even 180, and the evidence overwhelms. Washington Post readers were told none of this.

  Levingston summed up my argument thus: “The book [Dreams] is beautifully written and yet, in Cashill’s opinion, Obama is—and always was—a crappy writer.” I would never use the word crappy, but I must give Levingston credit for so nicely summarizing my thesis even if he does dismiss it—ouch!—as “the stink that fills the detective’s nose.”

  AUDACITY

  In his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama presumed to tell the world just who he was and what he believed. One challenge he knew he would face—especially after September 11—was convincing America that he was one of its own.

  Despite his professed Christianity, there has been much talk about Obama’s Muslim roots, and that talk is not without some merit. Obama did, in fact, register in his Indonesian school as a Muslim and occasionally attended prayer services with his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro. “Barry was a Muslim,” his third-grade teacher told the Los Angeles Times in 2007, but this was a rare acknowledgment by the media. In general, they approached the issue in damage-control mode.

  Even such fundamental questions as whether Soetoro ever adopted Obama have gone unasked. In fact, it is Obama’s murky status as Soetoro’s stepson that has caused many soi-disant “birthers” to question his citizenship. The best known of those is Philip Berg, the Hillary Clinton supporter who filed suit against Obama challenging his “Constitutional qualifications” to serve as president. What Berg contends is that when Obama returned to Hawaii at age ten, he did so as “Barry Soetoro” on an Indonesian passport and has never legally changed his name back to Obama.

  The fact that Obama was listed on his mother’s 1968 passport renewal application as “Barack Hussein Obama (Soebarkah)”—with the unexplained “Soebarkah” in parentheses on the application—or that Ann Dunham’s 1965 passport application and any that might have preceded it were inexplicably destroyed has done little to still birther discontent.

  In Dreams, Obama takes pains to distance himself from his Muslim roots, particularly during his Indonesian phase. Obama tells the reader he “made faces” during Koranic studies and was scolded for it. And that is it for him and Islam. There is no mention in Dreams or Audacity of his 1981 trip to Pakistan and little mention of his close Pakistani friends and roommates.

  Obama is more elusive still about his relatives. Yes, Lolo Soetoro was a Muslim, but he practiced a kind of half-baked hybrid. Yes, his grandfather was a Muslim, but he converted because Islam better reflected his mercilessness. But no, Barack Sr. was not a Muslim. On one occasion in Dreams, a Chicago barber asks, “Barack, huh. You a Muslim?” Obama replies evasively, “Grandfather was.” If he conceded that his father was a Muslim, he would have had to deny his father to erase his Muslim roots, and that would have worked against the plotline.

  In reality, Barack Sr. lived his early life as a Muslim. In Dreams, Obama’s half brother Roy suggests that he died one as well. “The government wanted a Christian burial,” Roy tells Obama. “The family wanted a Muslim burial.” By 2006, knowing how toxic a Muslim heritage would be to an aspiring presidential candidate, Obama would write in Audacity, “Although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist.” During the campaign, the Obama press office declared that Obama Sr. was simply “an atheist” and did not mention his Muslim upbringing. An atheism-friendly media accepted this line uncritically.

  In September 2008, in a conversation with George Stephanopoulos set up to quell such rumors, Obama slipped up and referred to “my Muslim faith,” before quickly correcting himself. Slip-up or no, he found it “deeply offensive” that the Republican camp was suggesting “that perhaps I’m not who I say I am when it comes to my faith.”

  In Audacity, Obama hoped to establish “who I say I am.” The very title of the book, however, gives the wary reader pause. Obama names it—misnames it actually—after the life-changing sermon by Jeremiah Wright, “Audacity to Hope.” In Dreams, Obama recounts the sermon approvingly and in some detail. He cites classic Wright pearls like “White folks’ greed runs a world in need” as if they actually made sense. And this, he boasts, is the sermon that set him on the road to Christianity or something like it.

  To those paying attention, Obama’s conversion seemed as calculated as his choice of wife. Mendell notes that in 2004 “Obama, without fail, would mention his church and his Christian faith when he was campaigning in black churches and more socially conservative down-state Illinois communities.” Yet when Mendell tried to talk to Obama about his faith and his “ever present bible,” Obama proved “uncharacteristically short” in his responses. When Mendell persisted, Obama claimed that he was drawn to Christianity because “many of the impulses that I had carried with me and were propelling me forward were the same impulses that express themselves through the church.” In other words, Jesus thought pretty much along the same progressive lines as Obama did.

  In Audacity, Obama is even more ambiguous about his politics than he is about his faith. That, I believe, was as intended. The book seems to have been planned and written by committee, and the final product shows it. In October 2006, when Audacity hit the bookstores, it did not get the raves Dreams had. The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani describes Audacity “as much more of a political document. Portions of the volume read like outtakes from a stump speech.” Still, despite the book’s “flabby platitudes,” she assures her readers that “enough of the narrative voice in this volume is recognizably similar to the one in Dreams From My Fathe
r.”

  The question that must first be asked is who provided that narrative voice. In the way of recap, after being elected senator in November 2004, Obama replaced his loyal agent Jane Dystel and her 15 percent cut with a powerful D.C. attorney who charged only by the hour. Some time before his swearing-in as senator, Obama signed a two-book deal with Crown for somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million and pocketed the $300,000 that would have otherwise gone to Dystel.

  Despite the onerous workload of a freshman senator, Obama found time to write a 431-page book without any acknowledged writing help in what was roughly an eighteen-month window. This was the same writer who blew a six-figure advance because he was unable to produce a book during three much less hectic years, the same writer who between his 1995 masterpiece and Audacity had written nothing deeper than an occasional lame column for a community newsletter.

  In reality, the window was much less than eighteen months. “He procrastinated for a long time,” concedes Remnick. It is understandable why Obama might have. His schedule was ridiculous. He would typically fly into D.C. on Monday evenings and out on Thursday evenings. In addition to a daily trip to the gym and occasional lunches and dinners with friends, Obama’s D.C. workdays were packed, in his own retelling, with “committee markups, votes, caucus lunches, floor statements, speeches, photos with interns, evening fund-raisers, returning phone calls, writing correspondence, reviewing legislation, drafting op-eds, recording podcasts, receiving policy briefings, hosting constituent coffees, and attending an endless series of meetings.”

  When home, in that first year alone, Obama hosted eighty-nine town-hall meetings throughout the state of Illinois. He traveled abroad to Russia, Eastern Europe, Israel, and Iraq. “Like a traditional pol,” admits Remnick, “he spent hours making cajoling calls” to fill the coffers of his political-action committee. Given his high profile, he hit the campaign trail to raise money for his colleagues. All business aside, the fatherless Obama also worked hard to be a good father to his daughters and a good husband to Michelle. Accordingly, he set aside Sundays for his family and as much other time as he could squeeze in.

  “There was another inkblot on this sketch,” writes Mendell. “Writing a book is a full-time job in itself.” Somehow Obama managed to moonlight a book project in the wake of a day job that always ran overtime. “I usually wrote at night after my Senate day was over, and after my family was asleep—from 9:30 p.m. or so until 1 a.m.,” he told interviewer Daphne Durham of Amazon. Once he got started, Obama wrote his initial draft in longhand.

  “His best writing time comes late at night when he’s all alone, scribbling on yellow legal pads,” confirmed the embarrassingly credulous Jay Newton-Small in Time two months before the November 2008 election. “This is how he wrote both of his two best selling books—Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope—staying up after Michelle and his two young daughters had long gone to bed, reveling in the late night quiet.”

  Time was apparently shorthanded on fact checkers. As to Dreams, Obama’s oldest daughter was born in 1998, three years after the book was published. As to Audacity, his family may have gone to bed early, but that was in Chicago. Obama was in D.C. He came home most weekends, but I cannot imagine the Obamas abandoning their Twelve Oaks social life for book writing. The late-night story line may have been based on Obama’s habits but was surely inflated to accommodate his casual completion of a task that would have sent Hercules looking for his union rep.

  Although he had dissed Christopher Andersen on Chicago radio for using “unnamed sources,” Remnick relies on a person known only as an “aide” to explain how a slow writer, off to a late start, using 19th century technology, could pen (literally) a well-researched, 431-page book in the face of an absurd work schedule. “He was punching the clock during the day and then coming alive at night to write the book,” says the “aide.” That was enough to satisfy Remnick. He adds that facing his deadline, Obama wrote “nearly a chapter a week.” The chapters are on average nearly fifty pages long. Remnick is a writer. He should know better. Obama had to be taking a page out of the Tribe-Ogletree playbook.

  In the acknowledgments section of Audacity—Dreams does not have one—Obama lists an astonishing twenty-four people who provided “invaluable suggestions” in reading or fact-checking the book prior to publication. These include David Axelrod, Cassandra Butts, Forrest Claypool, Julius Genachowski, Scott Gration, Robert Fisher, Michael Froman, Donald Gips, John Kupper, Anthony Lake, Susan Rice, Gene Sperling, Cass Sunstein, Jim Wallis, Peter Rouse, Karen Kornbluh, Mike Strautmanis, Jon Favreau, Mark Lippert, Joshua DuBois, Robert Gibbs, Chris Lu, Madhuri Kommareddi, and Hillary Schrenell. As a point of comparison, other than the publisher’s people, my English professor wife is the only one who reads my books before publication. None of the twenty-four above is a publisher person. They are all Obama people.

  Although Obama singles out Gibbs and Lu, if there is a muse in chief among this crowd, it is almost assuredly speechwriting wunderkind Jon Favreau. Favreau first met up with Obama at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and although he had just turned twenty-three, he did not hesitate to offer advice on Obama’s keynote speech. Obama interviewed Favreau on his first day in the Senate in 2005 and promptly hired him. And there is the rub. Favreau is one of eight people who, Obama carefully notes, “read the manuscript on their own time.” As a paid Senate staffer, Favreau would have had to do book writing on his “own time.” So would have Obama, for that matter.

  No writer was closer to Obama or more trusted than Favreau. While getting to know the senator, he carried Dreams around and committed it to memory. His goal, reports Ashley Parker of the New York Times, was “to master Mr. Obama’s voice,” meaning the voice of Dreams. Continues Parker: “Now, he said, when he sits down to write, he just channels Mr. Obama—his ideas, his sentences, his phrases.”

  Mendell got to see Favreau in action before he became a minor celebrity. “In crafting a speech,” Mendell writes, “Favreau grabs his laptop and sits with Obama for about twenty minutes, listening to his boss throw out chunks of ideas. Favreau then assembles these thoughts into political prose.” Although I cannot prove that Audacity was assembled in the same fashion, I can confirm that portions of Audacity sound like “outtakes from a stump speech” precisely because they were, in fact, outtakes from a stump speech.

  Kudos to Mr. Southwest for his work on this. He found thirty-eight passages from Obama speeches delivered in 2005 or 2006 that appear virtually word for word as ordinary text in Audacity. The first example comes from a speech Obama gave on October 25, 2005:

  … those who work in the field know what reforms really work: a more challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on math, science, and literacy skills. Longer hours and more days to give kids the time and attention they need to learn.

  This second excerpt comes from Audacity:

  And in fact we already have hard evidence of reforms that work: a more challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on math, science, and literacy skills; longer hours and more days to give children the time and sustained attention they need to learn.

  By June 2006, with a deadline imminent, Obama appears to have been either inserting whole speeches word for word into the manuscript or lifting passages from the manuscript to use as speeches. The first example comes from a June 28, 2006, speech:

  Indeed, the single biggest “gap” in party affiliation among white Americans today is not between men and women, or those who reside in so-called Red States and those who reside in Blue, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don’t.

  This second excerpt comes from Audacity:

  The single biggest gap in party affiliation among white Americans is not between men and women, or between those who reside in so-called red states and those who reside in blue states, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don’t.

  Of course, all that this proves is that whoever wrote Obama’s speeches wr
ote large sections of Audacity, perhaps all of it, and this is an issue only if someone other than Obama wrote his speeches. As we are seeing, though, illusions of genius are not easily sustainable. When senior editor Rachel Klayman of Crown pulled Dreams from the vaults and put it back into circulation, she unknowingly set in motion a series of compounding untruths, beginning with the foundational myth that Obama is a literary lion. To sustain that myth, Obama’s enablers had to make us believe that he also wrote Audacity by himself, as well as most of his speeches, staying up until the wee hours each night to do so.

  The public flowering of Favreau after Obama’s election to the presidency—the Washington Post first discovered him and his laptop in a D.C. Starbucks—complicated this scenario. So lost in Obama worship was British writer Jonathan Raban that he confessed to being “disconcerted” to learn that Obama used speechwriters at all. He felt even more “let down” when he discovered that the Philadelphia “More Perfect Union” speech was “a joint Obama/Favreau production.”

  Of the thirty-eight speech passages from 2005 to 2006 that found their way into Audacity, the Obama faithful are forced to believe that Obama wrote all of them. If he did not, then he did not write Audacity by himself, and if he lied about that, then he was also capable of lying about his unique authorship of Dreams. It seems much more likely that Favreau wrote most of these speeches, if not all. Yes, Obama may have dictated his thoughts or written down notes in longhand, but why would he not have given those notes to his gifted, government-issue speechwriter to put into prose?

  Here is what I believe happened. Obama knew he had a problem on his hands when Dreams was republished in 2004. He recruited Ayers to write the distinctly postmodernist preface to the 2004 edition, but once he was elected to the U.S. Senate they both knew that Ayers was poison. To achieve continuity, Ayers was asked to write the prologue to Audacity and the final pages of the epilogue, but no more.