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

by Jack Cashill

  Although not one word or phrase reaches smoking-gun status, I was able to match every distinctive phrase and concept from this last thousand-word stretch of Audacity to a comparable one from Ayers’s work—with one interesting exception. This extraordinary parallelism suggests a certain haste on Ayers’s part as he seemed to be mining his own clichés.

  Many of the words and phrases in the Audacity epilogue can be found in the Ayers books, often multiple times. These include words like contingent, obscurity, torrent, inherently, satisfying, glimpse, fleeting, demonstrable, calculation, petty, nameless, faceless, as well as narrow and landscape used metaphorically, thousand used hyperbolically, and labor used as a verb.

  Telling too are the phrases: “my heart,” “filled with,” “measure of,” “sense of,” “what matters,” “the path to.” Again, none of these is significant in itself. It is just that every phrase I searched in Audacity I found in Ayers, again often multiple times. I do not believe Favreau was that good a mimic.

  More than the word matches, it was the conceptual parallelism that convinced me of Ayers’s involvement. For instance, Obama tells us that “satisfaction is not to be found in the glare of television cameras.” Ayers is equally disdainful of “the sinister glare of celebrity.” Obama talks about our “collective dreams.” Ayers uses the word collective more often and in more ways than even Marx did. Speaking of Marx, Obama uses the concept of “process” in a consciously dialectic sense, as does Ayers.

  In Audacity’s epilogue, Obama tells the reader that he strives “to help people live their lives with some measure of dignity.” Ayers too sees the need “to validate the dignity and worth of students,” to honor “the full measure of their humanity,” and to make efforts “to achieve and extend human dignity.”

  In the epilogue’s most dramatic moment, Obama relates a conversation he had had nearly twenty years earlier with an older friend of his, an academic who offered Obama advice on law school and a political career beyond. “Both law and politics required compromise,” the man tells Obama, adding that he himself had thought about going into politics but was unwilling to compromise.

  Ayers likely put his words in this poor man’s mouth. In Fugitive Days, for instance, he tells us that he and his comrades were eager to “combat the culture of compromise.” Looking back, Obama concedes that he was “perhaps more tolerant of compromise” than this older friend was. Curiously, tolerant is the one key word I could not find in any of Ayers’s books. Apparently, he had no particular use for that concept.

  Other than the epilogue and the prologue, the voice and style of Audacity are fairly workmanlike and consistent. As with Dreams, Obama surely contributed, especially in the personal reminiscences, but there is no way he could have actually written the body of the book without substantial help. That help seems to have come from one key individual. Of all the writers in Washington, only Favreau could have had the private time with Obama to pull this off without attracting attention. If, say, Ted Sorensen had stopped by daily to powwow with Obama, someone surely would have caught wind of it, even if Obama did not name the book Son of Profiles in Courage.

  At this point, Favreau is just about the only real suspect. If I am correct, Favreau labored to make Audacity sound like Dreams, but he simply does not write as knowingly or maturely as the Dreams muse does. Consider this passage from Audacity:

  But travel a few blocks farther in any direction and you will also experience a different side of Mac’s world: the throngs of young men on corners casting furtive glances up and down the street; the sound of sirens blending with the periodic thump of car stereos turned up full blast; the dark, boarded-up buildings and hastily scrawled gang signs; the rubbish everywhere, swirling in winter winds.

  This is the kind of stretch that Kakutani rightly describes as “recognizably similar” to the “narrative voice” of Dreams. It reads, however, like a description of a generic ghetto street that could have been imagined from the comfort of a D.C. Starbucks, not the real Chicago so vividly described in this passage from Dreams:

  … during my very first days in Chicago I had seen the knots of young men, fifteen or sixteen, hanging out on the corners of Michigan or Halsted, their hoods up, their sneakers unlaced, stomping the ground in a desultory rhythm during the colder months, stripped down to T-shirts in the summer, answering their beepers on the corner pay phones: a knot that unraveled, soon to reform, whenever the police cars passed by in their barracuda silence.

  It takes a seaman to know how silently a barracuda passes. Now, compare the above to an excerpt from Ayers’s A Kind and Just Parent: “Here a knot of young men stand around a stoop talking and passing a bottle.” In Race Course, there is more of the same: “Knots of men collected on corners and in the vacant lot next to our building, smoking, passing a bottle, or a skinny joint.” Not all authors assemble their young men into “knots.”

  More to the point, consider the way each of the two muses uses the telling word ballast. In Dreams the word is used with an understanding of what the word actually means, namely a weight that stabilizes a boat and prevents it from capsizing:

  A steady attack on the white race … served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair.

  In Audacity, the word is flat-out misused:

  … one is tempted to assume that the impact of faith on politics is largely salutary, a check on personal ambition, a ballast against the buffeting winds of today’s headlines and political expediency.

  No one in the know uses the phrase “ballast against” in reference to a ship. Then too there is the unnatural linking of “headlines” and “expediency” as metaphorical “winds.” The Audacity muse appears to be channeling the Obama of Dreams, right down to the nautical metaphors, but not quite getting it right.

  One Republican who has voiced his suspicions about Audacity is Bush adviser Karl Rove. He tells of running into Obama soon after Audacity was published. “Hey, I understand you got me in your book,” said Rove. “I don’t think so,” Obama replied. Rove continued, “I think you got me in your book saying, ‘we’re a Christian nation.’” Said Obama, “Where’d I say that?” Rove showed him.

  THE PLAN

  Whether or not Barack Obama actually wrote Audacity of Hope, the content of the book matters. Those millions of Americans who read it or read about it had good reason to think of it as Obama’s governing blueprint. After two years of the Obama presidency, however, the reader can see the book more clearly for what it is—a masterful strategic feint.

  One senses the guiding hand of David Axelrod. The repositioning of Obama took an insider’s understanding of the way the media work—Axelrod started as a Chicago Tribune reporter—and some serious chutzpah. Axelrod saw in “Obama” a product that would have excellent shelf appeal if properly repackaged, and he used the fall 2006 release of Audacity to roll that product out.

  Although the media chose not to see, there was no mistaking the nature of the core product, Obama himself. As a boy in Indonesia, his secular humanist mother would say of less enlightened Americans, “They are not my people,” and Obama got the message. As a teen in Hawaii, communist Frank Marshall Davis nudged him further to the left. Upon hitting the mainland, Obama immersed himself in a deeply leftist milieu. After college, he rejected a corporate life to community organize Saul Alinsky–style. At Harvard, he found mentors like Tribe and Ogletree. After Harvard, when he could have had any job he wanted, he returned to Chicago and civil rights law. For a pastor, he chose the most radical one in Chicago. For pals, he turned to people like Ayers, Dohrn, and Khalidi. As a state senator, he proved himself, in Mendell’s words, an “unabashed liberal.” In the U.S. Senate, the National Journal cited him as “the most liberal.” And yet Audacity would all but institutionalize Obama’s position as “a healer, not a divider.” This repositioning was chapter one, verse one in what “Ax” and Obama called “The Plan.”

  Axelrod could n
ot have accomplished this with just any candidate. From his childhood on, the multicultural Obama had shown the ability to blend Zelig-like into a range of environments. Although this trait could be useful, even endearing, it could also be irritating. At Harvard, for instance, he pitched the small conservative bloc to get himself elected president of the law review. The maneuver left at least a few of them thinking Obama “somewhat two-faced” and “all things to all people.” One of his black congressional opponents in 2000 called him what many others in the community felt, a “white man in blackface.” The Clinton camp wrote him off as a “politically calculating chameleon.”

  The media, of course, chose not to read the fine print on the Obama package. With the help of what even David Remnick concedes was “generally adoring press coverage,” Obama was reborn as a centrist. At the start of his Senate career in 2005, Newsweek made Obama its cover boy under the heading “The Color Purple.” This represented a full media buy-in to the conceit Obama had advanced in his Godfearing, flag-waving convention keynote speech. There he ceremoniously rejected the blue state–red state dichotomy and insisted that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.”

  Audacity gave new meaning to the phrase “purple prose.” Writing from the left, Michael Tomasky neatly summarizes the gist of the book in his critique for the Saturday Review of Books:

  The chapters boil down to a pattern: here’s what the right believes about subject X, and here’s what the left believes; and while I basically side with the left, I think the right has a point or two that we should consider, and the left can sometimes get a little carried away.

  In his otherwise flattering review, Time magazine’s Joe Klein had less patience still with this presidential two-step. Klein counted no fewer than fifty instances of “excruciatingly judicious on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-handedness” in Audacity. He calls the tendency “so pronounced that it almost seems an obsessive-compulsive tic.” More generously, Remnick calls Audacity “a shrewd candidate’s book.”

  One sign of that shrewdness was Obama’s professed respect for Ronald Reagan. “Reagan spoke to America’s longing for order,” writes Obama, “our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism, and faith.” Nor does he, unlike so many on the left, dismiss Reagan as merely an effective, if deceptive, communicator. His appeal “spoke to the failures of liberal government.” That government, according to Obama in words that now do cartwheels across the page, “had become too cavalier about spending taxpayer money.”

  Between these words of praise, Obama offers a critique of Reagan and his policies so gentle as to leave the impression that the Reagan revolution merely needs a little tweaking. Audacity is pure seduction. With an eye on 2008, Obama had cast his sauciest come-hither look at Reagan Democrats and Republicans of unsteady resolve.

  Lest his seeming moderation alienate his party’s hotheads, Obama sent out the appropriate smoke signals to keep them on the reservation. Nowhere is this more evident than in his treatment of gay marriage. The inclusion of a gay marriage amendment on the Ohio ballot in 2004 may have cost Kerry the election. It was a losing issue. Accordingly, during his 2004 Senate race and the 2008 presidential race for that matter, the crafty Obama opposed same-sex marriage.

  In Audacity, he tells the story of how one of his lesbian supporters phoned him to express her dismay at his position. The call reminded him that he had to remain “open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided,” that perhaps he “had been infected with society’s prejudices and predilections and attributed them to God.” Translation: he was prepared to change positions as soon as God and/or David Axelrod gave him the sign. The base got the message.

  Although the left’s shift in self-designation seems awfully coy, for Obama the label “progressive” fits much better than “liberal.” A liberal can have a fixed set of values, much as conservatives do. But a progressive, by definition, is always progressing. Like a great white, if one stops moving, it dies. Obama’s fellow progressives, the party’s base, understand that the long march through the institutions will have many strategic stalls, perhaps even a few reversals, but the march inevitably continues forward. In crafting Audacity, Axelrod was confident that party activists would see why Obama was marching in place. Their almost universal support for Obama in 2008 suggests that they did.

  For all his strategic legerdemain, Axelrod is no Svengali. Obama has none. From the beginning of Obama’s political career, his critics, myself included, have been looking for the man behind the curtain, but I am now convinced that if there is a wizard, it is Obama himself. He may be a “bound man,” forced to operate within narrow constraints, but he provides the drive. Fueling that drive, writes David Mendell, is “an internal conceit that formed in his character after being treated as a special human being as far back as childhood.”

  Occidental is not good enough for Obama, so he transfers to Columbia. He wearies of community organizing and limits his law school choices to “Harvard, Yale, Stanford.” Civil rights law proves small beer, and he runs for office. The state senate is beneath him, and so he runs for Congress. His opponent, Bobby Rush, calls him “a tool of the white liberals,” but if anything, the white liberals are his tool.

  Undeterred by his loss to Rush, Obama runs for the U.S. Senate. Incredibly, even the U.S. Senate is infra dig. “He was so bored being a senator,” says one aide. “The job was too small for him,” writes Remnick with a straight face. “He’s been bored to death his whole life,” summarizes confidante Valerie Jarrett. “He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

  Such uncommon people often find their way into the progressive camp because it encourages their deep-thought thinking and allows for the accumulation of power. Jonathan Alter openly marvels at the “many extraordinarily smart men and women” who have grouped themselves around Obama, not the “legion of second-raters” whom Bush attracted. (Yes, he actually writes this.) Like their president, they believe that “human beings don’t always do what’s in their rational best interest … but with the proper government rules and incentives, society could be dramatically improved.” Alter thinks of Obama as the most extraordinary of all these “brilliant policy mandarins.”

  Alter’s view of Obama conforms to Obama’s youthful view of himself. College friend John Drew contends that in his Occidental days Obama saw himself as “part of an intelligent, radical vanguard that was leading the way towards this revolution and towards this new society.” Obama may have sublimated his radicalism but not so his self-esteem. In 2008, he was still capable of confusing his capture of the Democratic nomination with “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

  Throughout his career, Obama has attached himself to people more powerful than he, but as with the Chicago liberals, it is not they who have used him, but he who has used them. Given this pattern, it seems likely that it was Obama who sought out the help of Khalid al-Mansour and through him that of Percy Sutton, and when they had served their purpose, he moved on.

  Obama found his way to Jeremiah Wright precisely because Wright had power and influence that Obama did not. When Ayers advanced Obama’s career in the mid-1990s, it was Ayers who had the clout and Obama who had the cunning to profit from it. It was Jane Dystel who had the connections in the publishing world that Obama needed, and it was he who exploited them until he did not need them or her anymore. At the end of the day, Obama would disown all of these people and others as well. “I think he’s an arrogant, self-absorbed, ungrateful jerk,” said one former Chicago ally. “He walked away from his friends.”

  The Alice Palmer drama set something of a pattern. A popular state senator, Palmer chose to run for U.S. Congress when a sexual assault and child pornograph
y conviction—the indictment did not deter voters in 1994—derailed the career plans of seat holder Mel Reynolds. In the interim, Palmer helped prep Obama to run for her state senate seat. When Palmer got beat in the primary by Jesse Jackson, Jr., she asked Obama to step aside so she could run for reelection as state senator. Not only did Obama refuse, which was understandable, but he challenged—successfully—the signatures Palmer had gathered to get back on the ballot. In anyone’s book, this was dirty pool.

  Obama’s treatment of Jeremiah Wright leaves one almost feeling sorry for Wright. Unwittingly, the Obama campaign had transformed one of Chicago’s most respected and influential preachers—however berserk—into everyone’s idiot uncle. To undo the harm the Wright videos had done to the campaign, Obama and Favreau concocted a five-thousand-word stemwinder to distance Obama from the man without exactly disowning him.

  Obama delivered the speech, titled “A More Perfect Union,” in Philadelphia in March 2008. Its central trope was pure soap opera. “I can no more disown him,” said Obama of his pastor, “than I can disown the black community.” Obama proceeded to compare Wright to his cryptoracist Hawaii grandma and promised to abandon neither. In the course of the speech, however, Obama condemned “in unequivocal terms” many of the comments that Wright had been making for the last thirty-six years. As Obama would soon learn, the pastor did not exactly cotton to a public spanking by a protégé.