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

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  2006: THE CHAUTAUQUA RISING (NOVEL)

  DECONSTRUCTING

  OBAMA

  THE LIFE, LOVES, AND LETTERS

  OF THE FIRST POSTMODERN PRESIDENT

  JACK CASHILL

  Threshold Editions

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  Copyright © 2011 by John Cashill

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  First Threshold Editions hardcover edition February 2011

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cashill, Jack.

  Deconstructing Obama : the life, loves, and letters of America’s first postmodern president / Jack Cashill. — 1st Threshold Editions hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  1. Obama, Barack—Literary art. 2. Obama, Barack—Authorship.

  3. Obama, Barack—Friends and associates. I. Title.

  E908.3.C37 2011

  973.932092—dc22 2010038341

  ISBN 978-1-4516-1111-3

  ISBN 978-1-4516-1113-7 (ebook)

  To Margaret and Flannery

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Christmas 2009

  I. THE POLITICAL CAMPAIGN OF 2008

  10,000 Hours

  The Story

  Burying Percy

  Amiable Dunces

  Beautiful Old House

  Fugitive Days

  The Word-Slinger

  Poetic Truths

  Crystal Chaos

  Conspiracy Commerce

  Ballast

  Secret Sharer

  The Postmodern President

  Weird Science

  Acknowledgments

  Reformers

  Rush

  Channeling Billy

  Space Limitations

  Swiftboating

  Vichy

  London Fog

  II. THE WILDERNESS CAMPAIGN, 2009–2010

  Milli Vanilli

  Genius School

  Copycats

  Green Peppers

  Wine-Dark Sea

  Hog Butcher

  Audacity

  The Plan

  Nobel Laureate

  Going Rogue

  Gramps

  Barack Sr.

  Unknown Black Male

  Frank

  Ax

  Hubris

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  CHRISTMAS 2009

  September 23, 2009, was Christmas Day for me, and I woke to find an official Red Ryder carbine-action two-hundred-shot Range Model air rifle under my tree. Not a real tree, mind you, nor a real air rifle, but a gift in my inbox even better than an air rifle, specifically a cluster of emails, all of them pronouncing some joyous variation on the theme “Did you see Hannity last night!!!!”

  I had not, but in the age of the Internet, it was simple enough to find the clip in question. The guest on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show was celebrity biographer Christopher Andersen. An establishment journalist with credentials of the first order—Time, People, Vanity Fair—Andersen had written some thirteen New York Times bestselling biographies in the past twenty years.

  He appeared on the Hannity show to promote the fourteenth, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage. If Andersen did not fire his publicist after the show, he should have. The natural audience for his book skews female and left. USA Today had accurately described it as “A glowing ‘Portrait’ of the Obamas’ rock-solid marriage,” and yet here was Hannity pounding on one of the book’s few unfriendly revelations, namely Barack Obama’s friendship with terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers. For those who have been comatose the last several years or stuck on NPR, Ayers is the Weather Underground veteran who made unrepentant a household word. His relationship with Obama would bedevil the candidate throughout the 2008 campaign.

  I had observed the campaign at a safe remove until, in September 2008, the literary detective work I had been doing led me to suspect a heretofore unimagined intimacy between erstwhile terrorist and candidate. Indeed, I had come to believe that Ayers had been deeply involved in the writing of Obama’s acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father. I went public with my suspicions in September 2008 and for my troubles I endured a year of sustained abuse from all corners of society, polite and otherwise.

  And then Chris Andersen showed up on Hannity. I watched the clip with the kind of awe I once felt for the first moon landing and the Miracle on Ice. On air, Hannity quoted Andersen’s claim that “literary devices and themes [in Dreams] bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’s own writings.” Asked Hannity, “Bill Ayers helped him with his book?” Andersen answered in the affirmative and then anxiously changed topic. Hannity, sensing perhaps he had gotten all he could, let Andersen move on, but the proverbial cat had crept rather publicly out of the bag.

  I immediately headed to my local Barnes & Noble and bought the book. By late afternoon, I had consumed it. The Ayers bombshell was no minor aside. Andersen spends some six pages on the story. He details the how, when, and why of Obama’s collaboration with Ayers on Dreams.

  Andersen wrote from within the gates. He had no agenda. His book is as softly liberal and sympathetic to the Obamas as his previous book had been to Christopher and Dana Reeve. He interviewed some two hundred people for the book, many of them close to the Obama family, at least two of whom talked to him about Ayers’s role in Dreams, possibly Bill Ayers himself. The Obamas had likely given their tacit blessing to the project. Andersen had no reason to invent facts that would alienate his base. Nor does he have a track record of doing so.

  In the immediate aftermath of the Andersen revelations, friends advised me to start writing my Pulitzer speech, but by this time I knew better. Too much depended on Obama’s authorship of Dreams. In their reading of the book, the world’s literary gatekeepers, an influential subset of the Obama faithful, had convinced themselves that Obama was too smart, too sensitive, too skilled as a writer to need anyone’s assistance. They believed this deeply enough to have built Obama’s foundational myth around his presumed literary genius.

  Obama encouraged them. “I’ve written two books,” he told a crowd of teachers in Virginia in July of 2008. The crowd applauded. “I actually wrote them myself,” he added with a wink and a nod, and now the teachers exploded in laughter. They got the joke: Republicans were too stupid to write their books.

  Although no one much cared about Obama’s second b
ook, a first-person memoir /policy brief published in 2006 and titled The Audacity of Hope, Dreams had emerged as the sacred text in the cult of Obama. “There is no underestimating the importance of Dreams from My Father in the political rise of Barack Obama,” David Remnick would later write in his exhaustive look at Obama’s life and career, The Bridge.

  Thanks in no small part to Dreams, Obama had been anointed perhaps the smartest would-be president of all time. The Obama campaign machine, Organizing for America, did not shy from saying so. It had shamelessly encouraged its minions to “get out the vote and keep talking to others about the genius of Barack Obama.” This, I sensed from the beginning, was a myth that one challenged at his own peril.

  As I half expected, the media ignored Andersen’s bombshell. Scores of major media outlets reviewed Barack and Michelle, among them CBS News, USA Today, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Seattle Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Chicago Tribune, and the Telegraph of London. Yet incredibly, despite Andersen’s insights, despite the research that my co-conspirators and I had done on this topic, I could not find a single outlet that so much as mentioned the Dreams controversy, the most newsworthy item in the book.

  By September 2009 I knew well that this controversy involved more than authorship. It involved the very content of Dreams and the character of the man who put his name on it. Proving Ayers had helped write it would make a statement but would not be statement enough. To move this story onto the main stage, I had to dig deeper and “deconstruct” the life of our first postmodern president.

  A serious student of literature, Ayers has written a good deal about the postmodern perspective, specifically in the writing of a memoir. Like pornography, postmodernism is one of those things that is hard to define, but you know it when you see it, and Ayers’s version is not all that hard to spot. Like many on the left, he rejects the possibility of an objective, universal truth, either the “modern” scientific perspective of the Enlightenment or the God-centered perspective of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In its stead, he argues for a more personalized reality, one whose “narrative” we each “construct” as we journey along.

  Ayers’s own memoir, the 2001 Fugitive Days, is laced with repeated references to what he calls “our constructed reality.” So too is Dreams. “But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie,” writes Obama, “something I’d constructed from the scraps of information I’d picked up from my mother.” (For simplicity’s sake, I will refer to “Obama” as the author of everything that appears under his name.) If the role of the postmodern writer is to construct a reality, the role of the postmodern critic is thus to “deconstruct” it.

  To help sort out the lies and the half-truths from the truth, I return to the words that Obama has spoken or written or had written for him. Of these, Dreams is the most telling, but Audacity is not without its revelations. Significant too are Obama’s half-dozen or so defining speeches. More quietly critical is an enigmatic poem published under the name of the nineteen-year-old Obama called “Pop.” If Dreams serves as sacred text, “Pop” is the Rosetta stone, the key to decrypting Obama’s shrouded past, his fragile psyche, and his uniquely cryptic political life.

  In unlocking that past, I have discovered that the story that Obama has been telling all his life varies from the true story in ways big and small. I suspect that in other times and places a man as enigmatic and ambitious as Obama could emerge as president or caliph or czar, but only in contemporary America could a scrappy band of everyday Joes take him on and actually hope to prevail.

  I

  THE POLITICAL CAMPAIGN OF 2008

  10,000 HOURS

  This adventure began all so innocently. In June 2008 a friend sent me some excerpts from Dreams from My Father and asked if they were as radical as they sounded. I had not yet read the book, but I found myself bookless in the Detroit Metro Airport awaiting America’s least glamorous flight—Detroit to Buffalo—and decided to buy a copy.

  Besides, the bookstore provided escape from the billboard-size TV screens that dominate each successive chamber in Detroit’s then Northwest, now Delta terminal. A few years earlier, just prior to the 2004 election, I experienced what, for me at least, was the very essence of Orwellian terror. While walking through the terminal, I looked up and saw the surreal, snarling, Rushmore-sized head of certifiable political madman James Carville.

  I looked away, of course, but Carville’s ragin’ Cajun cackle trailed me from speaker to speaker as I walked ever faster through this seemingly endless chamber of horrors. Finally, I passed under the screen and breathed a sigh of relief only to be confronted in the next massive chamber by another talking billboard filled still with the same monstrous, gleaming Carvillian head. On my way to a nightmarishly distant gate, in fact, I passed through about ten more such chambers and under ten more colossal Carvilles until I finally reached the gate and ducked into the bookstore, the only refuge I could find without a urinal in it.

  For the record, Carville was then co-host of the CNN show Cross-fire. Until that moment, I had not really noticed that CNN had infiltrated every major airport in America. This service, launched in 1992, is called the CNN Airport Network. When last I checked, 1,775 airport gates in thirty-nine of America’s leading airports showed CNN news and no other show but CNN news, all the time.

  Upon inquiring, I discovered that major airports were contractually bound well into the future to force-feed a captive audience the politically loaded CNN twenty-four hours a day, arguably the most comprehensive monopoly in the history of the American media. One can imagine the outcry if the airports switched to a new station that people actually watched, like Fox News, for instance.

  The airport bookstore drove me nearly as batty as the terminal. There were Obama books everywhere I looked: hardcover, softcover, coffee-table books, coloring books, you name it. Given my biases, I found myself as uneasy in buying Dreams as I had been when I bought my first copy of Playboy many moons ago. “What if someone sees me?”

  The clerk, a young black woman, beamed at me for my purchase, and I felt squeamish no longer. Like so many of my fellow citizens, I had a momentary flash, however delusional, of the racial harmony that would settle upon the land if Obama were elected. The extent of the delusion became clear some months later when I told this story on the air and was promptly called a racist for either experiencing it or telling it. I wasn’t sure which, maybe both.

  I also bought a yellow highlighter, a complicated one that collapsed into itself like a low-grade Transformer toy. Once on the plane, I commenced to read the book—the cover kept discreetly down—find the passages in question, and highlight them. What I found disappointed my friend. “As far as I can tell,” I emailed her back, “the excerpts all seem to be taken out of context. They are not as radical as they sound.” Most, in fact, were quotes by other people that Obama had captured. They did not express his own thoughts.

  The content of Dreams did not strike me then as terribly controversial. In paperback, the book runs 442 pages. The first section, called “Origins,” begins with Obama as a twenty-one-year-old learning of his father’s death and quickly backtracks to cover his family’s history on either side. This 126-page section takes Obama through his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, his college years in Los Angeles and New York, and ends with the twenty-four-year-old Obama on the verge of moving to Chicago.

  The 162-page second section, “Chicago,” reads as though it were written to be part of some other book. It mercilessly details the three years Obama spent as a community organizer before climaxing with Obama’s weepy embrace of something like Christianity at Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church. Yet, despite its length, the section does little to advance the primary thrust of the book—Obama’s search for identity.

  The third section, “Kenya,” picks up the identity theme again. Its 131 pages dwell on Obama’s first trip to Kenya in what would appear to be 1988, the summer before he begins Harvard Law School. A short epilogue wraps up
the rest of Obama’s brief life, including his Harvard experience and his marriage to Michelle in 1992.

  Early on in the first read, the quality of the writing caught my attention. Although the book lacks discipline and occasionally grinds on in useless detail, long stretches of Dreams are very well written. In my twenty-five-year career in advertising and publishing, I have reviewed the portfolios of at least a thousand professional writers. Not a half dozen among them wrote as well as the author of the book’s best passages, and these were professionals, not presumed amateurs like Obama.

  To be sure, political celebrities routinely use ghostwriters. This kind of low-level subterfuge is as common in Washington as hair dye. But that an aspiring state senator of modest means and minimal reputation could afford such a quality professional touch-up impressed me as an angle worth examining.

  Many critics of my research have failed to recognize that some people have a keener eye for style than others. I learned this the hard way. A few years ago, a visiting artist friend zeroed in on a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt hung on my living room wall. I had painted it as a high school student in New York at a salon overseen by Helen Farr Sloan, the widow of famed American painter John Sloan, and herself a painter of no small talent.

  “Who did that?” my friend asked upon seeing the painting.

  “I did,” I answered proudly.

  “I can believe you did the face,” said my friend, a funny, blunt guy. “That sucks. But who did the eyes?”

  “I did,” I answered. He stared at me hard. “I had help,” I added sheepishly.

  “You had more than help.”

  He was right. Helen Sloan had touched up the eyes after I proved unable to bring them to life. Who knows how many hundreds of people had looked at my TR painting without spotting the difference in quality between her eyes and my face. My artist friend saw it in a second. The painting now hangs in my basement.