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

  Not long ago my wife asked me if I wanted to go to an Eric Clapton concert. “Why do I want to pay seventy bucks a ticket to see Eric Clapton?” I asked. “He’s the best guitarist in the world,” she answered. “We’d waste the investment,” I countered. “I couldn’t tell the world’s best guitarist from the fourteenth-best guitarist in Kansas City.”

  If I cannot tell the great from the good in art or music, I can do just that when it comes to writing. I read a hundred or so nonfiction books a year. I have taught writing of all sorts at all levels. I have a Ph.D. in American studies with a literature emphasis. I write for a living. I have “doctored” books by people you have heard of. And I have recently written a book on literary and intellectual fraud, Hoodwinked by name. I can spot the “eyes” of a book and recognize a literary Eric Clapton, often at a glance. I am hardly unique. Others can do the same, but they have to be willing to look. Precious few have looked.

  Not too long ago I volunteered to teach a writing class at a local high school. I met with the same small group of kids once a week for three years. They tried hard, and after three years all wrote better than they had at the beginning. But none wrote appreciably better, and the skill differential among them had not shifted a whit. As all teachers will attest, to make an ordinary writer an extraordinary one is nearly impossible.

  Even a gifted student writer must work hard to reach the next level. In his bestseller Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell painstakingly lays out what he calls the “ten-thousand-hour rule.” He quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin to the effect that “ten thousand hours of practice [in any subject] is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert” and cites example after example to make his case.

  In his recent memoir, Hitch-22, British-born journalist Christopher Hitchens details what that ten-thousand-hour rule might look like in the life of a writer. Hitchens spends page after page documenting his early awakening to the craft, his first efforts, his influences, his successes, his failures, his strengths, his failings. Obama’s Hawaii mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, does the same in his useful memoir, Livin’ the Blues, published posthumously in 1992. Davis incorporates several of his poems into the text. He talks at length about his influences, his honors, his early infection with “journalitis,” his publications, his ambitions.

  In Dreams, there is none of this. Gladwell’s ten thousand hours gets whittled down to about one hundred implied hours of journal entries and “very bad poetry.” And then, without further ado, Obama produces what the estimable Joe Klein of Time magazine calls “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.” To put this in another context, imagine that your double-bogey golfing buddy shows up one day at your country club wearing a green jacket and claiming to have won it at the Masters. Would you not be a little suspicious? Surely, the editors of Golf Digest would be. From the looks of his literary scorecard pre-Dreams, Obama was a double-bogey writer. If anything, given his skill base, it would have been easier for him to make the cut at the Masters than to write a minor political masterpiece.

  After reading Dreams, I thought there would be chat rooms filled with people who shared my suspicion. Not so. The literati had already embraced Obama as one of their own. On the strength of Dreams, noted British author Jonathan Raban called Obama “the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln.” Added Raban, “Every sentence has its own graceful cadence! He could as easily be a novelist as a politician!”

  Raban was in good company. “Whatever else people expect from a politician,” wrote Oona King in her London Times review, “it’s not usually a beautifully written personal memoir steeped in honesty.” The American literary crowd was just as enamored. “I was astonished by his ability to write, to think, to reflect, to learn and turn a good phrase,” said Nobel Prize–winning novelist Toni Morrison of Dreams. “I was very impressed. This was not a normal political biography.” Implicit in every review I read was that Obama penned the memoir himself. One amateur reviewer nicely captured the left’s shared faith in Obama’s talent: “Wow. The man can write.”

  I had a full plate in the summer of 2008, so I did just a little dabbling in literary detection. I began by picking out a series of distinctive poetic phrases from Dreams—“ragged laughter,” “unadorned insistence,” “the landscape of my heart,” and the like—and began Googling to see if I could find any matches online. I found no pattern. The best I could find I summarized in an email headed “Long Shot” to an online buddy, a boxing promoter and all-around good spirit who has the same last name as my two suspects. To protect identities, I will change their shared name to “Tarleton.”

  Donald, I am doing some literary detective work on Obama’s Dreams From My Father, which I am sure he did not write. My best guess is that it was written by a couple: Bill and Slyvia [sic] Tarleton. Actually, I am not sure that they are a couple but one distinctive Omaba [sic] phrase shows up in Bill’s work and another in Sylvia’s. Do you know either of these people?

  Donald did not know them at all. My next trick, a fairly lame one, was to send an email to Bill Tarleton. As I incorporate my name in my email address, the email could not come from me. So I asked my webmaster to send it, a useful ruse given that her hosting site at the time was “sfsu.edu.” The exchange went as follows:

  Hi Bill,

  Long time! Just got to the Obama book. Great job. Regards to Sylvia.

  Debra

  Debra,

  Please, what Obama book? Who is Sylvia?

  Nice to get praise, but I have no idea who you’re talking about. San

  Francisco State University, sfsu?

  Bill

  Bill,

  Oops. Sorry. I was looking for another Bill Tarleton.

  Debra

  Debra

  How can there be another Bill Tarleton?

  Oh, yeah, my son Bill is another Bill Tarleton.

  Just to let you know, we are Obama people.

  Bill

  In looking over Bill Tarleton’s writings, I had presumed he was an Obama person, which is why I used a cutout to approach him. He could have Googled me as easily as I Googled him and discovered that I was probably not an Obama person. In any case, he had fully convinced me of his innocence.

  Unable to identify a collaborator, I plunged deeper into Dreams and into the language Obama used in spontaneous interviews. I first publicly voiced my suspicions on July 31, 2008, in a WorldNetDaily (WND) column titled “Who Wrote Dreams from My Father?” Quoting my painter friend, I argued that Obama “had more than help,” much more. The real question, I asked, was where did that help come from and why. At the time, I did not suspect Bill Ayers at all.

  THE STORY

  The story that Barack Obama tells in Dreams is a story that he had been telling with some variation all his life and always to good effect. When Obama hooked up with campaign guru David Axelrod in his 2004 race for the U.S. Senate, his story crystallized into a marketing strategy. Packaging was Axelrod’s strong suit.

  Guided by Axelrod, Obama held off in his breakthrough keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention for all of forty-six words—including “Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much”—before sharing his story with the world. At the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Obama leaped into the story in the very first sentence. “Four years ago,” he began, “I stood before you and told you my story—of the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas who weren’t well-off or well-known, but shared a belief that in America, their son could achieve whatever he put his mind to.”

  In between the two convention speeches, the story of Obama’s birth was told more often than that of anyone since Jesus. No one, of course, told it as convincingly as Obama himself, especially in his game-saving Philadelphia speech, immodestly titled “A More Perfect Union.” In this speech, delivered to negate the baleful impact of the Jeremiah Wright videos, Obama attributed his faith in the American people to his “own Ame
rican story.” He reminded those few registered voters who might somehow have forgotten, “I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas.”

  Obama and his operatives would invest enormous political capital in what David Remnick calls his “signature appeal: the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal.” From the beginning, Obama’s handlers worked hard to protect their investment. This “carefully constructed narrative,” confirmed Toby Harnden of the U.K. Telegraph, was “guarded assiduously by his campaign staff.” As Harnden and others discovered, Obama staffers would do what they had to do to keep the storytellers in line.

  As Obama told the story at the 2004 convention, his father had grown up in Kenya “herding goats.” His mother’s roots he traced to Kansas, as he always did. “My parents shared not only an improbable love,” Obama continued, “they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation.” Obama refined his story for a critical speech in Selma, Alabama, in March 2007, a speech that would define his presidential campaign. “My very existence might not have been possible had it not been for some of the folks here today,” Obama told the civil rights veterans gathered to mark the events of “Bloody Sunday” forty-two years prior.

  “Something happened back here in Selma, Alabama,” Obama said. This something “sent a shout across the ocean,” which inspired Barack Sr., still “herding goats” back in Kenya, to “set his sights a little higher.” This same something also “worried folks in the White House” to the point that the “the Kennedys decided we’re going to do an airlift.”

  As the saga continued, Barack Sr. got a ticket on the airlift and met Obama’s mother, a descendant of slave owners. “There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge,” preached Obama. “So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama.”

  Something about Selma apparently inspired Obama to embellish more than usual. For starters, herding goats in his father’s town was like delivering newspapers in an American one. Everyone did it as a kid. Obama’s grandfather was the most prosperous guy in the village. Indeed, the photo of Barack Sr. as a toddler on the cover of Dreams shows him in Western clothes. He grew up speaking English and attending Christian schools. He was working as a clerk in Nairobi, not a goatherder in the Kenyan bush, when he applied for the first airlift in 1959. The Republican Eisenhower, not the Democrat Kennedy, was the president when he came to the United States.

  Although born in Kansas, Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, was not exactly Dorothy. She spent her formative years in the state of Washington under the tutelage of some hipster teachers. If there ever was a romance between her and Barack Sr.—and much more on this later—the record of the same is elusive. In any case, Selma had nothing to do with Obama’s birth. He was conceived four years before anyone outside Alabama ever heard of the town. By the time of the march, Barack Sr. had long since abandoned Ann and baby Barry for Harvard, where he hooked up with another American woman.

  No matter. Well before Obama launched his presidential campaign, Axelrod had come to understand that a popular Democrat, especially if black, could craft his own mythology and get away with it. He had learned from the master, Bill Clinton, whose 1996 campaign he had helped shape.

  Almost exactly ten years before Obama’s election to the presidency, author Toni Morrison had famously anointed Clinton “our first black president.” Wrote Morrison in her much-discussed New Yorker article, “Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”

  In August 1998, the same month as Clinton’s ill-tempered and ill-received public apology for l’affaire Lewinsky, Clinton’s approval rating among African Americans registered an astonishing 93 percent, higher even than Jesse Jackson’s. Indeed, black support for Clinton had been critical at every step of his presidency. This kind of support was possible for one reason: the media had allowed Clinton to craft a fictional account of his own life.

  Although his actual story mirrors Obama’s in some interesting ways—the missing father, the wandering mother, the nurturing grandparents, the unreliable stepfather, the elite education—Clinton spun his tale nearly as far from the truth as Obama did. Clinton did not exactly grow up, as the public was told, in an archetypal poor, single-family household with a brutal stepfather. The old man may have been a drunk, but he was a largely benign one. Clinton’s strategic exploitation of his drinking problems on the campaign trail maddened the extended Clinton family.

  “Nobody ever loved Bill Clinton more than Roger did,” wrote Clinton’s mom, Virginia, about Roger Clinton, her new, well-heeled husband. In fact, both Clinton parents doted on Bill. They turned the living room of their comfortable home into a veritable “shrine” to the lad’s many accomplishments, writes the Washington Post’s David Maraniss. “The refrigerator was stocked to his taste.” His bedroom, and he never had to share one, was the largest in the house. He had his own bathroom, perhaps the only teen in the state so blessed.

  Meanwhile in the Clinton carport sat the black-finned Buick that young Bill drove to segregated Hot Springs High School. For special occasions, like a trip to the whites-only country club, he could always finagle the family’s cream yellow Henry J coupe. By nineteen, Clinton was driving a white Buick convertible with red interior. If these were really the “tropes of blackness,” Jesse Jackson would have had to find a new hustle a half century ago.

  In Clinton’s defense, he may have shaded a fact or two, but he never denied his inner redneck. What you saw was what you got. When Clinton quoted Bible verses or sang country songs, it came from the heart. Not so for Obama. When he cited Moses and Joshua at Selma or sang the wonders of America, he sounded as though he were speaking a second language, one whose accent he had nearly mastered—but not quite.

  BURYING PERCY

  The blogosphere abhors a vacuum. So when the mainstream media (for simplicity’s sake, going forward, “the media”) leave holes in a given narrative—in this case, the biography of a presidential candidate—bloggers individually, incrementally, and indefatigably strive to fill them in.

  Although I am not a blogger per se, I do occasionally orbit the blogosphere through a weekly column for the long-running WorldNet-Daily and through occasional think pieces for the aptly named online journal American Thinker. Like most in this sphere, I do not get paid. I justify the time invested by imagining that the exposure will help me sell my books and videos, but I really contribute for the same reason most others do, namely the itch to shake things up and shape the debate.

  I trace that itch to my days as a paperboy who consumed his own product, the Newark Star-Ledger. Like every other kid in America with a Mick or two in the family tree, my first preteen political passion was JFK. Unlike the others, I can still name his first cabinet. When Kennedy was killed in 1963, I transferred my affection to his brother Bob. As the decade wore on, however, and the city crumbled around us, even an adolescent could see the consequences of liberal misrule.

  I was nineteen in the summer of ‘67 and working at an institution for troubled city kids. The place was co-ed, multiracial, and “progressive” in any number of interesting ways. For a self-identified Democrat eager to sample the perks of “the revolution” and not at all above its pretenses, it seemed a likely place to be.

  When the Newark riot broke out, I watched the news on a kitchen TV with my co-workers, most of them either garden-variety potheads or revolutionary wannabes. Although my cop father had died the same year as JFK, my cop uncle was in the thick of it. As events unfolded, I understood quickly and clearly that my co-workers and I saw the world through different eyes. Where I saw relatives and friends, they saw “pigs.” They weren’t shy about saying so. It was the
first time I had heard that slur within striking distance, and it almost came to that. By the time the smoke had cleared, so had my illusions. I did not know what I was politically, but I knew what I was not.

  More to the point of this story, I saw for the first time up close how and why the media choose sides. Like Procrustes, the mythological innkeeper who stretched his victims or severed their limbs to make them fit his iron bed, the media were making a fluid set of facts fit their iron perspective. At the time, this shocked me. I had trusted newspeople the way I trusted Bishop Sheen or Davy Crockett. I had no reason to suspect mischief.

  Over time, the media would grow more Procrustean still. Refitting the bed were people like Tom Hayden, who, in the progressive tradition, was not about “to let a serious crisis go to waste.” Hayden had drafted the Port Huron statement, the defining document of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the outfit that would nurture the young Billy Ayers. Within months of the riot, Hayden and Vintage Books had elevated the mayhem in my hometown into Rebellion in Newark.

  As George Orwell acknowledged in his timeless 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” intellectuals have long manipulated words to make an alien ideology palatable. “Political language,” he argued, was “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

  The budding intellectuals of the New Left might disagree on intent but not on the manipulation. “We invented words,” Bill Ayers would later write; “we constructed culture.” Calling a riot a “rebellion,” however, did not make it “an organized attempt to overthrow a government or other authority by use of violence.” It was nothing of the sort. Hayden knew that. No, Newark was a riot, exactly as the dictionary defines riot, namely “a public disturbance during which a group of angry people becomes noisy and out of control, often damaging property and acting violently.”