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

by Jack Cashill

  By 2008, the Tom Haydens of the world and those they influenced, if not intimidated—the potheads and revolutionary wannabes now all grown up—largely controlled the media flow. Although they rarely fabricated news, they decided what information was allowed through the sluices and what was not. And in the case of the Obama campaign, there was a whole lot of raw data that was not allowed to become “news.”

  Having made little headway in my search for Obama’s muse in the summer of 2008, I was tipped to a story that the media were scrupulously ignoring. It involved the venerable African American entrepreneur and politico Percy Sutton. A Manhattan borough president for twelve years and a credible candidate for mayor of New York City in 1977, Sutton had appeared in late March 2008 on a local New York City show called Inside City Hall.

  When asked about Obama by the show’s host, Dominic Carter, the octogenarian Sutton calmly and lucidly explained that he had been “introduced to [Obama] by a friend.” The friend’s name was Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, and the introduction had taken place about twenty years earlier. Sutton described al-Mansour as “the principal adviser to one of the world’s richest men.” The billionaire in question was Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.

  For the record, bin Talal was the very same Saudi who had offered New York $10 million to help the city rebuild after 9/11, but who had his gift refused by Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In September 2001, Giuliani was in no mood to hear even a billionaire blame America for inciting the attacks with its pro-Israel stance, no matter how deep his pockets.

  According to Sutton, al-Mansour had asked him to “please write a letter in support of [Obama] … a young man that has applied to Harvard.” Sutton had friends at Harvard and gladly did so. Although Sutton did not specify a date, this would likely have been in 1988, when the twenty-six-year-old Obama was applying to Harvard Law School.

  Khalid al-Mansour was a piece of work. Although impressively well connected, the Texan-born attorney and black separatist had yet to meet a paranoid racial fantasy unworthy of his energy. His books included myopic classics like The Destruction of Western Civilization as Seen Through Islam and Will the West Rule Forever?

  Several of his speeches can still be seen on YouTube. In one named “A Little on the History of Jews,” he shares his distinctive insights into the creation of Israel. “God gave you nothing,” al-Mansour lectures the world’s Ashkenazi Jews. “The children from Poland and Russia were promised nothing. But they are stealing the land the same as the Christians stole the lands from the Indians in America.”

  No matter how many books he had written, al-Mansour himself lacked the wherewithal to have written or even helped with Dreams from My Father. What interested me at the time, however, was that he seemed to be one of many people in Obama’s network with enough money and/or influence to get the book of an unknown author written and published.

  I had hoped that the blogosphere would force the Sutton story into the larger media. Three months before the election it should have mattered that a respected black political figure had publicly announced that a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, backed by an ambitious Saudi billionaire, had been guiding Obama’s career perhaps for the last twenty years. It apparently did not matter to the gatekeepers. The story died a quick and unnatural death.

  Moving in swiftly for the kill were Politico, an insider D.C. journal run by Washington Post alums, and Media Matters, an alleged watchdog group founded by the recovering Troopergate author, David Brock. Since the reporters from neither entity could deny what Sutton had said, they claimed instead that he had insufficient marbles to be taken seriously.

  Ben Smith of Politico took the lead. Shortly after the story broke, Smith ran the disclaimer that “Barack Obama’s campaign is flatly denying a story told by former Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton.” The Obama camp, in fact, denied that Obama even knew al-Mansour. Smith then talked to al-Mansour. At first, al-Mansour avoided contradicting Sutton’s story out of respect for Sutton, “a dear friend.” When pressed, however, al-Mansour disowned Sutton’s story. “The scenario as it related to me did not happen,” he reportedly told Smith.

  A self-appointed “spokesman for Sutton’s family” by the name of Kevin Wardally put the penultimate nails in this story’s coffin with an email to Smith that read in part:

  The information Mr. Percy Sutton imparted on March 25 in a NY1 News interview regarding his connection to Barack Obama is inaccurate. As best as our family and the Chairman’s closest friends can tell, Mr. Sutton, now 86 years of age, misspoke in describing certain details and events in that television interview.

  For Smith, even though Wardally had gotten Sutton’s age wrong by two years, this email was proof enough that Sutton’s highly specific claim was manufactured. Wrote Smith, Wardally’s email “seems to put the story to rest for good.” Media Matters meanwhile scolded those conservative bloggers who did not accept the various denials at face value.

  Like the man about to be carted away in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, the Percy Sutton story was not quite dead yet. Newsmax, a conservative satellite in the blogosphere, contacted Wardally. Unconvincingly, he claimed that a nephew of the elder Sutton had retained his services. Sutton’s son and daughter, however, told Newsmax that no one in their family even knew who Kevin Wardally was, let alone authorized him to speak on behalf of the family. When Newsmax contacted al-Mansour, he repeatedly declined to comment on what Sutton had said and, contrary to the line from the Obama camp, claimed to know Obama personally.

  “I’m getting better,” pled Monty Python’s nearly dead man. No he wasn’t. Nor was this story. With Hillary out of the race, no newsroom in America felt compelled to dig up dirt that could sully Obama. At the time this story was gelling, in early September 2008, the media were doing all their digging in Alaskan Dumpsters.

  At the time, I thought that the premature burial of this story merely seemed coordinated. In March 2009, however, Michael Calderone of Politico revealed the existence of a four-hundred-member-strong online meeting space called “JournoList.” Calderone described the participants as “left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks, and academics.” Given that three Politico writers, Ben Smith among them, contributed to the “JList,” as well as David Brock, Calderone wrote approvingly of an enterprise unabashedly designed to elect Barack Obama president. It was not until the content of several group discussions was published in July 2010 that the outside world could see how effectively JList participants had steered the national discourse in Obama’s favor.

  The books that might have shed some light on the Percy Sutton incident have not done so. John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s comprehensive look at the 2008 campaign, Game Change, does not so much as mention Percy Sutton. Nor does David Remnick. The Pulitzer Prize winner and New Yorker editor has proved particularly disappointing. The Bridge stands as the authoritative book on Obama’s “life and rise,” but he only inadvertently addresses the question of how Obama got into Harvard Law.

  The eighty-nine-year-old Sutton would pass away in December 2009, but the story had died long before he did. With his death, there was no chance the tale would come back to haunt the president. The media gatekeepers in the age of Obama had done their job.

  AMIABLE DUNCES

  A short time back, an eye-popping documentary about the Moinjang tribe of the White Nile stopped me dead in my channel-surfing tracks. For about a half hour, I watched in awe as several hugely tubby guys wandered around town stark naked, covered in dust, eating everything in sight.

  As I learned, the men were participating in an ancient tribal custom, roughly translated as “the fattest man in the land competition.” Apparently the competitors eat all they can for about a year, and at the end of the year the biggest lard butt wins. This was billed as “a high-stakes contest” and with good reason: at least one unlucky contestant fell over dead when his stomach exploded. Still, the narrator described the whole phenomenon in the kind of hushed tones one reserves for incomp
rehensible third-world rituals and/or major golf tournaments.

  Oh, that such a respectful documentary crew would have come to Kansas! Instead, in the wake of Thomas Frank’s soft-core Marxist bestseller, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, we got smarmy know-it-alls from either coast. They came not to learn about our humble customs, but rather to tell us what’s wrong with the customs we have.

  I say “we” reservedly. Although Frank deemed me the embodiment of what was the matter with the Sunflower State, the person in whom “all the contradictions come together,” I have spent fewer nights in Kansas (three) than I occupy pages in Frank’s book (ten). Details! Details! I live and work in Missouri and was born and raised in New Jersey. Had I been cited as “what’s the matter” with either of those two states I would have been honored, but to have been cited as “what’s the matter” with Kansas left me feeling mostly just confused.

  To help me work through the confusion, the Kansas delegation invited me to attend the 2008 Republican National Convention as their guest, an honorary Kansan. Not having attended a convention before, I happily accepted. A few days beforehand, however, I almost changed my mind. The rumor started seeping out that John McCain was about to pick Joe Lieberman as his running mate, a decent fellow as far as Democrats go, but a Democrat. Unless I misremembered, he had been Al Gore’s VP choice in 2000.

  Always a contrarian, McCain shocked the media by choosing Sarah Palin. The choice left me feeling very smart. In early June, at lunch with some of my political buddies, I was asked whom I thought McCain would pick as a running mate. “Sarah Palin,” I said. They said, “Sarah who?” Now they were all emailing me, “How did you know?” I didn’t. I just guessed, but why tell them?

  While driving north through Iowa—America’s prettiest state in August and September—on that uneasy Labor Day of 2008, I station-surfed to keep abreast of the news. It was all Palin all the time and just about all negative. Like the TV crews that came to Kansas, the radio talking heads were busy telling Republicans how they ought to think and what they ought to do, namely dump Sarah Palin. What with that Marge Gunderson accent and University of Idaho diploma, not to mention the slutty daughter, Sarah Palin was just another lowbrow off the Republican assembly line, no more ready to serve as vice president than Daisy Mae Yokum.

  None of this surprised me. The left, through its control of the media, including the entertainment media, has been rigging political IQ tests for the last half century, if not longer. Those Republicans who were not evil geniuses—Nixon, Cheney, Rove—the media have painted as blithering idiots. Dwight Eisenhower was doddering and incoherent. Gerald Ford, perhaps the best athlete to occupy the White House, was a bumbling fool. “I wanted [Jimmy] Carter in and I wanted [Ford] out,” comedian Chevy Chase would later admit of his mocking Ford impersonation on Saturday Night Live, “and I figured look, we’re reaching millions of people every weekend, why not do it.”

  Ronald Reagan, in the memorable words of Clark Clifford, was an “amiable dunce.” The senior George Bush was so out of touch he was ambushed by a grocery scanner. Dan Quayle could not spell potato. George W. Bush inspired the popular bumper sticker “A village in Texas is missing its idiot,” as well as charming websites like “president moron.com.” And now Sarah Palin—the hillbilly who could allegedly “see Russia from my house”—was being anointed Bush’s idiot successor.

  In a 2010 tour of the White House, my former favorite Beatle, Liverpool High grad Paul McCartney, would capture the pop zeitgeist perfectly both in terms of content and dopy condescension. Said McCartney, in a graceless dig at George Bush, an avid reader and Harvard MBA, “After the last eight years, it’s great to have a President who knows what a library is.”

  Democratic politicians, by contrast, have been “scary smart,” too bright for an undeserving American citizenry. Adlai Stevenson was an “egghead.” JFK was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author. Eugene McCarthy was professorial. George McGovern was cerebral. Bill Bradley was a Rhodes scholar. So was Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton was the smartest woman on the planet. Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, and Al Gore were all big-brained wonks. John Kerry was so finely educated that when smearing American troops, he remembered to pronounce the name Genghis “jenghis.” And Obama, of course, as historian Michael Beschloss put it, was “probably the smartest guy ever to become president.”

  Most Americans never got to hear that Ted Sorensen wrote Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage or that Bill Bradley scored a lowly 485 on his SAT verbals or that John Kerry’s grades at Yale were “virtually identical” to George W. Bush’s. Given the protection the media afforded Democratic candidates, exposing the shaky foundation of Obama’s genius would not be easy, regardless of the evidence. With Palin’s nomination, the job had just gotten harder. To undermine his bona fides would be to elevate hers, and for many in the media, including some influential conservatives, that would sting doubly.

  Although I cannot vouch for Palin’s IQ, she is surely smart enough. This I got to confirm firsthand. Despite the merry time we Kansans were having in St. Paul—luncheons, receptions, cruises down the Mississippi flanked by gunboats—we all worried about the pressure on Palin. If she screwed up her big Wednesday night speech, the race was over.

  I stayed off the convention floor that evening and sat up in the mezzanine, hard by the bar. Before Palin emerged, I watched a whole parade of women speakers make their pitches—Meg Whitman of eBay, Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard, Governor Linda Lingle of Hawaii. All were a bit dull and stiff but competent. They read from their teleprompters without incident. I remember hoping that Palin could just do as well as they did.

  As history will record, she did hugely better. She was sharp, sexy, funny, and utterly charming. Under enormous pressure, she had served up a convention speech as dazzling and unexpected as any in modern political history—including Obama’s 2004 keynote—and she did so before a malfunctioning teleprompter. “I knew the speech well enough that I didn’t need it,” she would say. At night’s end every guy I talked to wanted to marry her and have her babies.

  Had Obama’s teleprompter malfunctioned at the 2004 convention, he would not be president. He has always depended on the eloquence of others. So thoroughly hooked on the teleprompter is Obama that the irrepressible Joe Biden jokes about it. “What am I going to tell the president?” Biden asked the crowd at the Air Force Academy after a teleprompter blew over. “Tell him his teleprompter is broken? What will he do then?”

  BEAUTIFUL OLD HOUSE

  In early September 2008, while still scouting about for hints as to who might have served as Obama’s literary muse, I came across a photo floating through the blogosphere taken during an Arab American community dinner in Chicago in 1998 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Palestinian nakba, or disaster, also known as the birth of Israel.

  The photo shows Obama sitting next to Edward Said (pronounced “sigh-EED”), seemingly engaged in an animated conversation at dinner. The intimacy surprised me. At the time of the photo, Obama was an obscure state senator while Said, according to the Nation, was “probably the best-known intellectual in the world” and star of that evening’s show. He would speak on this occasion, as the Los Angeles Times would later report, “against settlements, against Israeli apartheid.”

  I presumed it possible that the pair had met when Obama was a student and Said a professor at Columbia University, but the information known at the time about Obama’s New York years was, for a presidential candidate, uniquely sketchy. In late October 2007, the New York Times had run a telling article on that period headlined “Obama’s Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say.” Given that he was an announced candidate for president, the Times expected Obama to welcome the chance to reconcile his account in Dreams with the accounts of those who knew him. “Yet he declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years.”

  A campa
ign spokesman, Ben LaBolt, offered a conspicuously lame explanation for Obama’s reticence. “He doesn’t remember the names of a lot of people in his life.” Lame or not, it worked. Obama’s indifference to the facts on the ground may have shocked the Times, but it did not exactly shock the Times or any other media outlet into action.

  Nearly three years later—and eighteen months after the election—David Remnick would offer the first serious inquiry into those years and would confirm that Obama had indeed taken a course in modern fiction from Said at Columbia. Although Remnick reports that Obama was not keen on the course, Obama may have absorbed more from Said about modern fiction than Remnick suspects.

  Said, you see, lived an almost entirely fictional life. In 1978, he had published his masterwork, Orientalism, a book so influential that it changed the very direction of Middle Eastern studies. “Orientalism is written out of an extremely concrete history of personal loss and national disintegration,” Said observes in the Afterword of the book’s 1994 edition. It is this sense of loss that gives the book its spirit of righteous certainty.

  Not unlike Obama, Said used his childhood as the central metaphor for his significant life work. “Mr. Said was born in Jerusalem and spent the first twelve years of his life there,” confirmed the New York Times in a flattering 1998 article. His family left the house and “fled” Palestine for Cairo in late 1947, “five months before war broke out between Palestinian Arabs and Jews over plans to partition Palestine.”