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

by Jack Cashill

  Davis died in 1987, two years after Obama arrived in Chicago. For guidance in the Windy City, Obama looked to people like Jeremiah Wright, who relentlessly instructed his congregants, says Steele, “to think and act as if the exaggerated poetic truth of white racism is the literal truth.” Writing well before anyone had seen those telltale videos, Steele asks a fundamental question: how could Obama “sit every week in a church preaching blackness and not object”?

  Even on a first reading of Dreams, I could see that Obama’s muse proved particularly eloquent on the subject of the angry black male. Phrases like “full of inarticulate resentments,” “knotted, howling assertion of self,” “unruly maleness,” “unadorned insistence on respect,” and “withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage” lace the book. Yet in the several spontaneous interviews Obama had given on the subject of race, I had not seen a glimpse of this eloquence and insight. The good reverend, as I could see, had the requisite anger in surplus but lacked the editorial chops to bring this project to life. At the time I had no idea who had both.

  The evidence, however, was leading me toward an odd conclusion: the man who lent Obama his voice on the subject of blackness gave all appearances of being white. The more I researched Bill Ayers’s background, the less unlikely this seemed. Skin color aside, Ayers and Obama had much in common. Both grew up in comfortable white households, attended idyllic, largely white prep schools, and have struggled to find an identity as righteous black men ever since.

  “I also thought I was black,” writes Ayers only half jokingly. He read all the authors Obama did—James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones, Richard Wright, Malcolm X. As proof of his righteousness, Ayers named his first son “Malik” after the newly Islamic Malcolm X and the second son “Zayd” after Zayd Shakur, a Black Panther killed in a shootout that claimed the life of a New Jersey state trooper. Just as Obama resisted “the pure and heady breeze of privilege” to which he was exposed as a child, Ayers too resisted “white skin privilege,” or at least tried to.

  Tellingly, Ayers, like Obama, began his career as a self-described “community organizer,” Ayers in inner-city Cleveland, Obama in inner-city Chicago. In Chicago, Ayers also found a strategic ally in Jeremiah Wright, a man he called a “distinguished theologian and major intellectual,” meaning that Wright too spelled “Amerikkka” with three k’s. In short, Ayers was fully capable of crawling inside Obama’s head and relating in superior prose what Obama calls, only half ironically, a “rage at the white world [that] needed no object.”

  In Fugitive Days, “rage” rules. Ayers tells of how his “rage got started” and how it evolved into an “uncontrollable rage—fierce frenzy of fire and lava.” In fact, both Ayers and Obama speak of “rage” the way that Eskimos do of snow—in so many varieties, so often, that they feel the need to qualify it, as Obama does when he speaks of “impressive rage,” “suppressed rage,” or “coil of rage.” The real roots of Obama’s rage trace back not to his father in Kenya, but to his pal in Hyde Park.

  This rage leads Ayers to a sentiment with which Obama was altogether familiar. Ayers writes, “I felt the warrior rising up inside of me—audacity and courage, righteousness, of course, and more audacity.” Ayers had likely pulled the concept of “audacity” from the same source Jeremiah Wright did, Martin Luther King. Something apparently got lost in translation.

  Although Ayers rages at “structural racism” in all of his books, that rage approaches primal scream in Race Course: Against White Supremacy, a book he co-wrote with wife Bernardine after Obama’s election. One would think that victory would have eased the pain, but it has done no such thing for Ayers and any number of other radicals, black and white.

  Among the eternally irritated is Tim Wise, author of Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama. Self-described as an “Angry White Male” in the title of one of his earlier works, Wise penned his jeremiad post-election precisely to deny whites even a moment of self-congratulation.

  In his book, Wise quickly reassures his audience that the “deep-seated cultural malady” of racism has been “neither eradicated nor even substantially diminished by Obama’s victory.” To support his arguments, he marshals the most outlandish set of statistics I have seen in a book that was not self-published.

  Scarier still, the copy of the book I bought online had been previously owned by a student assigned to read it, likely by Wise himself, a former “distinguished visiting scholar for Diversity Issues” at Washburn University in my native Kansas. Even scarier, she seems to have bought into his malarkey. The student writes, among other silly notes, “great simile” in the margin where Wise compares the oppression of witches in 17th century Salem with that of blacks in contemporary America. I wish I were kidding. Wise, like Ayers, like Wright, like all believers in institutional racism, sees remediation only through “productive anti-racism and social justice work.”

  In a similar spirit, Ayers rejects any easy “end-of-white-supremacy narrative.” He fears that Obama’s victory may actually set back the cause of social justice by taking black concerns off the table to preserve the illusion of racial harmony. For Ayers, social justice means nothing less than communism, albeit with a small c. In 1993, a year before Dreams was finally written, Ayers would concede in an interview for the book Sixties Radicals, Then and Now, “Maybe I’m the last communist who is willing to admit it.” Outside of Cuba, North Korea, and the occasional American campus, he still may be.

  Listening to these radical voices, Steele believes, has kept Obama a “bound man.” He is not allowed to extrapolate from his own experience and preach the value of education, marriage, family, ambition, and success. At exactly the wrong moment, Ayers crawled into Obama’s head, much as Elijah Muhammad had crawled into Ali’s, and shielded his charge from his better angels.

  Ayers had the chance to help Obama establish himself as his own man, but instead, like Wright and so many others, he insisted that, to be authentic, a black man must rage at the machine. If Obama argued for redemption through self-help, his core supporters, black and white, would deny him his authenticity. For someone who has struggled so long and hard to establish an identity, that denial is scarier than defeat. This is why, implies Steele, “He Can’t Win.”

  CRYSTAL CHAOS

  On October 2, 2002, at an impromptu rally staged by Chicagoans Against the War in Iraq, Barack Obama gave a speech second in career importance only to the 2004 DNC keynote. This was the speech that enabled his handlers to position him on the credibly sane left flank of naïfs like Hillary Clinton and John Edwards “who took the president at his word” and voted for the war in Iraq.

  Although effective, this speech was factually adrift in any number of key details and sneakily anti-Semitic. In Obama’s defense, he may not have sensed the anti-Semitic riff, either because he was parroting what he had heard others say or because someone else had inserted the telltale phrase for him. I suspect the latter.

  The rally was the handiwork of Chicago’s vestigial radical community. Two of the key organizers were proud veterans of the militant Students for a Democratic Society, Carl Anderson and Marilyn Katz, the latter a friend of Bill Ayers since her teen years. As Katz tells it, she was one of a group of five individuals who put the rally together, and they did so on just ten days’ notice.

  David Mendell, who was close to the action, does the best job of tracking Obama’s recruitment. According to Mendell, heiress and activist Bettylu Saltzman, who had long been “enraptured” by Obama, called and asked whether he wanted to participate. At the time, Obama was keen on taking a shot at the U.S. Senate in 2004. He envisioned as his base of support blacks and lakefront liberals like Saltzman, the former for their votes, the latter for their money. When he asked adviser Dan Shomon whether he should accept the invite, Shomon told him it was a “no-brainer.” Obama could not risk alienating Saltzman, especially given her close relationship with media guru Axelrod, whom Obama was then courting. That much said, Shomon advised
Obama to be cautious given the “political ramifications to whatever you say.”

  Obama got the message. There was no point risking his future to please a bunch of crazies in Chicago. So he spoke, but cautiously. Indeed, in the very first sentence of the speech, Obama offered the unlikely caveat that he was “not opposed to war in all circumstances,” a point that he was at pains to reinforce. Obama promptly cited the American Civil War as a war he could support. That the war led to a bloody, twelve-year occupation and Iraq-style insurgency, which ended only when the U.S. military yielded to the insurgents, was likely something Obama and helpmates had not thought through even by 2008.

  Obama also gave his belated approval to World War II and sang the praises of his grandfather, who fought in Patton’s army and “heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka.” By Memorial Day 2008, however, Obama was claiming that it was his “uncle” who was “part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz.” When reminded that his mother was an only child and his father a Kenyan, Obama designated his “great uncle” as the liberator of Auschwitz. This proved problematic as well because Auschwitz, as the Republican National Committee gleefully pointed out, was actually liberated by the Soviets.

  The media dependably liberated Obama from the Republican siege. “What’s worse,” opined the Los Angeles Times: “Obama’s apparent gaffe or the RNC pouncing on a Holocaust-related historical mistake for political advantage?” What was worse actually was that Obama used his “uncle” to make the point that America ignored its traumatized war vets. “The story in our family,” Obama told the 2008 Memorial Day crowd in New Mexico, was that when his “uncle” came home from the war, he promptly went up to the attic and did not come down for six months. One would think Obama might have remembered this striking detail in 2002 when he attributed the liberation of Auschwitz not to his notoriously deranged uncle, but to his grandfather’s “fellow troops.”

  In June 2008, speaking before a veterans’ group, Obama would make the opposite claim. “My father served in World War II,” he told the veterans theretofore unaware that Kenyan third graders fought in the big one. “And when he came home,” Obama continued, “he got the services that he needed. And that includes, by the way, post-traumatic stress disorder.” He was likely referring to his traumatized, Auschwitz-liberating great-uncle, whose malleable history had just been reshaped to bash the Bush administration. As was their wont, the media let this gaffe, if that’s what it was, pass unremarked.

  As to why Obama opposed the war in Iraq six months before it began, there is some confusion. Six years later, he would tell Rick Warren’s Saddleback forum that he “was firmly convinced at the time that we did not have strong evidence of weapons of mass destruction.” This point would have delighted the crowd at Chicago’s Federal Plaza had he made it, but he did not. In October 2002, Obama made a more politic claim entirely, namely that although Saddam “butchers his own people” and has “developed chemical and biological weapons and coveted nuclear capacity,” the war was “dumb” nonetheless.

  If later confused about his motives, Obama could never forget the speech’s emotional toll. He would tell Warren, in fact, that protesting the war was his most “gut wrenching decision,” largely because of its “political consequences.” Obama’s official 2008 website attested to the anguish. “As a candidate for the United States Senate in 2002,” the website claimed, “Obama put his political career on the line to oppose going to war in Iraq.” Obama would likewise tell Mendell that this was his “most courageous” speech, unaware that Mendell himself saw the speech as “a political calculation.” Indeed, given the political drift of Obama’s intended base, supporting the war in 2002 would have been the courageous thing to do.

  In Chicago, whatever his motives, Obama traced his early opposition to intelligence that had apparently escaped the attention of Clinton and Edwards. Nearly six months before the war began, Obama had sniffed out “a cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz,” the only two officials in the defense hierarchy cited, “to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats.”

  Aiding and abetting the neocons, of course, was Bush adviser and all-purpose progressive punching bag Karl Rove. As Obama told it, Rove was banging the war drum to distract America from, among other things, “a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.” In reality, the Dow Jones had been fairly flat since July 2002 and would gain more than 10 percent in that very October of Obama’s discontent.

  Although Bill Ayers attended the rally, neither Mendell nor Remnick connect him in any way to Obama’s speech. After agreeing to participate, writes Mendell, Obama “wrote the speech long hand in a single evening.” Obama told Mendell that he found the speechwriting “liberating” because “I said exactly what I truly believed.” Parsing Obama’s thoughts, Mendell later questions whether saying what he believed was an exception for Obama rather than the rule.

  Yet despite Obama’s claims to unique authorship, one senses a radical contribution to the speech. On his own, he would not likely have made the quietly anti-Semitic reference to Perle and Wolfowitz, two names in common parlance only on the hard left. A less sophisticated protestor might have blamed the anticipated war on Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, Rice, or Tenet, not two obscure Jews from within the bureaucracy.

  Soon after publishing my thoughts on this, I heard from one of my better correspondents, a Conrad scholar who prefers to be called “Ishmael.” His reason for choosing anonymity was not hard to understand. “Like just about everyone else,” he wrote, “I dread the scrutiny received by Joe the Plumber.”

  For those of short memories, on October 12, 2008, Joe Wurzelbacher had a chance encounter with Barack Obama, who had descended on Joe’s small Ohio town to campaign. When Joe asked whether Obama’s tax policy would impede his intended purchase of a small business, Obama responded in part, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” By standing up to the seemingly indomitable Obama and sparking his socialist instincts, this ordinary Joe turned overnight into a cable-TV David.

  Wurzelbacher paid for his boldness. The media immediately commenced to comb through his and his employer’s financial records as though Joe were the guy running for president. Meanwhile, employees of Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services dug into the state databases for some useful dirt. On October 16, ABC broke the news, such as it was, that a judgment lien had been filed against an Ohio plumber for nonpayment of $1,182 in state income taxes, a lien that Wurzelbacher himself had not yet been made aware of.

  The New York Times and other news outlets spent more resources investigating Joe’s plumbing license than they had Obama’s birth certificate. “An official at Local 50 of the plumber’s union, based in Toledo,” intoned the Times solemnly, “said Mr. Wurzelbacher does not hold a license. He also has never served an apprenticeship and does not belong to the union.” As proof of its solemnity, the Times added the qualifier that Local 50 was supporting Obama. You can’t make this stuff up.

  Although the state employees would later be fired, the damage had been done, not so much to the resilient Wurzelbacher, but to the vox populi. Any number of my correspondents cited Joe when they declined my offer of credit. University correspondents did not need Joe’s example to keep their mouths shut. Their reticence would become an issue in a growing campaign to out the muse who inspired Dreams.

  A fan of the late political philosopher Leo Strauss, Ishmael would provide some useful insights along the way. “You are the only person to note that in Obama’s anti-war speech he gave in 2002, he singled out two Straussians, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz,” he wrote. “You’re right that there is absolutely no way Obama would have chosen those names himself.” He added that only someone like Ayers, Said, or some other fellow traveler would have zeroed in on a pair of Jews. “A political climber like Obama,” he noted, “would not have risked the charge of anti-Semitism.”

 
In an extended quote from the Mendell book, Obama hints that he may indeed have had help. “That’s the speech I’m most proud of. It was a hard speech to give,” he tells Mendell. He adds, “And it was just, well, a well-constructed speech. I like it.” Obama had to “give” the speech himself, and of this he is proud, but he describes the “well-constructed” text as though it had been handed to him, which it may have been.

  Whatever his contribution to the speech, if any, Ayers knew whom to blame for Iraq. “Let’s look forward to the day Wolfowitz will be tried as a war criminal,” Ayers would insist some years later. He also had an historic fondness for Middle Eastern Jew haters. In 1974, he and his pals dedicated the Weather manifesto, Prairie Fire, to, among others, Sirhan Sirhan, the raging anti-Semite who assassinated Robert Kennedy. More than thirty-five years later, he and Dohrn would help organize the Free Gaza Movement, whose six-ship flotilla tried to bust the Israeli blockade.

  Still, Ayers was no garden-variety anti-Semite. His lakefront liberal allies were predominantly Jewish. Then too, there were any number of ethnic Jews in the Weather Underground. Curiously, however, just about all of them—Terry Robbins, Ted Gold, Mark Rudd, Kathy Boudin, Laura Whitehorn, and Bernardine Dohrn—came into the world with Anglicized names and moved through it even more deracinated than their parents.

  They would have to have been totally severed from their roots, however, not to be disturbed by one passage in Fugitive Days. “The streets became sparkling and treacherous with the jagged remains of our rampage,” writes Ayers of his window-breaking spree through the streets of Chicago in the famed “Days of Rage.” Then Ayers lovingly describes the scene, in a trope that has to chill the blood of any Jew, as “crystal chaos.” Just thirty years prior, the Nazis had called their sparkling rampage through the streets of Germany “Kristallnacht,” or “Crystal Night” in English.