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

by Jack Cashill

  “Coretta,” by the way, is just one of many names in Dreams that show up in Ayers’s books. Others include Malik, Freddy (with a y), Billy, David, Tim, George, Stan, Sally, Andy, Jimmy, Jeff, John, Joe, Jane, Marcus, Rick, Angela, Linda, “Aunt Sarah,” and “the old man.” Many of the stories involving these characters in Dreams seem as manufactured as their names.

  In a third of the parallel stories, the evidence for Ayers’s involvement is strongest. As suggested earlier, Ayers has strong opinions about “education” on the one hand and “training” on the other. “Education is for self-activating explorers of life, for those who would challenge fate, for doers and activists, for citizens,” he writes in To Teach. “Training,” on the other hand, “is for slaves, for loyal subjects, for tractable employees, for willing consumers, for obedient soldiers.” Adds Ayers, “What we call education is usually no more than training. We are so busy operating schools that we have lost sight of learning.”

  In Dreams, written two years later, these sentiments find colloquial expression in the person of “Frank,” as in Frank Marshall Davis. “Understand something, boy,” Frank tells the college-bound Obama. “You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained.” Frank shares Ayers’s distaste for training. “They’ll train you to forget what it is that you already know,” Frank tells Obama. “They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit.”

  Just as Ayers makes the case that students are often stripped of their ethnic identity and “taught to be like whites,” Frank argues that university expectations include “leaving your race at the door.” The skeptics who insist that these ideas are progressive boilerplate and thus coincidental have not read the memoir Davis wrote in the early 1970s and amended at decade’s end, Livin’ the Blues. Neither apparently did Ayers or Obama. The folk wisdom that “Frank” mouths in Dreams does not at all jibe with the experience Frank Marshall Davis recounts in his memoir.

  Davis loved college! He was the rare African American to get a college education in the 1920s, and he savored every minute of it. The years he spent at Kansas State University proved particularly rewarding. The campus was “beautiful,” the students “usually agreeable,” and his journalism department “excellent.” It was here that he discovered his gift for poetry, a gift that was praised and nurtured by his uniformly white professors. In fact, he dedicated his second book of poetry to Charles Elkin Rogers, the department head with whom he shared “a fine friendship.”

  Throughout his memoir, Davis meets fellow black writers and cites their college backgrounds approvingly. He also meets open-minded white college students, whom he sees as the hope for America’s racial future. His college poetry-reading tours on the mainland in 1973 and 1974 are huge successes. They fill him with hope and confidence. Obama visits Davis a few years after these tours while he is living in Waikiki’s “Jungle,” a neighborhood overflowing with students from the University of Hawaii. In his memoir, Davis describes his student neighbors as “rebels” and “natural allies of the black revolution.” The “Frank” who speaks ill of university life in Dreams is pure sock puppet. As to who was doing the puppetry, Ayers makes an excellent suspect, the only one, really.

  There was some speculation, though no confirmation, that Ayers had met Obama earlier in the decade during their overlapping years on the Columbia University campus in New York. Whether or not they had met in New York, Obama relates an experience at Columbia with the kind of insight and regret that one would expect from a veteran of internecine left-wing warfare.

  As Obama tells it, he goes to hear the black activist formerly known as Stokely Carmichael speak at Columbia. Upon leaving, he watches dolefully as “two Marxists” scream insults at each other over minor sectarian differences. “It was like a bad dream,” thinks Obama. “The movement had died years ago, shattered into a thousand fragments.”

  These insights into “the movement” seem much too knowing and weighty for a twenty-year-old bodysurfer just in from Hawaii and L.A. They sound perfectly natural, however, coming from a radical nearly twice that age emerging from a futile decade underground. In an interview for the book Sixties Radicals, Then and Now, Ayers makes the same point. “When the war ended,” he says, “our differences surfaced. We ended up in typical left-wing fashion: We ate each other … cannibalism.” Ayers would likely have gone to see Carmichael. He knew him personally and writes about him favorably both in To Teach and in the recent Race Course.

  After leaving Columbia, Obama went to work for what he describes in Dreams as “a consulting house to multinational corporations.” He observes, “As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company.” He does not boast of his racial uniqueness. Rather, in full grievance mode, he considers it “a source of shame.”

  As early as July 2005, however, former co-worker and current Obama fan Dan Armstrong revealed Obama’s whole account to be a “serious exaggeration.” Obama did not work at a multinational corporation, but a “small company that published newsletters.” He was not the only black person who worked there. He did not, as claimed, have his own office, wear a jacket and tie, interview international businessmen, or write articles. He mostly just copyedited business items and slipped them into a three-ring binder for the company’s customers.

  When this discrepancy surfaced years later, pundits in either camp were confused as to why Obama would lie about such seemingly irrelevant details. There are two good, nonexclusive possibilities. For one, the exaggeration enables the reader to see Obama as he would like to see himself—“a spy behind enemy lines.” For another, Ayers once again took the framework of Obama’s life and roughed in the details.

  In Fugitive Days, Ayers uses the phrase “behind enemy lines” almost literally to describe his and his comrades’ quiet infiltration of the opponent’s position. Dohrn has said the same in public. When the Weather Underground declared its state of war with the United States in May 1970, she warned that people fighting “Amerikan imperialism” all over the world “look to Amerika’s youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire.”

  Ayers and his radical friends were obsessed with Vietnam. The war there defined them and still does. To reflect their radical savvy, they tend toward the knowing phrase. In Fugitive Days, for instance, when conjuring up an image of Vietnam, Ayers envisions “a patrol in the Mekong Delta.” When mourning “a hamlet called My Lai,” Bernardine Dohrn locates it “in the middle of the Mekong Delta,” never mind that the two places are hundreds of miles apart. Similarly, when the young Obama pontificates about “angry young men,” he places them “in Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta.”

  Ayers had a much deeper connection than Obama to “Detroit” as well. Its historic riot took place shortly before Obama’s sixth birthday. Ayers lived in Detroit the year after the riot and experienced its meltdown firsthand. In 2007, on his blog, he chose to “commemorate” the fortieth anniversary of what he predictably calls the “Detroit Rebellion.”

  For obvious reasons, the media and the Obama camp have held Obama blameless for knowing anything about anything before 1970. “Why is John McCain talking about the sixties?” one Obama ad asked. “McCain knows Obama denounced Bill Ayers’ crimes committed when Obama was just eight years old.”

  In reality, Ayers and pals went underground in early 1970 and planted their first bomb in May of that year. Although Obama and his handlers never wearied of this petty deception, false advertising is not the issue. What is at issue is whether Obama maintained an intimate working relationship with a self-described communist whose acts of violence the candidate denounced only to win an election. In the fall of 2008, this would seem to have mattered.

  SPACE LIMITATIONS

  In the great campaign books of yore—Theodore White’s come to mind—the authors made an effort to present the campaigns of both parties with similar detail and a sem
blance of balance. In the two major books on the 2008 campaign so far released—The Bridge by David Remnick and Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin—the authors simply don’t know how.

  These scribes do to Republicans quite what Edward Said believes Western writers do to “Orientals”—they judge them by their own standards. To paraphrase Said, these efforts can never be “veridic”—meaning genuine. They tend to tell us more about the people doing the judging than those who are being judged.

  Despite his postmodern obtuseness, Said may be on to something. In one comic example, Remnick talks about the “pitiable” plight of John McCain having to stump for votes among “right-wing evangelists, free-market absolutists, and other conservatives.” Without meaning to, Remnick just described—in the pejorative—the entire Republican Party. Who else is there?

  Remnick’s myopia surfaces in his discussion of the “wider currency” the conservative media provided my research. He cites Limbaugh as mentioned and a writer for National Review’s blog. That writer, unnamed by Remnick, was Andy McCarthy, who posted a piece on October 11 describing my work as “thorough, thoughtful, and alarming.” Remnick cites these two examples as though they typified the established right’s response. I wish they had. In reality, they were rare exceptions. McCarthy was writing against the National Review’s grain.

  To be sure, not one single major media outlet stepped up to commission a university study or even test the evidence that I had gathered. If my hypothesis were true, and those paying attention may have feared it was, they simply did not want to know.

  As to the bloggers, in vintage left-wing style scores of them slashed away profanely without having read anything by either Ayers or Obama. One rather typical young progressive attacked me as an “Internet hobo” (huh?) and interpreted my theory to mean, “Obama didn’t write a fucking word in the whole book.” Her respondents were less generous still. Wrote one, “Well there are 48 striking similarities between Cashill’s chromosomes and a fucking chimp’s.” Wrote another, “The best part about this whole conspiracy theory isn’t how spectacularly wrong it is (and it’s completely fucking incorrect), it’s the fact that, were it true, it would be the most completely inconsequential conspiracy in fucking history.” Wrote a third, “What the fuck is wrong with those people? Can we cure them with savage beatings? As a heathen I suggest we use Science to study the effects of beatings on wingnuts.” I read somewhere that profanity shows up nineteen times more often in left-wing blogs than in right-wing ones. When I read it, I thought, “Only nineteen?” In the era of universal self-esteem, dull people seemed not at all shy about expressing sharp opinions.

  This collective shrug from the major media did not surprise me. Their ignorance had a logic. Real knowledge might just have undermined their commitment to a philosophy so evasive—“Yes, we can?”—that they themselves would be at a loss to describe it. Their ideological house of cards required vigilant security guards. That much I got.

  What I did not get was why the “respectable” conservative media (RCM), those with a serious and sober presence in New York and/or Washington, were mimicking the turtle-like defenses of their mainstream peers. My thesis involved no eyewitnesses or radar data or ballistics tests. No one would have to leave his or her D.C. desk. All the evidence lay between the covers of a half-dozen or so books, two ostensibly by Obama and the rest by Ayers. I was not asking them to buy my thesis sight unseen but to kick the tires and take it for a test drive. Yet even so simple a literary review proved a task too daunting.

  I am not sure I know why. There are good, smart, sincere people in the RCM. But for whatever reason, they had become cautious to the point of cowardly. Phantom beavers had all but dammed up the Clinton-era “communication stream of conspiracy commerce.” By the time of the 2008 campaign, it had slowed to such a trickle that the major media could have sold at least half of the American people just about anyone for president, and “just about anyone” is what they sold.

  After much back and forth, Human Events punted on my research. The National Review did, too. The Fox producers downstairs showed interest, but the suits upstairs did not. The managing editor of the Weekly Standard referred me to the magazine’s literary editor, whose response echoed the others: “An interesting piece, but I’m rather oversubscribed at the moment, the length is considerable, and cutting would not do it justice. (Also, we had a long, rather critical, piece on Obama’s oeuvre not too long ago.) So permit me to decline with thanks for allowing me to take a look.”

  For all my bellyaching, the Weekly Standard remains my favorite magazine. I subscribe. Still, a cover story that read “Who Wrote Dreams from My Father?” could have shaken up the election, maybe even turned it. Yet not a single conservative writer in the power corridor bothered to do what Nebraskan Ryan Geiser was routinely doing after a busy day framing and drywalling—namely, reviewing the relevant books. That simple. Dang those space limitations!

  After the election, the respectable conservative media remained mute or worse. In February 2009, as the evidence of Obama’s limitations grew painfully obvious by the day, James Taranto, editor of the Wall Street Journal’s online editorial page, rushed once more into the breach.

  Taranto singled me out by name as among those of his fellow conservatives who “engaged in irresponsible rumor-mongering and conspiracy-theorizing” for daring to suggest that “Ayers might have ghostwritten Obama’s acclaimed autobiography.”

  I had to respond. “James, There I was, reading my most recent The American Spectator,” I began my email to Taranto, “starting with my favorite columnists, James Taranto high among them, and I find myself on the unflattering end of one of your observations.” I sent along an op-ed for the Journal, a process he does not control.

  “Jack—I’m afraid I still find the Ayers-ghostwrote-Dreams idea too far out to take seriously,” he wrote back. In a sentence, he summed up the problem with my thesis—it just seemed too perfect. A few months later, the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg would protest in a similar vein: “I think trying to claim some sort of literary conspiracy is a bridge too far.” In 1994, however, Ayers’s help would have seemed no more conspiratorial than if an electrician neighbor had helped Obama rewire his house.

  Pre-election, the still-vital forces in the conservative media—the Internet and AM radio, with a particular nod to Rusty Humphries and his producer, Rich Davis—were trying to push the story downstream, but the RCM had closed the locks. This effectively dried up Rush’s commentary, and the major media scarcely had to trouble themselves with the controversy at all.

  I remember sitting at my office desk late on a Friday afternoon, October 17, eighteen days before the election, E minus 18, humming a Randy Travis tune about the media, “Is it still over / Are we still through / Since my phone still ain’t ringing / I assume it still ain’t you.” In the week since Limbaugh talked about my thesis, I had not received a single call from anyone in the print or television media—right, left, or center—despite my efforts to prime the pump.

  It was then that the inimitable Bob Fox called. Although I had never met Fox, still haven’t, we would exchange at least two dozen phone calls in the next few weeks. A California businessman, not quite fifty, Bob had recently returned from an extensive health-care consulting gig in Russia. His “ru” email exchange would lend an air of mystery to our correspondence.

  Fox had recently received an email from one of his sisters alerting him to the work I had been doing in WND and American Thinker. A student of languages—he also speaks Russian, German, and French—Fox saw the merit in my thesis and alerted the husband of another sister, Utah congressman Chris Cannon. After six terms, Cannon had lost a primary challenge due to his perceived weakness on the illegal immigration issue. At this stage, he had nothing to lose.

  Cannon had been paying closer attention to the Obama phenomenon than most of his Washington peers. “He understood what Obama was from the beginning,” said Fox.

  After our exchange,
Fox had me call Cannon. Even before the weekend was out, Fox and Cannon had contracted to have writing samples from Ayers and Obama tested through a university-based authorship program and arranged a conference call early in the following week with some people of influence on the right. I went back to my leaf-raking that weekend with at least some of the burden lifted from my shoulders.

  That Saturday I received a boost from another, unexpected source, namely a classics professor at the Ohio State University, Bruce Heiden. Heiden, whom I would later meet over breakfast at his Columbus home, had come a long way from his natural habitat. He had grown up in Coney Island, gone to high school in Brighton Beach, college at Columbia, and graduate school at Cornell. This was as total a liberal immersion as any American has ever had to endure. Before Ohio, he may have never even seen a Republican in the wild.

  For Heiden, the subject that sparked his discontent with the left was public education. The people whose politics he shared argued for a pedagogy that struck him as very nearly perverse. Once Heiden started questioning progressive wisdom on one subject, he started to question that wisdom on a host of subjects, most notably communism. He took to reading Solzhenitsyn, then Whittaker Chambers, and from there it was just a matter of time.

  When I met Heiden, he looked as unassuming and professorial as he had when he voted Democratic, and his home—all bookcases and exposed wood—looked like a professor’s home. It is just that Heiden no longer thought the way one expected a humanities professor to think. In 2008, the fifty-something prof would cast his first-ever vote for a Republican in a presidential election. In the weeks leading up to that election, the fearless Heiden weighed in on his blog, the Postliberal, with the fascinating assertion that Obama “agrees with Cashill on one important point,” namely that Obama himself “didn’t write [Dreams].”