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

by Jack Cashill

  Heiden’s nearly five-thousand-word argument is observant, amusing, and, for a university professor in the dawning age of Obama, mighty bold. Tenure does have its uses. Heiden analyzes Dreams’ original 1995 introduction and compares it to the preface affixed in 2004. Absurdities abound. The essay deserves to be read in full, but for practical purposes let me reproduce Heiden’s summary:

  According to this analysis, Barack Obama’s Introduction to Dreams from My Father and his 2004 Preface offer an obfuscated, self-contradictory, and unbelievable representation of his authorship that, upon close reading, proves vacant. As Obama tells it, his authorship of Dreams was miraculous, because although he lacked the writing skill to be the author of anything, and he didn’t want to be the author of a memoir, and he resisted becoming the author of a memoir, and he tried in vain to become the author of a different kind of book, and he never had an idea of being the author of anything until one or several publishers had the idea first and he agreed to accept the opportunity they offered to be an author, and even then he only considered himself an author as long as his publisher was selling his book, after which he reverted back to a complete non-author, reverted so completely that he wasn’t even moved to reread his book when political opponents were using it against him—because, in short, despite all the reasons Obama gives why he couldn’t have written a book like Dreams from My Father, and despite the fact that, according to Obama’s account, he didn’t write Dreams from My Father, nevertheless Dreams from My Father somehow “found its way” onto the page with Barack Obama’s name under the title as the author. That’s a miracle. It couldn’t have happened.

  As example of Obama’s passivity, Heiden offers an oddly truthful passage from the 1995 introduction that speaks to the genesis of the book:

  At some point, then, in spite of a stubborn desire to protect myself from scrutiny, in spite of the periodic impulse to abandon the entire project, what has found its way onto these pages is a record of a personal, interior journey—

  The subject of this sentence—after the “in spite of” clauses—should rightly have been “I,” as in “I wrote this book.” Obama has shown no reluctance to use the “I” word elsewhere. Instead, whoever wrote this sentence gives Obama no credit for writing Dreams. Yes, Obama’s story has “found its way onto these pages.” No one questions that.

  The 1995 introduction makes the claim, likely true, that Obama had originally intended to write a book “about the current state of race relations” and had agreed to take a year off after graduation to “put thoughts to paper.” Somewhere along the way, however, he found his “mind pulled” toward writing a family history despite his desire to protect himself from scrutiny.

  The 2004 preface, however, tells a different story. “I received an advance from a publisher,” writes Obama, “and went to work with the belief that the story of my family … might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience.” In this version of events, which follows immediately after the 1995 introduction in the 2004 paperback, Obama jumps directly into the family history, advance in hand.

  Among other curious revelations in the 2004 preface is Obama’s claim to have pulled out a copy of Dreams “for the first time in many years” and read a few chapters. He does so not to examine the contents for potentially embarrassing revelations but to “see how much my voice may have changed over time.” In that he has written nothing of the slightest consequence in the last ten years, it is hard to imagine that his voice would have changed at all or that anyone would notice if it had. Still, he confesses to wincing at the occasional ill-chosen word or phrase and feels the urge “to cut the book by fifty pages or so.”

  In fact, the book is 150 pages or so too long. Dreams serves up several windy accounts of events and conversations, especially in Chicago and Kenya, that just take up space. My interpretation of this unlikely apology varies a bit from Heiden’s. I believe Ayers largely wrote the 2004 preface and overlooked the transition from a book on race relations to a family history. I also believe, and this is purely speculative, that he was telling those in the know that he could have done better with Dreams, that perhaps he allowed the nominal author too much leeway in what remained in the book. Ayers has an ego. All real writers do.

  Obama’s ascendancy as a literary superstar had to irritate Ayers at least a little. The spectacular mistiming of his own 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, doomed the book to short-term infamy and long-term obscurity. Now he was playing the deformed Cyrano to Obama’s hunky Christian, and it was Christian who was winning the heart of Roxanne/America.

  To be sure, Heiden’s support from within the academy did not change the debate, but it did make me feel a little less crazy. There were times in October 2008 that I could identify with Dr. Miles Bennell, the small-town doctor and seeming madman who desperately tries to convince the local shrinks that giant seed pods of a communist bent have indeed taken over Santa Mira, in the film classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I still identify.

  SWIFTBOATING

  Bob Fox and I were in constant contact the week of October 20. Two friendly university professors had signed on to the authorship project, and they were throwing their best science at the various books of Ayers and Obama. Fox kept me continuously updated on their progress.

  In the meantime, Congressman Cannon had arranged a conference call among several key members of the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” On the line, if I remember right, were Jed Babbin, editor of Human Events, direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie, leading conservative publicist Craig Shirley, Cannon, myself, and a few others.

  After a given electoral defeat, the left consoles itself with the illusion that a cabal of this nature would have contrived the lowest, slimiest smear it could have hoped to get away with, found some moneybags to fund it, snuck it into the public debate, and swayed the weak-minded. The two classic cases of such imagined mischief are that of Willie Horton and the Swiftboaters.

  The left’s reimagining of the Willie Horton incident reached its demented apogee in Michael Moore’s Academy Award–winning Bowling for Columbine. While scolding whites for their fear of the black man, Moore shows an ad that he attributes to the 1988 George H. W. Bush campaign. The Bowling version of the ad features the scary mug shot of Willie Horton, an African American, and the caption “Willie Horton released. Then kills again.”

  The real ad, like this one, had focused on what Horton had done—robbed a seventeen-year-old gas station attendant, fatally stabbed him nineteen times, and dumped him in a trash can to die. Twelve years later, despite a life term without parole, Horton received a weekend furlough, during which he knifed, blinded, and gagged a man in Maryland, raped his fiancée, and stole their car.

  The real ad, the one produced by the Bush campaign, did not show or name Willie Horton. It showed prisoners passing through a revolving door while viewers were told how liberal Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis had supported this insane furlough program as a form of criminal rehabilitation. Of the thirty prisoners shown in the Bush ad, only three were black. For that matter, it was Al Gore who had first raised the furlough issue during the primaries.

  Before the election, few in the media knew exactly who Willie Horton was. Most had never heard the name or seen the photo. After the election, however, Democratic operatives unearthed an ad featuring Horton’s mug shot that an independent group had run in New England for two weeks. In the subsequent months and years, in order to paint the new president and his cronies as racist dirty tricksters, a bitter punditry would repeatedly show the Horton ad and attribute it to Bush.

  The bait and switch worked. More than fifteen years after the election Moore could show the ad in his movie and expect his audience to assume it was Bush’s. A sloppy propagandist, Moore inserted the “Willie Horton released. Then kills again” caption into the ad indifferent to the fact that Horton did not kill upon his infamous weekend leave. Moore assumed, as did the media, that the Bush ad worked by playing on Ame
rica’s chronic anxiety about the black man. The implication, of course, is that the public would have welcomed Dukakis’s furlough program had it freed only white killers to rape and plunder.

  The media response to the 2004 Swiftboat campaign was equally self-deluding. During the Vietnam War, John Kerry had served in a small area called An Thoi, Coastal Division 11. Of the twenty-three officers he served with in that area, four supported him for president, two took no position, but an astounding seventeen of the twenty-three were willing to publicly condemn him as unfit for command, based on an undeniable history of fabricating slurs against his fellow soldiers and lying about his own war record.

  John O’Neill, the former Swiftboater who organized Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, had voted for Al Gore in 2000 and Ross Perot in the two previous elections. When he and his fellow vets held a news conference at the National Press Club in early May 2004 to air their grievances, the media pretended not to notice.

  In late May 2004, I was approached by Cleveland talk-show host Paul Schiffer to see if I could produce a video for the Swifties. At that time, they had no money and few connections. The fact that they were talking to me at this point shows how utterly unconnected they were. When I read their material, I was overwhelmed by the consistently damning testimony of so many of Kerry’s fellow officers. I suggested a book and played a small role in helping O’Neill and co-author Jerome Corsi find a publisher.

  As I watched the campaign unfold that summer, I found it hard to believe that the Democrats were doing nothing to immunize Kerry against the charges that were soon to resurface. In fact, they set Kerry up for a fall by having him boat across Boston Harbor and mount the podium at the FleetCenter as if he were at a VFW convention and declare, “I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty.”

  Like Barack Obama, who had given his keynote speech the night before, Kerry was building a political persona on a precarious foundation. “I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as president,” swore Kerry. Obama would make a similarly dubious claim on the campaign trail in 2008. “I’ve written two books,” Obama told a crowd of teachers in Virginia. “I actually wrote them myself.” In reality, Kerry was to fighting what Obama was to writing: they both dabbled. Boasting about one’s imagined exploits, however, had the potential of playing into the opposition’s hands.

  Democrats still attribute Kerry’s loss to the fact that he would not fight back against the Swifties. They refuse to accept the reality that he could not. The Swifties had the truth on their side. Kerry chose the strategically wiser route—step aside and let the media smear the opposition. Indeed, given the liberals’ control of the airwaves and the academy, they have managed to turn swiftboat into a verb meaning “a strong pejorative description of some kind of attack that the speaker considers unfair or untrue—for example, an ad hominem attack or a smear campaign.” Recall Maureen Dowd’s earlier citation of the Swift-boat campaign as a symptom of “our long national slide into untruth.”

  Republicans have a much keener sense of the way the media work than do Democrats. During the teleconference two weeks before the election, those on the line understood that the moment they went public with the accusation that Obama needed major help from Bill Ayers to complete Dreams, the most powerful forces in the media—the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS—would, if they could not ignore the accusers, turn their collective wrath upon them.

  In that I had no reputation in Washington to protect—dwelling, as I did, “in the Web’s farthest lunatic orbit”—I was prepared to move forward. By this time, my confidence in the soundness of my theory was approaching 100 percent. My new telephonic colleagues, however, were understandably more hesitant. They needed a confidence builder. Despite my cautions about the limits of literary science, they hoped to see some hard data. Cannon told them it was on the way.

  In a manner of speaking, it was. Two days later, October 22, E minus 13, the two university professors sent us a summary of their authorship study, and the results were encouraging. The study did, however, have a few, well, limitations. The first is that no one could understand it. The report began with the following explanation:

  Our study was based on the well known Chi Square test. This test is run by applying a formula to observed data to compute a Q value. Given the number of degrees of freedom and the desired confidence level, a threshold is looked up in a table or, as in our case, computed using a function built in to a software package. The outcome of the test depends on the Q value in relation to the threshold.

  This was the easy part. It got more complicated from there. The professors had done their job well, but we had hoped to present the media with a document that spoke for itself. This one would require actual work from media that did not want to be bothered in the first place. A second limitation was that, in writing at least, the professors did not want to overstate their case lest their prudence be doubted. Although they were more openly supportive over the phone, in print they felt obliged to pull their punches. The result was this:

  The Q values in the Dreams-Dreams comparisons had the same magnitude as the Q values in the Dreams-Fugitive comparisons. This means that the Dreams text fit the Fugitive text as well as it fit other sections of the Dreams text. This fact alone is not sufficient to conclude that there is a common author, but it does raise serious questions. Why are these writings so similar? If Obama wrote Dreams, why does it match so well the writings of another author? In some cases, the fit of Dreams to Fugitive was better than the fit of Dreams to other portions of the Dreams text.

  Had the date been E minus 113, the results might have prodded some media outlet on the right to throw some resources at the study, but on E minus 13, this was too little, too complicated, too late. And, as feared, there was a third problem. Valuing their futures in academe, the professors would not put their names on the work, let alone their mugs on TV. This all but negated the work’s value. I could hardly blame the profs. In the face of a likely Republican defeat, a futile tilt at the Obama windmill could have cost them their heads.

  As a last stab at gathering media attention, I asked the anonymous profs to summarize their results for easy consumption in one hundred words or less. Here are the 119 words I got back:

  The fundamental principle of stylometric analysis is that the frequency of occurrence of function words in a written document is an identifying characteristic of the author. We compared word frequency counts of Dreams From My Father with Fugitive Days and about ten other randomly selected texts. Goodness of fit between different documents was obtained by computing the so called Q value from the standard chi-square hypothesis test. The documents were divided into segments so that both within text and between text comparisons could be made. Under the Q-value statistic, segments of Dreams consistently compared as well with Fugitive segments as it did with other segments of Dreams itself. In contrast, Dreams compared poorly with other documents.

  Clear enough? I should add a fourth limitation with the study. Computer-driven authorship studies have the persuasive power of a polygraph, not a DNA analysis. At the end of the day, even O.J. could find a polygrapher willing to prove him innocent. If we went forward with our proof, I had no doubt but that our wily opponents could locate someone willing to contrive a contrary proof. And they owned the academy, not us. We were lucky to find the guys we did.

  Truth be told, I could make a better public case for Ayers’s involvement by a discussion of the word ballast than I could by sharing these results. But who was I? Even to the pundits on our own side, I was just one of those “Internet zanies” mucking up the debate. On the other side of the aisle, the pundits were far less f***ing generous.

  VICHY

  Bob Fox, just back from Russia, dug in like the Soviets at Stalingrad. The Obama machine would roll on triumphantly, he feared, unless HQ gave us the go-ahead to fire away. The word Fox was getting from the movers and shakers on the right, however, was that there would be no moving or sh
aking without an imprimatur from the academy. Not one to give up, even if just twelve days shy of the election, he continued looking for a university-based scientist who had the will to do an authorship study and the brass to stand up and defend it.

  As it happened, I knew one such guy. Andrew Longman had first started corresponding with me in 2005 when I was reporting for WorldNetDaily on the search for WMDs. Longman knew something about the subject. He holds a patent, along with his co-inventors, on a network concept for detecting hidden terrorist nuclear weapons in an urban environment. At the time we were corresponding, he was working contractually with Purdue University, my and his alma mater. His work historically had been a mix of science, scientific instrumentation, computing, and consulting engineering. I figured if you couldn’t trust a Boilermaker, whom could you trust?

  An evangelical Christian, and a large, goateed one at that, Long-man had made the Drudge Report earlier in the year when he confronted Chelsea Clinton, who was on campus to stump for her mom. Longman had attended the event and, when called upon, asked a seriously impertinent question.

  The House of Representatives impeached William Jefferson Clinton on counts of perjury and obstruction of justice. He was held in contempt of a federal court, was fined and disbarred from practicing law in Arkansas, and resigned rather than be disbarred before the Supreme Court. All of these were a consequence of his blatant lies under oath to a federal grand jury. Miss Clinton, your mother apologized, covered up, and lied for the lies that the President told under oath. How then can the Hillary campaign say the Monica Lewinsky affair was just a personal matter, when candidate Clinton covered up perjury and committed obstruction of justice for the President of the United States?