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

by Jack Cashill

  ARA encourages members to join buses to Washington and participate in a March 7–8 rally intended to push through the Freeze resolution which is making its second trip through the House.

  Join buses? This sounds like something you would hear in an ESL class. A rally cannot push a resolution through the House. Now on its second trip?

  An entirely student-run organization, SAM casts a wider net than ARA, though for the purposes of effectiveness, they have tried to lock in on one issue at a time.

  Organization is singular, and thus they has no antecedent. The wider net cliché is lazy.

  By organizing and educating the Columbia community, such activities lay the foundation for future mobilization against the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country.

  “People” organize and educate, not activities.

  The belief that moribund institutions, rather than individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAM’s energies alive.

  Again, an agreement issue: This should read, “The belief … keeps SAM’s energies alive.” The random use of commas throws everything off. Plus, the word choice sucks all logic out of the sentence. In the previous paragraph, Obama warns his readers about “the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country.” In this paragraph, the reader is told that these same military institutions are moribund—that is “nearly dead.” How their debilitated state keeps the energies of the Students Against Militarism (SAM) alive is not exactly clear.

  Regarding Columbia’s possible compliance, one comment in particular hit upon an important point with the Solomon bill.

  The subject of hit upon, not an apt verb to begin with, should have been a person, not a comment.

  What members of ARA and SAM try to do is infuse what they have learned about the current situation, bring the words of that formidable roster on the face of Butler Library, names like Thoreau, Jefferson, and Whitman, to bear on the twisted logic of which we are today a part.

  I went back and reread the hard copy on this sentence to make sure it had not been deformed when digitized. This, alas, reads as weirdly as written. Infuse is the wrong word. One infuses something “into” something else. There should be an and after situation, not a comma. Obama utterly mangles the “bring to bear” phrase. It should read something like “bring the words of those formidable men on the face of the Butler Library—Thoreau, Jefferson, Whitman—to bear.” As to how or whether we are part of a twisted logic, I will leave that to the reader’s imagination.

  In To Teach, Bill Ayers includes an essay by his son Zayd, written when he was twelve. It reads considerably better than Obama’s Columbia essay. The essays my daughters wrote in high school are dramatically better. Every single article in the Spring 2010 edition of the twenty-page Purdue Review, a conservative Sundial equivalent, is better written. There is no conceivable way that the author of “Breaking the War Mentality” could have written unaided Dreams from My Father ten years or a hundred years later.

  After the Sundial article, Obama had nothing in print for another five years. Remnick reports that Obama took a stab at a short story or two, but Remnick shares no samples. In Dreams, Obama cops to only the occasional journal entry during this period. Not surprisingly, when Obama makes his next serious literary effort, many of the signature failings on display in “Breaking” manage to find their way into his previously cited 1988 essay, “Why Organize?”

  Facing these realities, at least three major strands of earlier movements are apparent.

  Facing these realities modifies nothing. Strands do not “face reality.”

  The election of Harold Washington in Chicago or of Richard Hatcher in Gary were not enough to bring jobs to inner-city neighborhoods.

  Of course, it should read, “The election … was.”

  … neither new nor well-established companies will be willing to base themselves in the inner city and still compete in the international marketplace.

  The grammar is passable here. The logic is not. Obama means, I think, “Companies willing to base themselves in the inner city, new or established, will not be able to compete in the international marketplace.”

  Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda.

  Agendas do not have anathemas.

  But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well … and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts.

  Organizing does not face. Efforts do not leave skeletons.

  Obama wrote this essay in 1988, perhaps to pad his résumé for Harvard Law, at which he would enroll that same year. It shows a modest improvement from his Columbia essay five years earlier, which may be due to more vigilant editing, but it exhibits many of the same problems—awkward sentence structure, inappropriate word choice, a weakness for clichés, the continued failure to get verbs and nouns to agree. More troubling for the Obama faithful, this essay shows not a hint of the grace and sophistication of Dreams. Two years later, this same writer would be elected president of the Harvard Law Review (HLR). Soon after the election, he would begin writing his critically acclaimed memoir. Only in Obama’s uniquely privileged slice of America could a writer of such modest talent achieve so much.

  In 1990, Obama contributed an edited, unsigned student case comment to the HLR. This was his third and final published piece before Dreams. Granted that an analysis of fetal-maternal tort suits allows little room for soaring rhetoric, but the language one finds here does not even rise above the plain. “Suits by a fetus against third parties provide an additional deterrent to unwanted intrusions on a woman’s bodily integrity,” reads a typically leaden sentence. As to the note’s message, Obama may be the one prominent Democrat on record to argue against the expansion of tort law. Unfortunately, he opposed expansion because of “the dangers such a conceptualization poses to the constitutional rights of women.” In other words, if the court allows the unborn to sue their mothers for negligence, they might one day be able to sue abortionists for homicide.

  From the publication of Dreams in 1995 to its reissue in 2004, Obama had nothing in print beyond a semiregular column in the neighborhood newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald. If he wrote a single inspired or imaginative sentence in his many columns, I was not able to find it. More than a few evoke the clumsy, ungrammatical Obama of his Columbia days. Sentences that begin “One of the paradoxes recessions pose …” can come to no good end. Worse, virtually every column promised more counterproductive meddling in the life of the community. Such was the petty political yoke to which our literary master had to harness his outsized talent during these fallow years.

  The one column that attracted any attention—the January 2000 “Family Duties Took Precedence”—did so for its heart-stopping shamelessness. At the time, state senator Obama had a lot of explaining to do. In late December 1999, while on vacation in Hawaii, he missed a critical vote on a gun control measure. He had missed votes before, but now he was challenging former Black Panther Bobby Rush for his congressional seat. When he caught heat from Rush and the media, Obama used the column to roll out his alibi.

  To explain why he had gone to Hawaii, Obama cited the death of his mother, the death of his grandfather, and the subsequent loneliness of his ailing grandmother at Christmastime. To explain why he stayed—“10-footers on the North Shore” would not fly in the hood—he paraded an allegedly flu-ridden baby. “I could not leave my wife alone with my daughter,” said Obama, “without knowing the seriousness of the baby’s condition and without knowing whether they might be able to get a flight out of Hawaii before New Year’s Day.” On the plus side he spared the reader any tales of his dog, “Checkers” apparently having stayed behind in Chicago.

  This same awkward, uncertain, cliché-happy Obama reemerged in the inaugural address. “Some phrases were just strange,” wrote Michael Gerson of the speech at the time. “Recriminations have ‘strangled’ our po
litics, as in some ‘CSI’ episode. We have ‘tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation.’ Yuck, in so many ways.”

  Two days after the inauguration, I was able to participate in my first-ever March for Life. Among my assignments that day was to escort our spokesperson, actress Jennifer O’Neill, the hearthrob of every male breathing the summer of the Summer of ’42. It was a tough job, but someone had to do it.

  Having a camera on a central rooftop, we were able to estimate the crowd size, which we tabbed at about 350,000. For drama’s sake, I assigned our six cameramen to find as many pro-abortion protestors as they could and, if possible, interview them. Although we looked hard, none of us could identify a single such protestor. USA Today found a ragtag handful and gave them, incredibly enough, equal photographic billing. The rest of the media ignored the march altogether.

  The crowds were roughly the same for the march in 2010, which I also attended, but if anything, the media coverage was even more subversive. Krista Gesaman of Newsweek headlined her article “Who’s Missing at the ‘Roe v. Wade’ Anniversary Demonstrations? Young Women.” She claimed that “a majority of the participants are in their 60s” and wondered whether the march would soon die off from attrition. In fact, about 75 percent of the marchers were under twenty-five, with more females than males among the young people. Young women were everywhere and unavoidable. They filled every hotel lobby in town. Many of them had spent countless hours on buses to get there.

  During the 3 P.M. ET hour of CNN’s Rick’s List on the day of the march, Rick Sanchez acknowledged that it was the thirty-seventh anniversary of Roe v. Wade, then asked, “both sides being represented today, but it does appear to me, as I look at these signs that—which side is represented the most…. Do we know?”

  As Sanchez deliberated, CNN’s cameras seemed to have found the same disgruntled crew of pro-abortion protestors that USA Today had found the year before. After the commercial break, Sanchez finally conceded that although he had not “gone out and counted signs individually,” most of the protestors “seem to be anti-abortion activists.” In fact, just like the year before, the numbers broke out to be about 350,000 pro-life marchers to about five or so abortion supporters. At least 100,000 of these marchers were young women.

  In January 2009, the day after the march, the new U.S. president, apparently to protect “the constitutional rights of women” wherever they might be, quietly ordered his administration to start funding abortion providers overseas. The mist of uncertainty enshrouding the president was already beginning to dissipate.

  GENIUS SCHOOL

  Among the many questions left unanswered during the election was just how Barack Obama got into Harvard Law School. As the evidence trickled in, it became clearer that Obama never did need a Saudi-led conspiracy to secure a place in Cambridge. He had the one thing it took all along.

  Obama surely understood this. David Mendell tells the reader that Obama “won” a full scholarship to Occidental but as a bench-warming, B-minus student Obama had to know what he had done to “win” it. Despite adding considerable information to the record, David Remnick chooses not to know. He tells us that Obama was an “unspectacular” student in his two years at Columbia and at every stop before that, going back to grade school. A Northwestern University prof who wrote a letter of reference for Obama reinforces the point, telling Remnick, “I don’t think [Obama] did too well in college.” As to Obama’s LSAT scores, Jimmy Hoffa’s body will be unearthed before those are.

  How such an indifferent student got into a law school whose applicants’ LSAT scores typically track between the 98th and 99th percentile and whose GPAs range between 3.80 and 4.00 is a subject Remnick bypasses. Mendell is likewise silent on the mystery admission. This surprises because in stretches he saw more of Obama than Michelle did, and he writes objectively and intimately about Obama’s ascendancy.

  Mendell traces Obama’s sudden itch to become a lawyer to the model of the recently deceased Mayor Washington, but Washington went to Northwestern’s very respectable law school in Chicago. The thought doesn’t cross Obama’s mind. In Dreams, he limits his choices to “Harvard, Yale, Stanford.” Writes Mendell as casually as if the honor were deserved, “Obama would soon be accepted at the most prestigious law school in the nation.”

  Michelle Obama’s experience shows just how wonderfully accessible Harvard could be. “Told by counselors that her SAT scores and her grades weren’t good enough for an Ivy League school,” writes Christopher Andersen, “Michelle applied to Princeton and Harvard anyway.” Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, “Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well.”

  She did not write well, either. She even typed badly. College dropout Ryan Geiser found Michelle’s senior thesis at Princeton online and concluded, “I could have written it in sophomore English class.” Mundy charitably describes it as “dense and turgid.” The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observes, “To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be ‘read’ at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language.”

  Hitchens exaggerates only a little. The following summary statement by Michelle captures her unfamiliarity with many of the rules of grammar and most of logic:

  The study inquires about the respondents’ motivations to benefit him/herself, and the following social groups: the family, the Black community, the White community, God and church, the U.S. society, the non-White races of the world, and the human species as a whole.

  Still, Michelle was admitted to and graduated from Harvard Law. One almost feels sorry for her. She had to have been as anxious as Bart Simpson at Genius School, but Bart at least knew he was in over his head, and he knew why: he had cheated on his IQ test. “It doesn’t take a Bart Simpson to figure out that something’s wrong,” he tells the principal and demands out. Michelle fled inward and, as at Princeton, found refuge in her blackness. The obvious gap between her writing and that of her highly talented colleagues marked her as an affirmative-action admission, and the profs finessed her through.

  Obama was sufficiently self-deluding—some would say narcissistic—that he felt little of that anxiety. Later in his book, Remnick lets slip into the record a revealing letter Obama had written while president of the HLR. He attempts here to illustrate Obama’s maturity on matters racial. In the process, however, he suggests one explanation for how Obama got into Harvard and how he became an editor of the review. Wrote Obama to the Harvard Law Record:

  I must say, however, that as someone who has undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career, and as someone who may have benefited from the Law Review’s affirmative action policy when I was selected to join the Review last year, I have not felt stigmatized within the broader law school community or as a staff member of the Review.

  As Shelby Steele notes, Obama simply refused to see the implications of affirmative action that were obvious to others. “American universities impose this policy on black students with such totalitarian resolve,” he writes, “that even blacks who don’t need the lowered standards come away stigmatized by them.” Remnick refuses to concede Obama’s need for affirmative action, let alone any stigma attached to it. He boasts that this “inner sanctum of the establishment” accepted only the “brightest and most ambitious” first-year students and offers as explanation, “Obama’s grades were good.”

  As he does on many occasions, Remnick chooses not to share with the reader a larger truth. The fact is that Obama did not make the law review the old-fashioned way, the way HLR’s first black editor, Charles Houston, did seventy years earlier. To Obama’s good fortune, the HLR had replaced a meritocracy in which editors were elected based on grades—the president being the student with the highest academic rank—with one in which half the editors were chosen through a writing competition.

  This competition, the New York Times
reported in 1990, was “meant to help insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review.” If Obama’s entry in the writing competition had begun, “As an angry young black man …,” I suspect his odds of being selected editor would have improved considerably.

  “By the time Barack got to campus, in 1988,” fellow alum Elena Kagan would tell Remnick, “all the talk and the debates were shifting to race.” In the same spring 1990 term that he would stand for the presidency of the HLR, the law school found itself embroiled in a nasty racial brouhaha. Black firebrand law professor Derrick Bell was demanding that Harvard appoint a black woman to the law faculty. This protest would culminate in vigils and protests by the racially sensitive student body, in the course of which Obama would compare the increasingly absurd Bell to Rosa Parks.

  Feeling the pressure, HLR editors wanted to elect their first African American president. Obama had an advantage. Spared the legacy of slavery and segregation, and having grown up in a white household, he lacked the hard edge of many of his black colleagues. “Obama cast himself as an eager listener,” the New York Times reported, “sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once.”

  In February 1990, after an ideologically charged all-day affair, Obama’s fellow editors elected him president from among nineteen candidates. As it turned out, Obama prevailed only after the HLR’s small conservative faction threw him its support. Once elected, Obama contributed not one word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, “A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time.” Remnick confirms the same. Of course, that would not stop the deans at the University of Chicago Law School from hinting at tenure for Obama. To put this offer in perspective, imagine the manager of the White Sox hinting at a starter’s job for a guy who had not yet gotten a hit, even in the minors.