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

by Jack Cashill

  Bottom line: had Obama’s father come from Kentucky, not Kenya, and been named O’Hara, not Obama, there would have been no Harvard Law Review, no Harvard, no Columbia, and probably no Punahou. Hillary supporter Geraldine Ferraro made the mistake of saying as much during the primary season. “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” she blundered, forgetting for a moment that the obvious was now verboten.

  When attacked, this feisty paisana refused to roll over. “I am livid at this thing,” she told the New York Times. “Any time you say anything to anybody about the Obama campaign, it immediately becomes a racist attack.” She was clearly on to something. Lost in the hubbub following Obama’s “More Perfect Union” speech was his comparison of Ferraro’s comments to those of Jeremiah “God damn America” Wright.

  The irony of all this, of course, is that a process designed to compensate the descendants of slaves has compensated a man whose maternal ancestors were not slaves but slave owners. On the paternal side, the first of Obama’s African relatives to have even seen a white man was his grandfather.

  When affirmative action quietly morphed into “diversity,” and the rationale for unearned glory shifted from compensation to cultural variety, Obama could not provide that, either. Growing up in a white family in the least black state of America without “Dakota” in its name, he contributed less “blackness” to the cultural stew than an everyday white hip-hopper. Still, Obama looked the part, more or less, and appearances proved enough for institutions anxious about their “metrics.”

  Race alone, however, guaranteed little. It would have won Obama few plaudits from the media if he had taken his wisdom from, say, an Alan Keyes and not a Bill Ayers. This point is critical. Blackness bestows media advantage on the ambitious only to the degree they fulfill progressive expectations. Keyes, a black Republican who ran against Obama in the 2004 U.S. Senate race, cannot even get a bright out of Remnick let alone a brilliant, despite an earned Ph.D. from Harvard and his unprompted eloquence. To Remnick, Keyes is merely a “demagogic fool.”

  The case of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is even more instructive. “I’m black,” he told Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes. “So I’m supposed to think a certain way. I’m supposed to have certain opinions. I don’t do that.” And he has paid the price. Without approving what follows, Kroft summarized with surprising candor Thomas’s reputation in liberal circles:

  … a man of little accomplishment, an opportunistic black conservative who sold out his race, joined the Republican Party and was ultimately rewarded with an affirmative action appointment to the nation’s highest court, a sullen, intellectual lightweight so insecure he rarely opens his mouth in oral arguments.

  In his bestseller, My Grandfather’s Son, Thomas recounts a life that offers some striking parallels to Obama’s. He too is abandoned by a deadbeat father. His mother also surrenders him to the care of his grandfather. But the parallels end here. Thomas comes of age in a tough-love home in hardscrabble Jim Crow Georgia, not in the indulgent air of nearly race-blind Hawaii. He never has to question his racial identity. He has it shoved down his throat every time he leaves the house.

  None of this, however, has earned Thomas a nickel’s worth of praise from media that pride themselves on their racial largesse. Thomas’s failure to embrace “the liberal pieties,” he writes in Grandfather, meant that he “had to be destroyed.” Obama embraced those pieties as much out of ambition as principle. Had fashion favored black conservatives, I have no doubt but that he would be one.

  The embrace of those pieties secured Obama the protection of an embarrassingly complicit media. Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter would happily ignore the obvious to conclude in his book The Promise, “Obama’s faith lay in the cream rising to the top.” The reason why: “He himself was a product of the great American postwar meritocracy.”

  COPYCATS

  At Harvard, Barack Obama may have learned a few things about writing that were not exactly featured in the catalogue. And as mentors, he had two masters of the craft. One, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, hired Obama as his research assistant in 1989 and took a powerful liking to the young man. After the 2008 election, Tribe would gush, “His stunning combination of analytical brilliance and personal charisma, openness and maturity, vision and pragmatism, was unmistakable from my very first encounter.”

  Obama found a second prominent mentor among the Harvard Law faculty in professor Charles Ogletree, an African American. In the run-up to the 2008 election, Ogletree would enthuse, “I’m so excited about this candidacy that I just can’t tell you. I’m just overfull with joy.” If anything, Ogletree and Tribe should have been overfull with joy in the simple fact that they had hung on to their Harvard jobs.

  In August 2004, while Obama was cruising to victory in the U.S. Senate race, Ogletree was sorting his way through a mess of his own creation. He had been forced to apologize for somehow letting passages from Yale scholar Jack Balkin’s book What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said find their way into his own book All Deliberate Speed. At Harvard, given Ogletree’s standing, none dared call this plagiarism.

  At the Massachusetts School of Law, however, Dean Lawrence Velvel called it exactly what it was, and he did so publicly. Tribe, something of an academic showboat, moved swiftly to defend Ogletree. Although conceding that plagiarism by the prominent had become “a phenomenon of some significance,” Tribe questioned the “decency” of those like Velvel who would go public on issues “about which your knowledge is necessarily limited.”

  Velvel promptly responded. If decency prevented inquiry, he argued, interested parties would have to “depend for criticisms on those who are closest to the situation, who have the most reason not to discuss it lest they or their institution be harmed, and who are least likely to publicly discuss or criticize.”

  I could understand Velvel’s frustration. In the course of my research into Dreams, I often ran into similarly stupid defenses. Of course, my knowledge was “limited.” How could it not be? I could no more expect a frank admission from the principals involved—the publisher, the editor, the writer(s) of Dreams—than Velvel could from Ogletree or Tribe.

  In a delightful turn of the paddle wheel, Tribe’s showboating caught up with him just a few weeks later. Amazed by the sheer moxie of Tribe’s Ogletree defense, an anonymous tipster dropped the proverbial dime on the Harvard sage. As it happens, passages from Henry J. Abraham’s 1974 book, Justices and Presidents, had somehow found their way into Tribe’s 1985 book, God Save This Honorable Court. The tipster reported Tribe’s heretofore unreported pilfering to conservative scholar Joseph Bottum, who confirmed it and penned a damningly detailed five-thousand-word article for the Weekly Standard.

  Forced to review the twin cases, the Harvard Law School dean, Elena Kagan, and Harvard’s then president, Larry Summers, faced an obvious challenge: Ogletree was a black star on a faculty often criticized for being overly white, and Tribe was the superstar of the judicial left. Had the plagiarizers-in-residence not been such sacred cows, Summers and Kagan would have promptly ground them into hamburger. Instead, the administrators dithered strategically in hope that the scandal would somehow fade away.

  This dithering made sense. Given the progressive pedigree of both Ogletree and Tribe, the media had little interest in pursuing the story, and the Harvard faculty had even less. So Summers and Kagan let months pass before even announcing they had appointed a committee of inquiry. On this chummy panel were past Harvard president (and future interim president) Derek Bok and two other Harvard insiders.

  In April 2005, the committee reported its findings to Summers and Kagan. An actual physical report, if one existed, was never released. Not surprisingly, Ogletree and Tribe were cleared. The transgressions, Summers and Kagan agreed, had surely been the “product of inadvertence.” This being so, they thought it time to “consider the matter closed” and move on.

  That same April, Velvel reentered the fray, posting a nearly ten-tho
usand-word analysis on his blog. Writes Velvel of the administrative response, “it is a travesty. Its language is misleading, its logic miserable, and its spirit corrupt.” What troubled Velvel most was this: Ogletree and Tribe could claim “inadvertence” because both likely had research assistants write chunks of their books for them. Adds Velvel, “Ghostwriting, horribly enough, has become all too prevalent in academia as a general matter.”

  The fact that Ogletree used ghostwriters, says Velvel, was “widely accepted.” The case against Tribe was nearly as strong. The many instances of “copycatting” include a nineteen-word stretch in Tribe’s book identical to a nineteen-word stretch in Abraham’s earlier book. This struck Velvel as “more like what one would expect of a student than of a Tribe.” He points out too that a former Tribe assistant, Ron Klain, had reportedly claimed to have written large sections of Tribe’s God Save This Honorable Court.

  Still, Tribe and Ogletree skated. They may have been taking their cues on stonewalling from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. A Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard Ph.D., Goodwin was serving on the university’s governing board in 2002 when rightly accused of a word theft so felonious she should have had her Ph.D. recalled, not to mention her Pulitzer.

  For her 1987 book, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Goodwin had lifted entire passages without attribution from at least three different sources, most conspicuously Lynne McTaggart’s 1983 book, Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times. Wrote McTaggart, for example:

  Mrs. Gibson gave a tea in her honor to introduce her to some of the other girls—hardly a routine practice for new recruits.

  Wrote Goodwin:

  Mrs. Harvey Gibson gave a tea in her honor to introduce her to some of the other girls—hardly a routine practice for new recruits.

  Goodwin added only the first name “Harvey” and passed the sentence off as her own. She did the same with just the most minimal alterations in scores of other instances as well. When challenged, Goodwin wrote a long-winded and utterly disingenuous apologia in Time unintentionally summarized by her phrase “mistakes can happen.” These “mistakes” netted McTaggart, in her words, “a substantial monetary settlement.”

  If caught making the same or even lesser “mistakes,” a Harvard student would have had to withdraw from school immediately, stay away from campus for at least two additional semesters, and work satisfactorily at a full-time job for six months before being readmitted. Even if allowed back on campus, the student would have an “academic dishonesty” mark permanently branded on his record.

  When the student editors of the Harvard Crimson went after Goodwin, Tribe dependably went after the editors. He scolded them for their “lack of any real sense of proportion or, for that matter, much sense of decency.” If his prose was awkward, Tribe’s instincts were sound. No liberal has used the “decency” gambit so nimbly since Joseph Welch in the Army-McCarthy hearings.

  With support from Tribe and other literati, Goodwin wormed her way out of what should have been a career-killer. Through a combination of dissembling, denial, discreet payoffs to the plagiarized author, and strategic Bush-bashing, she was able to slither back onto network TV and the bestseller lists. So deft was the colonic mix that by 2008 Obama could cite “a wonderful book written by Doris Kearns Goodwin” without the slightest sense of taint.

  “That Harvard is setting a very bad example, with all too much of the bad stuff centered in its law school, is all too evident,” writes Velvel. One unfortunate consequence of this phenomenon was that the young were watching and learning from the masters. Here is how Velvel imagines their thought process might go:

  On balance, it is well worth it, for on the one side lies fame and fortune, and on the other lies only a slap on the wrist. And, especially if I can hide my misdeeds for years (as seems usually to occur), and in the meanwhile have become a big deal, I am virtually assured of suffering nothing other than a minor slap on the wrist if and when I am finally caught.

  One has to wonder whether Obama, when pressed to complete his book, took his cue from his esteemed Harvard mentors. Did one or the other whisper in his ear, “Have someone else write it, we do this all the time”? If so, his appointment of Kagan to the Supreme Court made sense. Her history of whitewashing the sins of the powerful would not have troubled him as it did Velvel, who wanted her fired for helping turn Harvard into a joke:

  Since it is now known that Harvard professors have plagiarized, copycatted, and pretty certainly have had stuff ghostwritten for them, the bona fides and reputations of nearly everyone at Harvard is called into question, especially people in the law school.

  In the years to come, of course, Harvard Law would have no more prominent exemplar of its literary legacy than President Barack Obama.

  GREEN PEPPERS

  In an ascent shrouded by mystery, no element of that ascent has remained more mysterious than Obama’s love life, a love life that has defied even the best of his biographers. In his six-hundred-plus-page biography, David Remnick lays down the baseline of what the mainstream media know about the president—or at least what they want us to know. Where Remnick falls oddly silent—not even to hector the blogosphere—is on the question of Obama’s amours.

  In his all-consuming search for identity, Obama’s romances should surely have been at the heart of the narrative. Whether he dated white women or black women—and what he might have learned from either—matters. Yet Obama gives the reader very close to nothing. “Cosby never got the girl on I Spy,” he laments in Dreams, but in his own retelling, he does not do much better.

  Obama spent thirteen not-so-swinging single years on the mainland before he married Michelle in 1992, and ten of those years were before he even met her. Remnick creates a credible picture of him during this stretch as a popular, good-looking man about town. Obama’s Chicago mentor Jerry Kellerman tells Remnick that Obama dated various women and “was more than capable of taking care of himself.” Another Chicago friend, John Owens, claims, “Barack tends to make a strong impression on women.” And Remnick refers specifically to an “old girlfriend” that Obama rather coolly abandoned upon leaving Chicago for Harvard in 1988. Confirms Mendell, likely Remnick’s source, “He had a serious girlfriend (and a pet cat), but all three parted amicably when he went to Harvard.”

  And yet, unless I missed something, despite scores of interviews with Obama acquaintances, never do we actually hear from a woman who dated Barack Obama, either in Remnick’s book or Mendell’s. Indeed, we learn no more about Obama’s Chicago sweetie than we do the cat. The same vacuum is apparent in Christopher Andersen’s book. Andersen quotes Obama’s New York roommate, Sohale Siddiqi, on the subject of Obama’s allure—“I couldn’t outcompete him in picking up girls, that’s for sure”—but we do not hear from any of the girls he might have picked up or dated. None of them has so much as a name.

  In Dreams, Obama creates a similarly virile image of himself. At one point, when his half sister Auma visits him in Chicago pre-Michelle, he tells her about a ruptured relationship with a white woman back in New York. He adds, with more than a little calculation, “There are several black ladies out there who’ve broken my heart just as good,” but we do not read as much as a single sentence about any of these ladies. The astute reader wonders whether they exist.

  In Dreams, in fact, the only lover Obama talks about is the mystery woman in New York. Although he speaks of her briefly and in retrospect, he does so vividly and lovingly. “She was white,” he tells Auma. “She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes.” This is no casual relationship. “We saw each other for almost a year. On the weekends, mostly. Sometimes in her apartment, sometimes in mine. You know how you can fall into your own private world? Just two people, hidden and warm. Your own language. Your own customs. That’s how it was.”

  This nameless young woman had grown up on a sprawling estate in the country. It was during a visit to the country home that Obama began to see the distance between “our two worlds.” That distance widene
d irreparably back in New York when the woman questioned the response of a black audience to a play by an angry black playwright. This led to a “big fight, right in front of the theater,” one that undid the relationship. “I pushed her away,” Obama tells Auma ruefully.

  An interracial romance should have been grist for an aspiring writer’s mill, especially a writer as obsessed with racial identity as Obama. Frank Marshall Davis lovingly details his romances in his memoir. So too does Bill Ayers in his. That Obama dedicates only a few paragraphs to this one romance—and these in a flashback—raises questions about its authenticity, not to mention Obama’s forthrightness. In real time, Obama hints at only one other liaison, this one in Chicago. When awakened by a loud stereo, Obama protests but only because “on this particular evening I have someone staying over.” That’s it, “someone.”

  I am not the only one to have noticed this. One correspondent of mine thinks that Obama modeled his inamorata on Kay Adams, Michael Corleone’s wife in The Godfather. Nebraskan Ryan Geiser makes a much more convincing case for a more proximate source, Diana Oughton. Ayers was obsessed with Oughton, who died in 1970 in a Greenwich Village bomb factory blast. In Fugitive Days, he fixes on her in ways that had to discomfit the Weatherwoman he eventually settled for.