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

by Jack Cashill

  At the time, the speech proved to be something of a hit. MSNBC’s cheaply thrilled Chris Matthews would describe it as “one of the great speeches in American history” and the New York Times’ feckless Frank Rich would call it “the most remarkable utterance on the subject by a public figure in modern memory.” Indeed, so effusive was the gushing that several of the more prominent gushes were collected into a book called The Speech.

  For a speech to be anything like “great,” however, the speaker should at least mean what he says. As soon became clear, Obama did not. A few weeks afterward, Wright went public once again. Holding forth at the National Press Club, he pulled out a few paranoid goodies from his oldies collection, including the one that the United States invented the HIV virus to kill off the black population and another that U.S. terrorism inspired September 11. Wright might have gotten away with these claims—the Associated Press called them “colorful”—had he not also challenged Obama’s authenticity.

  “If Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected,” Wright said of the Philadelphia speech. “Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.” In revenge mode, Wright had knowingly stuck his knife under the heel plate of Obama’s moderate façade and twisted.

  Long before The Speech reached the bookstores, Obama had already invalidated its central premise. In other words, Wright could be disowned and unceremoniously was. The announcement of the same was swift and public. Obama called Wright’s latest remarks so inexcusably “divisive and destructive” that he had to denounce the man this time—not just his comments—and resign from his church.

  Not since Molotov-Ribbentrop have so many progressives casually ignored so major a flip-flop. Most of the media bought in as well. Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist for the Washington Post, was one of the few to see Obama’s series of equivalences for “the cheap rhetorical tricks they always were.” Added Krauthammer, “Obama has now decided that the man he simply could not banish because he had become part of Obama himself is, mirabile dictu, surgically excised.”

  Obama had been listening to Wright’s comments for the last twenty years. What really bugged Obama about the good reverend’s press club bitch-slap was Wright’s failure to accommodate himself to “The Plan.” Obama just about said as much. “And what I think particularly angered me,” Obama fumed at an impromptu press briefing, “was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were [sic] somehow political posturing.” On his own, Obama still had problems with noun-verb agreement, let alone the truth.

  Wright’s street-sharpened senses told him who inevitably had to be behind “The Plan,” a revelation he shared with a reporter from the Daily-Press of Newport News, Virginia, in June 2009. “Them Jews ain’t going to let [Obama] talk to me,” Wright confided. Obama was duly shocked, as he had never once heard Wright “talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms”—or so he had assured us in Philadelphia.

  Obama treated Bill Ayers very nearly as shabbily as he had the Reverend Wright. After denouncing Ayers’s past in the ABC debate, Obama responded to pressure from McCain and Palin by recalibrating his denunciation. “When Ayers committed crimes in the sixties, Obama was eight years old,” said one radio ad. “Obama condemned those despicable acts. Ayers has had no role in Obama’s campaign, and will have no role in his administration.” What was once “detestable” had been upgraded to “despicable.” Obama, however, remained permanently eight years old even though he was of voting age when Ayers walked away—“Guilty as hell. Free as a bird”—from his increasingly irrelevant 1970s career as underground warrior.

  One did not have to be a weatherman to sense that Ayers would quickly blow cold on the Obama presidency. A lifelong radical, he had little patience with the progressives’ “long march”—a phrase Obama actually used in the Philadelphia speech—even if he and they were marching in the same direction. Still, the speed and the severity of Ayers’s criticism, let alone the medium for doing so, shocked even veteran Ayers watchers.

  In late February 2009, less than five weeks into the Obama era, Ayers blasted Obama’s decision to send additional troops to Afghanistan. “We’ve seen this happen before,” Ayers told Sean Hannity’s guest host Alan Colmes on Hannity, a show held in deep contempt even among the shallow left. “We’ve seen a hopeful presidency, Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, burn up in the furnace of war.”

  Ayers referred to Obama’s Afghanistan decision as a “colossal mistake.” He uses the word colossal when something truly irks him. Consider the following unsubtle passage from Fugitive Days: “The Pentagon was ground zero for war and conquest, organizing headquarters of a gang of murdering thieves, a colossal stain on the planet, a hated symbol everywhere around the world.”

  Ayers has so much emotional equity invested in hating America that nothing Obama could have done short of letting Hugo Chávez set defense policy and Perez Hilton design new army uniforms would have appeased him. Ayers’s pique would not matter much were he really just a “guy who lives in my neighborhood” long since outgrown. As Obama understands, Ayers is much more than that. He is the potential extortionist in the neighborhood. Ayers served Obama a reminder of the same shortly after Christopher Andersen’s book Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage was published in September 2009.

  To repeat, it was not as if Andersen confirmed Ayers’s role in Dreams in passing. He spends six pages on this revelation. It is not as if Andersen had a bone to pick with the president. He seems to love the guy. It is not as if Andersen has a reputation for reckless journalism. Just the opposite. He is a pro with a proven track record. Bizarrely, his book proved a bigger story in Zaire, whose major media covered it fairly, than in New York or Washington.

  Thanks to the work of intrepid journalist Hanspeter Born, one other country where the story got traction was Switzerland. Fluent in English, Born serves as chief foreign correspondent for the influential Zurich-based weekly Die Weltwoche and has covered the last eight American presidential elections. In the 2008 cycle he was one of Obama’s early admirers, and even before the Iowa voters caucused in early January, Born was predicting an Obama victory in November. “Watching him in Iowa,” he tells me, “I was very impressed and thought he was a new kind of politician who could put an end to the deep cultural divisions in America.”

  That Obama wrote his own books impressed Born all the more. When, however, journalists contacted people who had known the young Obama, and their memories contradicted his, Born became suspicious. Having actually investigated the Swiftboaters’ accusations and found them to be true, he wondered whether Obama might just be another dissembler like John Kerry. The more he saw of Obama the more disillusioned Born became. “I came to think of him as narcissistic, intellectually arrogant, thin-skinned and in the thrall of post-1960s left wing illusions,” he says.

  Born has been interested in questions of attribution ever since he did his Ph.D. dissertation on Shakespeare’s involvement in an anonymous Elizabethan play. An informed observer, he became convinced that Ayers was “the main author of the book” and weighed in with a four-thousand-word article on the same for Weltwoche. What amazed him about the American media—“Remnick is typical”—was that not one journalist other than Andersen bothered to investigate an attribution issue of this magnitude. “Why don’t people want to know the truth?” asks Born. “Surely, it does not take rocket science to establish the facts.”

  Closer to home, truth still mattered to bloggers like Chicagoan Anne Leary, a Harvard grad and the chief cook and bottle washer at BackyardConservative.com. In early October 2009, Leary was heading back to the Midwest when she ran into Ayers in the Starbucks at Reagan National Airport. (What is it with Obama collaborators and Starbucks?) To prove the encounter, Leary shot a picture of Ayers on her BlackBerry and posted it. “An instant blight,” she would write. “Scruffy, thinning beard, dippy earring, and the wire rims.”

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bsp; “What are you doing in D.C., Mr. Ayers?” she asked respectfully. Ayers told her he was giving a lecture in Arlington to a Renaissance group on education. The theme, by the way, was “A Time for Reflection, Celebration and Rebirth.” Writes Leary, “How touching. At best, useless, at worst, so wrong.” U.S. secretary of education Arne Duncan was also in attendance. Trying to assess her sympathies, Ayers continued, “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear about me. You know nothing about me.”

  “I know plenty,” said the admirably brazen Leary. “I’m from Chicago, a conservative blogger, and I’ll post this.” At this point, the encounter turned weird. Out of the blue, Ayers said to Leary, “I wrote Dreams From My Father.”

  “Oh,” Leary replied. “So you admit it.”

  “Michelle asked me to,” he answered with a straight face. “Stop pulling my leg,” said Leary, then thinking to herself, “What a horrible thought,” the leg pulling, that is.

  “I really wrote it,” he insisted.

  “I believe you probably heavily edited it,” Leary countered, but when he continued to insist that he wrote it, she said, “Why would I believe you? You’re a liar.” At this point, Ayers turned and walked off, suggesting as he did that she prove he wrote Dreams so he could split the proceeds with the Obamas.

  That same weekend Ayers had played a similar game with reporter Will Englund from the National Journal. “Here’s what I’m going to say,” said the mischievous Ayers when asked about the authorship issue. “This is my quote. Be sure to write it down: ‘Yes, I wrote Dreams From My Father. I ghostwrote the whole thing. I met with the president three or four times, and then I wrote the entire book. And now I would like the royalties.’”

  “Ayers is messing with conservatives,” wrote faux conservative David Weigel, then writing for the Washington Independent before his self-immolation at the Washington Post. This was the standard bromide with which the media eased their initially uneasy stomachs. But before her encounter with Ayers, Leary, like most conservatives, had paid little attention to the authorship of Dreams. Even after Andersen’s book was published, most respectable conservatives shied away from the issue, and those like myself who pursued it weren’t worth messing with.

  The fact that Ayers had volunteered all this information surprised Leary. There was obviously irony in the air, but I suspect a double level of irony on Ayers’s part: he says what is true as a way of throwing doubt on what is, in fact, true. I talked to Leary, however, and she was not at all convinced that Ayers was being ironic at all. If his intended audience was the White House, he may not have been.

  NOBEL LAUREATE

  The very same week that Ayers was protesting Obama’s “insane” warmongering in Chicago, Obama was giving his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo. Given that Obama had been in office less than two weeks when the nominations closed, the Nobel selectors would seem to have been inspired more by Obama’s oratory on the stump than by any actions taken in those first ten days on the job.

  “Clearly, the award was an aspirational award,” said Bill Ayers knowingly. “They were making a comment on the war-like presidency of George Bush, wishing Obama would repudiate that and declare himself a peace president.”

  This was not the first time the Nobel Committee had chosen its winner to embarrass the United States. Nor was Obama the Peace Prize’s most absurd recipient. Hell, Al Gore had won just two years earlier for his global warming gimcrackery, but even Gore was not the most fraudulent of winners. That honor falls to one Rigoberta Menchú.

  When the Nobel Peace Prize committee met to award its 1992 prize, the choices were many and good. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the fall of the Berlin Wall two years before, committee members might have chosen any of the architects of that empire’s demise—Ronald Reagan, for instance, or Margaret Thatcher or Pope John Paul II or Solidarity or the Soviet dissidents. But no, this being 1992, the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas, the committee took the opportunity to rub its thumb in America’s eye by awarding the prize to the aforementioned Menchú, a Guatemalan indigena.

  Her autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, earned her the prize. It had sold well, and to many of the same easily deceived people who would soon buy Dreams. The Chronicle of Higher Education accurately described the book “as a cornerstone of the multicultural canon.”

  That cornerstone was about to crumble. A few years before the award was given, a young Stanford scholar named David Stoll was researching the anthropology of civil war for his Ph.D. dissertation. He had read Menchú’s book and was sympathetic with her people and her cause. It was hard not to be. Menchú describes in heartbreaking detail how the right-wing ruling class stole the land of her father and other native peoples and used the army to suppress dissent in some seriously nasty ways.

  In the book’s most dramatic scene, the army hauls more than a score of dissidents to the square of the little Maya town of Chajul, among them Rigoberta’s teenage brother. The soldiers then did what right-wingers are wont to do when feeling their repressive oats: they poured gasoline on the prisoners, set them ablaze one by one, and celebrated while the dissidents toasted. One more thing—they forced the family members to watch. “I just wanted to do something,” remembers Rigoberta, “even kill a soldier.”

  After much heroic resistance, Rigoberta fled the country. In 1982, while in Paris, she told her story to feminist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Elisabeth borrowed the “Debray” monicker from her ex-husband, the famed international gadabout and Che Guevara pal Régis Debray, the Bill Ayers of France. Do we see something of a pattern here?

  In 1989, Stoll found himself in the infamous town of Chajul. When he asked an elderly gent about the public burning, the man answered, “The army burned prisoners alive? Not here.” When Stoll expressed disbelief, the man insisted that the burning of a whole parcel of people in the town square is something he would likely have remembered. No one else in town could recall the incident either. This was the first of many major discrepancies that Stoll discovered.

  Stoll knew he had a problem on his hands. The postmodern, postcolonial era was in full flower. A white male gringo judged an indigena’s “narrative” at his own risk. For the very act of judging, any number of academics stood ready to roast him for cultural imperialism, if not racism. Says Stoll, “We have an unfortunate tendency to idolize native voices that serve our own political and moral needs, as opposed to others that do not.” He was not talking about Dreams, but he might as well have been.

  By creating what Stoll calls “mythologies of purity,” academics could blind themselves to reality often at the expense of the people they were mythologizing. Stoll was convinced that this willful blindness was hurting Guatemala, and in 1993 he published a book to deconstruct the narrative that Rigoberta and Elisabeth had constructed. Other than Rigoberta’s age, just about every other contention in Menchú’s book proved false, often spectacularly so.

  I, Rigoberta Menchú, Stoll argues, “protected revolutionary sympathizers from the knowledge that the revolutionary movement was a bloody failure.” In fact, Stoll believes that the book firmed up international support for the insurgency and helped keep the revolution alive after it had lost most of its internal political support.

  Appealing as it was to feminists, Marxists, multiculturalists, and supporters of indigenous rights—in other words, just about everybody in academia—I, Rigoberta Menchú had become nearly as sacred a text as Dreams. “Rigoberta’s story of oppression is analogous to a preacher reminding listeners that they are sinners,” observes Stoll. “Then her story of joining the left and learning that not all outsiders are evil makes it possible for the audience to be on her side, providing a sense of absolution.” In very similar words, one could describe the salutary effect of Dreams on the liberal reader.

  Stoll’s book and subsequent articles whipped up a firestorm in the academic community. That community’s bible, the Chronicle of Hi
gher Education, interviewed numerous academics across the country and came to a bizarrely predictable conclusion about most professors who taught the book: “They say it doesn’t matter if the facts in the book are wrong, because they believe Ms. Menchu’s story speaks to a greater truth about the oppression of poor people in Central America.”

  Happily for Rigoberta and later for Obama, the Nobel Prize committee cared more about the pravda than the istina. In progressive circles, big truth trumps little facts when the outcome matters. Rigoberta got to keep her award. “All autobiographies embellish to a greater or lesser extent,” Geir Lundestad, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, told the New York Times. In Oslo, the president was among friends.

  Unfortunately, the Norwegians were subverting Team Obama’s “Color Purple” strategy with a gesture so leftist and phony that even Obama-friendly comedians felt compelled to mock it. Said Bill Maher with some accuracy, “The Nobel committee said he won for creating a new climate for international politics, which sounds so much nicer than ‘In your face, George Bush, you cowboy asshole.’”

  Jibed Erick Erickson, “Obama is becoming Jimmy Carter faster than Jimmy Carter became Jimmy Carter.” Erickson’s joke reflected a certain reality. Obama had not been in office three months when he told an eager audience in Strasbourg, France, that America has “shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive” toward its allies. Said Britain’s Telegraph approvingly, “His speech in Strasbourg went further than any United States president in history in criticising his own country’s actions while standing on foreign soil.” It was with speeches like these that Obama had won over the Nobel Committee.

  It was for speeches like those that Jimmy Carter had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Axelrod and company did not like the comparison. As they knew well, in a center-right America the Carter brand did not have sufficient shelf appeal to earn a second term. So Obama went to Oslo and delivered a speech that George Bush’s speechwriters could have written. “The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms,” he trumpeted. The Norwegians likely did not understand English well enough to know that they too had become part of “The Plan.”