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

by Jack Cashill

  GOING ROGUE

  In the fall of 2009, Sarah Palin’s memoir, Going Rogue, hit the bookstores and bestseller lists simultaneously. Unlike Barack Obama, who did not even have an acknowledgments section in Dreams, Palin gave credit where it was due. Specifically, she thanked writer Lynn Vincent for “her indispensable help in getting the words on paper.” And yet the story is told honestly and sincerely in Palin’s voice. There is no artifice, no postmodern mumbo jumbo, and not a sentence in the book Palin could not have written herself. My personal favorite: “I love meat.” I suspect that, unaided, journalism major and former reporter Palin is the better writer than Obama.

  Hardball host Chris Matthews thought otherwise. He had shown the silly depths of this animus when he had earlier learned of Palin’s book deal. “Sarah Palin—now don’t laugh—is writing a book,” sniffed Matthews. “Not just reading a book, writing a book.” Unspoken, of course, was the assumption that Obama wrote his own books. “Actually in the words of the publisher she’s ‘collaborating’ on a book,” Matthews continued. “What an embarrassment! It’s one of these ‘I told you’ books that jocks do.”

  If the media were no more likely to fact-check Dreams or Audacity of Hope than they were the Koran, they swarmed all over Going Rogue. The Associated Press alone dispatched eleven reporters to review Palin’s book. Others did not need to fact-check or even read the book. They knew all they needed to know in advance.

  In the week of Going Rogue’s release, the New York Times house conservative David Brooks would call Palin “a joke.” Dick Cavett, the Norma Desmond of TV talk, would dismiss her as a “know-nothing.” Ex-con Dem fund-raiser Martha Stewart would brand Palin “a dangerous person.” And thousands of lesser liberal lights would deride her as “stupid,” an “idiot,” or a “moron” (8.5 million Google hits for “Palin moron”).

  How the literary/media establishment responded to the respective memoirs of these two political figures revealed far less about the authenticity, honesty, and quality of the tales the authors tell than it did about the collective mind-set of that establishment.

  From a classical perspective, Palin’s is the more compelling narrative. The obstacles that she must overcome to fulfill her destiny are many, varied, and real. Raised in the frozen outback by a schoolteacher father and a school secretary mom, Palin accomplishes nothing without a good deal of work, often under difficult physical circumstances.

  Palin takes a semester or two off to pay for college. She works at a diner over the summer. She enters the Miss Alaska contest to help pay tuition and is awarded second runner-up and “Miss Congeniality.” She interns in other summers to become a sports reporter. After college, Palin joins fiancé Todd on his Bristol Bay salmon boat. During slow salmon runs, she works “messy, obscure seafood jobs” until she can find a job as a sports reporter, and even then she keeps returning to Bristol Bay when the salmon are in season.

  Back in Hawaii, Obama spends grades five through twelve at Hawaii’s poshest prep school. Like Palin, he too plays basketball, but while she is leading her school to the state championship, he is a second-stringer on a team whose wins and losses go unremarked, even though it too wins a state championship. The only scores Obama shares, in fact, are the imagined racial ones that need to be settled.

  Obama admits to “marginal report cards” in prep school, but the diversity bean-counters keep his dreams alive. After two druggy, uninspired years at Occidental College, Obama transfers to the Ivy League, Columbia to be precise, for some drug-free mediocrity. In Dreams, Obama dedicates one half of a sentence to a summer job on a construction site. Otherwise he is silent on work and how his tuition might have been paid. As to his grades and SAT scores, it would be easier to pry North Korea’s nuclear secrets out of Kim Jong Il.

  After several years as a low-paid community organizer in Chicago, Obama decides to return to law school. Despite a lack of resources and a lackluster performance at Columbia—he does not graduate with honors—Obama heads off for Harvard. He had absorbed the diversity zeitgeist deeply enough to see success as an entitlement.

  In the spring of 1989, during Obama’s first year at Harvard Law, Palin’s “life truly began” with the birth of her oldest son, Track. That summer, with Todd working a blue-collar job on the North Slope oil fields, Palin, her father, and their Eskimo partner work Todd’s commercial fishing boat in Bristol Bay. Palin’s mother meanwhile babysits the ten-week-old Track.

  In 1992, while an anxious Obama dithers in an office that the University of Chicago had given him to write Dreams, half of his $125,000-plus advance already cashed, Palin is pulling her babies, Track and Bristol, along on a sled as she goes door to door seeking votes in her run for Wasilla City Council.

  Not surprisingly, Palin’s tenacity makes her enemies among those who had cashed in their Republican heritage for the perks and power of office. Her perseverance in the face of this resistance makes for compelling political drama. That she is a woman challenging the good old boys of backroom Alaska heightens the tension. Yet despite pushing the boundaries of female accomplishment throughout her career—as sports reporter, as commercial fisherman, as councilwoman, as mayor, as oil and gas commissioner, as governor, as vice presidential candidate—Palin never loses her sense of the feminine.

  Having five children surely helps. So does living in an environment where manly virtues still matter. An exchange with the larger-than-life Todd helps clarify Alaskan reality. Todd is a four-time winner of the Iron Dog competition, a 2,200-mile snowmobiling marathon. One night, Sarah expresses interest in competing. Says Todd:

  “Can you get the back end of a six-hundred-pound machine unstuck by yourself with open water up to your thighs, then change out an engine at forty below in the pitch black on a frozen river and replace thrashed shocks and jury rig a suspension using tree limbs along the trail?”

  When Sarah answers “Nope,” Todd replies, “Then go back to sleep, Sarah.” Todd lives his Eskimo heritage. He does not just dream about it, let alone exploit it.

  While Palin is slugging through Alaska’s political morass like a determined Iditarod musher, Obama is cruising through Illinois politics on skids greased by his Chicago cronies. The combination of his black genes and white demeanor makes the famously “articulate and bright and clean” Obama an irresistible choice to keynote the race-conscious 2004 Democratic convention. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man,” adds the inimitable Joe Biden.

  Now if only the story Obama told had been true.

  GRAMPS

  Kansas City keeps a person grounded. Those inclined to take themselves too seriously here do so at their own risk because no one else will. Unlike, say, California, where the rich and famous can buy themselves boats and views and Lakers tickets and even better weather—L.A. suburb Malibu is twenty-five degrees cooler in July than L.A. suburb Riverside—the rich and (slightly) famous here can buy only bigger houses, but many of them are discreet enough not to.

  Every lunch hour when the weather is tolerable, I sit out on the open portico of a small eatery and watch the world go by. Inevitably some of the world stops by: Dave, the UPS guy, who talks politics and investment strategy well enough to have his own show on CNBC; Paul, the banker, who details the havoc Washington is wreaking on his industry; Hank and Jerry, the cops, who confide in me, the son of a cop, how political correctness is killing the people it is supposed to protect; Floyd, the barber—no, just kidding. Yet a hint of Mayberry lingers in Kansas City. People here are saner, more centered, and better informed than the Alters and Remnicks of the world could begin to comprehend.

  Fittingly, it was on this same portico on a lovely day in May 2010 that Don Wilkie and I applied Occam’s razor to the sphinx that is Barack Obama. For those who find comfort in credentials, fifty-something Wilkie will disappoint. His are admittedly no better than Ryan Geiser’s or Mr. Southwest’s. He runs a small business in Michigan that bears his name and has as its motto the bluntly functional “Your ‘ONE STOP’ cost saving Conv
eyor Chain supplier.” He prepared for the conveyor chain business by earning a B.A. in sociology from Bill Ayers’s alma mater, the University of Michigan.

  The fact is I had lost interest in credentials a long time ago. In charge of hiring copywriters at the ad agency where I worked in the 1980s, I quickly discovered that portfolios told me little about a person’s talent, and résumés told me nothing at all. Unlike a law school, however, we could not afford a bad hire. So I took to testing: one hour, one marketing problem, solve it in an ad. “I don’t work well under pressure,” one woman told me, expecting a break. “Sorry, hon, but you’re in the wrong business.” A fellow shared with me in advance that he was good but slow. Said I, “In this business, Mac, if you’re not fast, you’re not good.” Copywriting is harder than it looks. Over time, I interviewed a lot of people.

  “Don is a detective at heart,” Wilkie’s obliging lady friend told me over lunch in Kansas City. They had come to Kansas City for no greater purpose than to meet with me and to attend a Rusty Humphies show, which they had done the night before. In addition to being a syndicated radio host, Humphries is a talented performer and satirist. Oregon-based, he just happened to be doing a gig in Kansas City. Thanks to Rich Davis, a former producer for Humphries and one of my most stalwart supporters, I had become a semiregular guest on Rusty’s show. As with Mr. Southwest, this is where Wilkie first heard me—a couple of rogue asteroids hooking up in the far reaches of the “lunatic orbit.”

  As a way of making sense out of a given mystery, I have found 14th century philosopher William of Occam to be a useful guide. We know his approach to problem solving by the label “Occam’s razor,” an axiom often stated in shorthand as, “The simplest explanation is usually the best.” The original Latin—“Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate”—adds some nuance. This translates roughly, “One ought not posit multiple variables unnecessarily.”

  In implicating Ayers in the writing of Dreams, I do not need to force a single variable. Ayers had the talent, the motive, and the proximity. He and Obama shared a worldview. He read the same books as Obama and many more. He knew black culture as well as any outsider to the culture could, better certainly than Obama. He had worked as a community organizer. He has written authoritatively about the postmodern style that runs through Dreams. He knows his nautical metaphors from his days at sea. He had even visited Hawaii the year before Dreams was written. Other than the fact that his name is not on the book, no variable disqualifies Ayers or forces the observer to doubt his involvement.

  To credit Dreams to Obama alone, one has to posit any number of nearly miraculous variables: he somehow found the time; he somewhere mastered nautical jargon and postmodern jabberwocky; he in some sudden, inexplicable way developed the technique and the talent to transform himself from stumbling amateur to literary superstar without any stops in between. To credit Audacity to Obama alone, one has to posit at least two additional variables: one is his adoption of a modified and less competent style, and the second is his ability to write such a book given the punishing schedule of a freshman senator.

  Wilkie and I were applying Occam to a distinct but related mystery—Obama’s origins. To this point, I had steered clear of the “birther” business. The fever swamps surrounding Obama’s citizenship were swallowing reputations whole, and so I stuck to literary analysis. Still, Team Obama’s squirrelly response to just about any inquiry regarding records—birth, grades, test scores, theses, parents’ marriage, passport, mother’s passport applications, adoption by Soetoro, status in Indonesia—raised the eyebrows of anyone who was looking.

  David Mendell came to this understanding as early as 2004. While covering the Illinois Senate race for the Chicago Tribune, he approached the Obama camp about interviewing friends and family in Hawaii. To his surprise, he sensed an initial hesitance. Given that his was the state’s largest newspaper, and it had endorsed Obama even in his ill-fated campaign for Congress, Mendell writes, “Turning down the Tribune’s request for family interviews would not seem a wise decision at this point in the Senate campaign.” Mendell’s next sentence demands attention: “However, Obama’s aides must have been wary about what I would turn up.”

  Obama agreed to assist Mendell on the condition that an attendant, a deputy press aide named Nora Moreno Cargie, accompany him to track his reporting and “monitor the content of my interviews.” The interview that seems to have made everyone most anxious was the one with Obama’s maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham. Mendell spoke to “Toot” in the living room of her spare tenth-floor Honolulu apartment, the one in which Obama was raised. Eighty-two at the time of the interview, Dunham struck Mendell as “cautious and protective.” She called the interview off after half an hour, grabbed Mendell’s arm, and told him, “Be kind to my grandson.”

  When Toby Harnden of the British Telegraph visited Hawaii early in the 2008 campaign, he too ran into a wall of resistance. One of Obama’s closest friends declined his request for an interview, telling Harnden, “He and others had been instructed to stop talking to the press.”

  Wilkie too had misgivings about the Gardol Shield around the Obama legend. In his first email to me a few months earlier, he told me he had a “different theory” as to why this was so, but he cautioned me, “My theory is really off the wall.” That caution struck me as encouraging. Too many people whose theories really are off-the-wall don’t know it. Wilkie pitched his idea as a literary project. “I remembered you talking about Obama’s poetry,” he continued. “I have read ‘Pop’ now maybe 20 or 30 times, and I think it is about Obama telling us that ‘Pop’ really is, his pop.” That was all the pretext I needed to jump into the swamp.

  From the beginning I had been aware of Obama’s poetry. As a nineteen-year-old sophomore, Obama had two poems— “Underground” and “Pop”—published under his name in the spring 1981 edition of Occidental College’s literary magazine, Feast. If Obama wrote any other poems, they have not emerged. Occidental student writer Kevin Batton first exhumed the poems in an article titled “Ode to Obama” in the March 2007 edition of the Occidental Weekly. In the first sentence of the article, the prescient Batton observes, “The remarkable details of Barack Obama’s heritage and biography are coming to be some of the most important aspects of his campaign.” As Batton understood, much depended on those details. If they proved less remarkable than advertised, the Obama brand would have suffered, perhaps fatally. Given the brand’s illusory nature, this was one “Pop” that Team Obama had hoped would remain absentee.

  Like Obama’s early prose, “Underground” suggests no particular promise. Other than being goofy and easy to make fun of, however, it presented no immediate problems, either. Republishing this poem may have been the cruelest swipe an otherwise friendly media took at Obama during the campaign.

  UNDERGROUND

  Under water grottos, caverns

  Filled with apes

  That eat figs.

  Stepping on the figs

  That the apes

  Eat, they crunch.

  The apes howl, bare

  Their fangs, dance,

  Tumble in the

  Rushing water;

  Musty, wet pelts

  Glistening in the blue.

  “What ‘Underground’ certainly shows,” writes Batton hopefully, “is Obama’s eye for detail and ear for rhythm, which anticipate his later writing style.” Another friendly critic has described the poem as a “vivid if obscurely symbolic description of a tribe of submarine primates.” Although “Underground” is arguably the best poem ever written about submarine primates, most of Obama’s literary acolytes have largely—and charitably—chosen not to notice it. The surprisingly mature and sophisticated poem “Pop” has drawn considerably more attention.

  POP

  Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken

  In, sprinkled with ashes,

  Pop switches channels, takes another

  Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks

  W
hat to do with me, a green young man

  Who fails to consider the

  Flim and flam of the world, since

  Things have been easy for me;

  I stare hard at his face, a stare

  That deflects off his brow;

  I’m sure he’s unaware of his

  Dark, watery eyes, that

  Glance in different directions,

  And his slow, unwelcome twitches,

  Fail to pass.

  I listen, nod,

  Listen, open, till I cling to his pale,

  Beige T-shirt, yelling,

  Yelling in his ears, that hang

  With heavy lobes, but he’s still telling

  His joke, so I ask why

  He’s so unhappy, to which he replies …

  But I don’t care anymore, cause

  He took too damn long, and from

  Under my seat, I pull out the

  Mirror I’ve been saving; I’m laughing,