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

by Jack Cashill

In a more telling encounter, the Davis persona hooks up with a college student named “Gloria.” He places the meeting in Chicago in the 1940s, but dates, places, and names are routinely changed to protect identities. Gloria is described as a short, shapely, sad-eyed, dark-haired girl who “felt herself responsible, because of her white skin, for the evils of color hate and wanted to atone to Negro males individually.” To appease her guilt, Gloria presents her rump to the narrator and demands to be spanked. I cite this last detail because Davis admits to being something of a “derriere” man and two of the three alleged Dunham photos are fully derriere-centric, and the third is nearly so.

  When it comes time for actual sex, Gloria insists that the Davis persona not wear a condom. “What if you become pregnant?” he asks. “That’s what I’d hoped for,” she says. “I’d like nothing more than a baby by a colored man.” When Gloria expresses indifference to her parents’ likely rejection, the man asks how she would live. “Oh I’d find a way,” she answers. In both the memoir and Sex Rebel, by the way, the author boasts that the only women he has ever impregnated were white. In the memoir, he claims three such scores.

  In Dreams, Obama shows his mother from a different angle—thankfully—but with a passion not unlike Gloria’s. In this particular vignette during Obama’s Columbia years, Ann is visiting New York when she insists on dragging her son to a revival of Black Orpheus. Writer/director Marcel Camus based this film on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and sets it in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro during Carnival.

  Ann claims to have seen the film as a sixteen-year-old during the summer she allegedly served as an au pair in Chicago. This is one of the rare instances in the book where the dates actually work. Black Orpheus was originally released in 1959. Watching her watch the movie, Obama gets a glimpse into the “unreflective heart of her youth.” What he sees is “a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different.”

  One can only guess whether Dunham introduced his daughter to Davis in 1960 as he did his grandson some years later. (In Sex Rebel, the Davis persona dwells on a loving three-way encounter with a Seattle couple, Dot and Lloyd.) Ann, a progressive seventeen-year-old with a yen for the dark and exotic, would have been red meat for Davis. He might well have responded to the opportunity as Chicago congressman Mel Reynolds did when offered similarly ripe, career-killing fare: “Did I win the Lotto?”

  The most credible evidence for Davis as Obama’s father is embedded in the title of the poem about him, “Pop.” Passages in the poem would seem to reinforce the case. Like so much contemporary poetry, however, “Pop” is sufficiently obscure in meaning that one does not so much review the poem as decrypt it. All such efforts, of course, are subjective, including the one that follows.

  The young man in the poem appears restive, frustrated with the evasiveness of the older man, who “switches channels,” twitches, glances from side to side, rambles. Finally, the boy wearies of the old joke the man has been telling, holds a mirror up to the man’s face, and demands answers. The old man breaks, “Makes me smell his smell, coming / From me” and then “Stands, shouts, and asks / For a hug.” A very good case could be made that Obama has asked Davis, “Pop,” to acknowledge his paternity, and he has finally done so. At least a few of my correspondents have argued for this interpretation.

  If the title of the poem “Pop” was meant to be literal, if Davis seduced Ann and impregnated her, he would have had every reason to find a proxy father who was black. He was married at the time to a white socialite and had young children. Once again, for all the same reasons, Barack Sr. would have made the perfect “beard.” Davis acknowledged knowing Kenyans at the university and might well have met Barack Sr. at a communist front event, not unlike the ILWU-sponsored “Mother’s Peace Rally” at which the senior Obama spoke in 1962.

  In this scenario, there would have been no need to alter the timeline. An August birth would be entirely appropriate, and Ann would be understandably eager to leave the mess behind. What causes me to question this scenario is my own belief that Davis not only is “Pop,” but that he also wrote “Pop.” My suspicion here is more hunch than science. Still, it is an educated hunch.

  Nowhere else in his unaided oeuvre, such as it is, does Obama show the language control he does in “Pop.” Two years later, in the pages of Columbia’s weekly newsmagazine, Sundial, he would be writing semiliterate clunkers like “The belief that moribund institutions, rather than individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAM’s energies alive.”

  Ian McMillan writes of the nineteen-year-old Obama, “He’s obviously read the Beat poets and writers like Gary Snyder and Charles Bukowski.” Obviously? Obama, an indifferent student and doper at the time, has given us no evidence of an interest in anything besides “neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.”

  More telling, of course, is Obama’s poem “Underground,” which appeared alongside “Pop” in the spring 1981 edition of Occidental College’s literary magazine, Feast. This silly adolescent ode to “apes that eat figs” in underwater grottoes has none of the style or sophistication of “Pop.” In fact, “Underground” sounds as if it were written by another, lesser poet, namely Obama himself. Others have noted the difference. Poet and novelist Warwick Collins, for instance, believes “Pop” to be “by far the more powerful and complex” of the two poems, and his is the consensus opinion.

  Mr. Southwest, who has done yeoman’s work on the Ayers-Obama connection, has long believed Davis to be the subject of “Pop.” His preliminary textual analysis leads him to believe that Davis is the author of “Pop” as well. As he will be the first to admit, however, working with only one poem as base makes comparison with other Davis work tricky, especially since Davis experimented with a range of free verse styles.

  In my own reading, I see “Pop” as a self-reflection by Davis. Distressed to be losing the young Obama to the lure of the mainland, he writes a poem about himself as seen through Obama’s eyes. In the way of support for this theory, consider a poem published by Davis in 1975—six years earlier—called “To a Young Man.”

  I had hoped to show in this space the poem itself, but that was not to be. When I contacted the poem’s publisher, the University of Illinois Press, a representative cheerfully suggested that reprinting the poem would not be a problem.

  A month after my initial request, having heard nothing back, I inquired about the state of my request. For the first time, I was asked my reason for wanting to reprint the poem. Biting my tongue, I responded as follows:

  In Deconstructing Obama, I analyze the influences on Barack Obama’s oeuvre. In the case of the Davis poem, I attempt to show how Davis influenced the poetry of the young Obama, specifically Obama’s poem “Pop,” which is clearly about Davis and not his grandfather as reporters have lazily asserted.

  “I have forwarded your request to the estate of Frank Marshall Davis for approval,” responded the university’s Kathleen Kornell. “If they consent to the reprint I will let you know and mail a letter of permission and invoice for the permission fee.”

  This was the first I had heard of the need for Davis family approval. “With all due respect we initiated this request four and a half weeks ago,” I wrote to Kornell. “I was promised a response within two to four weeks. Now, it seems like we are just beginning the process.” I asked for a prompt up or down as this delay was beginning to threaten the book’s scheduled release.

  The response came promptly. “I have heard from the Frank Marshall Davis estate,” wrote Kornell a few days later, “and unfortunately, they have denied your request to reprint the poem, ‘To a Young Man.’” She offered no reason why.

  The motivations of at least one member of the family, Frank’s son Mark, seem self-evident. As a blogger on Obama’s Organizing for America website, Mark Davis worked to protect Obama from the “smear” originating in “Right-Wing Fantasy Land” t
hat Davis had passed his Stalinist values on to Obama.

  In any number of disingenuous posts during the 2008 campaign, Mark Davis argued that although his father may have been affiliated with the Communist Party, there was no evidence that he was a Stalinist—a neat trick in the Stalin era—or that he instructed Obama in the same.

  Unfortunately, Davis is silent on the issue at hand, namely, whether his father influenced Obama’s poetry, perhaps to the point of writing “Pop” for him. The parallels between that poem and “To A Young Man” are powerful.

  In each of the two poems in question, the old man, the Davis character, is discussed in the third person. In the 1981 poem, the narrator calls him “Pop”; in the 1975 poem, he is called “the old man.” In each poem, when this older character speaks to the young man, he does so without benefit of quotation marks.

  In “To a Young Man,” the Davis character says on one occasion, “Since then I have drunk / Half a hundred liquid years / Distilled / Through restless coils of wisdom.” Note in “Pop” the similar flow of language: “Pop switches channels, takes another / Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks / What to do with me, a green young man.”

  Both poems are written in free verse and make ready use of what is called enjambment, that is, the abrupt continuation of a sentence from one line into the next. There are parallels in word choice as well as in style. “Neat” means without water or ice. “Neat” and “Distilled” both suggest a kind of alcoholic purity. The author emphasizes each of these words by isolating it from the flow of the text.

  In “Pop,” the older man “Stands, shouts, and asks / For a hug, as I shink.” Most reviewers simply dismiss shink as a typo, the right word being shrink. Still, as poet McMillan notes in the Guardian, shink literally means “to be hit in the face with a penis.” I am not making this up.

  In each case, too, the older man shares his wisdom with a “young man” who may not be eager to hear it. The young man of “Pop” dismisses that wisdom as a mere “spot” in his brain, “something / that may be squeezed out, like a / Watermelon seed between / Two fingers.” Comparably, the old man in the Davis poem “walked until / On the slate horizon / He erased himself.” Whether “squeezed out” or “erased” from the young man’s consciousness, the older character understands just how tenuous is his hold on the lad’s soul.

  For all his awareness, however, the older man finds a certain drunken satisfaction in the exchange. Toward the end of “To a Young Man,” the old man “turned / His hammered face / To the pounding stars / Smiled / Like the ring of a gong.” “Pop” also concludes on an upbeat note: “I see my face, framed within / Pop’s black-framed glasses / And know he’s laughing too.”

  There is no way to know whether the “young man” of the 1975 poem is Obama. The reader is told that the younger fellow is twenty years old and that the old man is fifty years older. Davis was precisely seventy in 1975, but Obama was no more than fourteen. This may be just a note of discretion on Davis’s part. Lacking too in the 1975 poem are the intimacy and anxiety that characterize “Pop,” but in 1975 Davis was just getting to know Obama, and he was not worried about losing him.

  Each poem hints at a love that is something other than paternal. A therapist who blogs under the name “Neo Neocon” offers the most insightful reading of the poem that I was able to identify. She too is convinced that “Pop” is Davis and she finds the following sequence disturbing in the extreme:

  Pop takes another shot, neat,

  Points out the same amber

  Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine, and

  Makes me smell his smell, coming

  From me …

  The most innocent explanation for the “amber stain” on the shorts of both mentor and initiate or “his smell, coming / From me” is that Davis got the teenage Obama drunk, and they both spilled whiskey on themselves. That reading does not explain, however, why the spill is specifically on their shorts and not on their shirts or how Davis’s breath now comes from Obama. The therapist senses a darker exchange. She cannot be certain about “outright sexual abuse,” but, she notes, “there is no question that the poem is describing a boundary violation on several levels: this child feels invaded—perhaps even taken over—by this man, and is fighting against that sensation.”

  This would be easier to dismiss were it not for the narrator’s concession in Sex Rebel that “under certain circumstances I am bisexual” as well as “a voyeur and an exhibitionist.” In the introduction to Sex Rebel, an alleged Ph.D. named Dale Gordon goes further. He describes the pseudonymous author, Bob Greene, as having “strong homosexual tendencies in his personality.” He specifies, “When Bob Greene takes another man’s penis in his mouth, he does so to provide pleasure for the man.” There is enough talk in Sex Rebel about the taste and texture of semen to merit the suspicion that the “breath” and “amber stain” references in “Pop” refer to the exchange of something other than whiskey. There may have been a whole lot of “shinking” going on chez Davis after all.

  In Livin’ the Blues, Davis is considerably more discreet. Although he talks at length about his romantic life, he spares the reader the nitty-gritty. He makes an exception to speak of a particular enthusiasm, what he calls on one occasion his “lifelong oral orientation” and on another his “hitherto repressed oral desires,” but he places these in a heterosexual context. He restricts talk of homosexuality to the theoretical. “I am unalterably opposed,” he thunders indignantly, “to any attempt at regimentation of the sex drive into the rigid outlets customarily prescribed by our religious traditions.” At least a decade before anyone else did, Davis argued for a united front between gays and blacks: “Blacks and Homos, Arise!” If it matters, he was also the first guy on his block to get his ear pierced.

  I had been skeptical of the tabloid allegations of bisexuality that have dogged Obama until realizing that Obama imported the only romance that appears in Dreams. Bolstering those allegations is the fact that his most notorious accuser, Larry Sinclair, limits Obama’s role to that of the passive partner in oral sex, a role that could have been ingrained chez “Frank” given Davis’s obsession with pleasing people orally.

  The fierce and frequent public debate about gay-related issues makes Obama’s sexual history relevant. If what Sinclair says is true—and he has written a book about the same, titled, a wee bit sensationally, Barack Obama & Larry Sinclair: Cocaine, Sex, Lies & Murder?—there may be others out there even more exploitive and extortive than Sinclair.

  The media’s discretion would be understandable had they not spent so much energy trying to discern the “real” mother of Trig Palin or to find the apocryphal dealers who sold cocaine to George Bush or marijuana to Dan Quayle. As became embarrassingly clear in their aggressive noncoverage of John Edwards and his love child, the media alter outcomes even of primary races by ignoring the escapades of favored Democrats.

  Remnick, of course, turns a blind eye to Davis’s dark side. In one of those hot flashes that give liberalism a bad name, he describes Dunham’s introduction of his grandson to Davis as “one of the more thoughtful and consequential things Stanley did in his role as surrogate grandfather,” almost as thoughtful perhaps as when Mom introduced her thirteen-year-old to Roman Polanski. Forget about the communist part. Davis was an admitted “sex rebel” with, at the very least, a fictional taste for the underage and the male.

  As compensation for exploiting the young Obama, Davis may well have slipped this “green young man” a poem for publication. Such an everyday scam would not have seemed unethical to an old man used to the “flim and flam” (“Pop”) of a world where “one plus one” does not necessarily make “two or three or four” (“To a Young Man”). Trained to believe that nothing adds up and the deck is stacked against him, Obama has seemed from the beginning entirely comfortable with a counterfeit literary career.

  AX

  Before signing on with Obama for the 2004 U.S. Senate race, David Axelrod met with the man favored to wi
n the Democratic primary, multimillionaire Blair Hull. Known for his aggressive oppositional research, beginning with his own candidate, Axelrod quickly learned of Hull’s Achilles’ heel, a protection order that Hull’s second wife had applied for during a nasty divorce proceeding. Axelrod did not think Hull could survive its disclosure and opted instead to work with underdog Obama.

  About a month before primary election day, the Chicago Tribune, Axelrod’s former employer, broke the news of the protective order. With the Tribune pushing for disclosure, Hull’s ship sunk even more swiftly than Howard Dean’s had after his “I Have a Scream” speech earlier that year in Iowa. Although Axelrod has denied involvement in leaking the story, the Tribune reporter who broke it would later concede that Team Obama had “worked aggressively behind the scenes” to get the story out.

  In April 2007, the New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy feature on Axelrod with the aptly postmodern title “Obama’s Narrator.” Wrote reporter Ben Wallace-Wells, “Axelrod has worked through Obama’s life story again and again, scouring it for usable political material.” By April 2007, Axelrod had surely scoured it for the unusable as well. Knowing the holes in the Obama story, he restricted David Mendell’s movements in Hawaii, discouraged any number of Obama friends from talking to the press, and refused to give even the New York Times leads about Obama’s days in New York.

  When Axelrod combed through the official records—the grades, the SAT and LSAT scores, the college theses, the passport, Obama’s parents’ marriage license, the college applications, the birth certificate—he likely saw more red flags than in his own parents’ May Day parades and so decided to bury them all. The media would not have let a Blair Hull skate by like this, let alone a Sarah Palin, but Axelrod knew the media well enough to know their weakness for bright, clean, articulate, dialect-free black Democrats.