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

by Jack Cashill

  What did Axelrod know? If I can speculate, he knew that Obama’s very paternity resembled the punch line of a racist taunt he had heard as a kid on the mean streets of lower Manhattan: “At least I got a father, not fourteen black suspects.” On the information available, he could not know for sure who the father was.

  The best suspect remained Barack Sr. Yet every time he looked at that picture of a smiling Stanley Dunham waving aloha to his supposed scoundrel of a son-in-law he had to wonder even about that. For sure, the narrative Obama painted in Dreams—not even Ax suspected Ayers’s role—and rolled out for the 2004 keynote was false in almost every detail. Barack Sr.’s coupling with Ann Dunham was no Kumbaya moment. If it symbolized anything, it symbolized third-world eagerness to exploit mindless liberal idealism, and that was not the kind of story line that would get a president elected. Better to leave Obama believing in the Dorothy-and-the-goatherd fable. The campaign would need his sincerity. But how sincere was Obama? In the 1995 introduction to Dreams, he writes, “I learned long ago to distrust my childhood and the stories that shaped it.”

  Try as he might, Axelrod could not scratch Frank Marshall Davis from the paternity sweepstakes. Davis was more than the sum of his parts—communist, pornographer, possible pedophile—but those parts were enough to sink a candidacy, that is, if the media chose to pursue the connection. Axelrod was confident they would not. Davis’s race and obscurity would keep them well at bay. It was the live ones, Ayers and Wright, who had him double dosing on Compoz, but at least they could not be the father. Could they?

  The only person who knew the story behind the story lay on her deathbed as the 2008 campaign wound down. She was a sometime Republican, the ant in a family of grasshoppers, and just a little bit bitter about the same. Could Ax count on her to protect her grandson? Ten days before the 2008 election, Obama abandoned the campaign trail to make sure. He flew to Hawaii to visit Toot one last time. The Washington Post innocently hinted at a secondary motive for the visit: “The trip served to remind not only of Obama’s biracial heritage but also the unusual and even exotic upbringing that shaped his life.” Yes, one more reminder of the improbable love that would teach the world to sing.

  The media, however, could not bring themselves to question any of this, not the story, and certainly not the authorship of the story. In recognizing Obama’s unique genius, they validated their own. They have so much emotional equity staked in this recognition that they would rather believe Obama a failed president than a fraudulent human being or a fake writer. In May 2010, in the midst of the Gulf oil mess, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd plumbed new depths of self-deception:

  In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama showed passion, lyricism, empathy and an exquisite understanding of character and psychological context—all the qualities that he has stubbornly resisted showing as president. It was a book that promised a president who could see into the hearts of other people. But there’s so much you don’t learn about candidates in campaigns, even when they seem completely exposed.

  To those of us west of Times Square, “completely exposed” obviously means something different than it does to the willfully blind Ms. Dowd.

  HUBRIS

  In 1872, amateur archeologist Charles C. Abbot found some ancient Indian tools on his farm in western New Jersey. After consulting a Harvard geologist, he surmised that the remains dated back about ten thousand years. At the time, the official orthodoxy, enforced by a haughty Smithsonian Institute, was that American Indians had moved into North America much more recently. Accordingly, the Smithsonian sent its skeptic in chief, William Henry Holmes, to review the site and put this upstart amateur in his place. Abbott got his revenge by publishing a poem in Science. It reads in part:

  The stones are inspected

  And Holmes cries, “rejected,

  They’re nothing but Indian chips.”

  He glanced at the ground,

  Truth, fancied he found,

  And homeward to Washington skips….

  During the presidential campaign of 2008, there were more than a few of us who could identify with Mr. Abbott. One was author and activist Michael Patrick Leahy. In the summer of 2010, Leahy called me and asked whether I would be in western New York state in early August. His parents live in Jamestown, and I spend much of my summer nearby on Lake Erie. As it turned out, we had only one day on which we could meet, and that day was August 4.

  We met at Andriaccio’s, a congenial Italian restaurant on Chautauqua Lake, the setting for my one and only novel, 2006: The Chautauqua Rising. Published in 2000 and set, as the reader might surmise, in 2006, this mildly futuristic action thriller tells the tale of a grassroots insurrection that in many ways anticipated the Tea Party insurgency of 2009. As it happens, Leahy—a good-spirited, unpretentious guy for a Harvard grad—had just signed a contract to do a book on the ideological roots of the Tea Party movement. As an aside, those thinking of writing a book should be sure to give it a title that people can pronounce. I learned this the hard way. The lake is pronounced “sha-TAWK-wa.”

  When a member of our party observed that the day, August 4, happened to be Barack Obama’s birthday, Leahy and I both chimed in, “alleged birthday.” It might very well be his birthday, we explained, but one simply could not be sure. In fact, there is very much about Obama’s life that must still be preceded by the word alleged. When, for instance, I put the question of Obama’s paternity to Leahy, Don Wilde, and Mr. Southwest, I got three different answers. And these are serious guys who know more about Obama’s past than does anyone at the New York Times.

  And therein lies the problem. For the first time in the modern era, the major media—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the TV networks, CNN, PBS, NPR, Time, Newsweek—chose not to know the background of a leading presidential candidate. The biographical information they served the public about Obama was consistently shallow, often synchronized, and more than occasionally wrong. Worse, the establishment media, left and right, chastened investigators like Leahy and myself for daring to look for evidence that challenged the orthodoxy. They would simply glance at our work, dismiss it out of hand, and, yes, homeward to Washington skip.

  During the fall and summer of 2008, Leahy and I had each addressed one of the two questions that this book poses: In my case, did Barack Obama write Dreams from My Father? In Leahy’s, was the story Obama told in Dreams true? As we both discovered well before the November election—discoveries that could have altered the outcome if widely known—the answer to each of our questions was an unequivocal “no.”

  If I might tie the threads together, here is what the media chose to ignore. In 1994, at Michelle’s urging, a desperate Barack Obama turned his mess of a manuscript over to Bill Ayers and asked for help. Obama knew that his mentors at Harvard had cut some corners, and if they could get away with it, why not he?

  Obama had not yet run for office, but he was itching to. As far as Ayers knew, Obama had set his sights no higher than mayor of Chicago, and that was fine by Ayers. With an indebted African American protégé as mayor, Ayers could undertake the kind of educational reform he had been conjuring since quitting the underground. So together he and Obama conspired to tell the kind of story that would make Obama electable. Ayers’s political insights tempered Obama’s steely ambition to produce a shrewdly crafted book, one whose architecture, if sometimes a plumb or two off bubble, is not terribly hard to decode.

  The media never tried. They point, for instance, to Dreams’ inclusion of Obama’s lotus-eating years as a sign of his honesty and the book’s artlessness. It was neither. Ayers and Obama here were cauterizing a wound. By exposing Obama’s drug use, they denied his future opponents the news value of doing the same. Besides, Bill Clinton had suffered more in the 1992 campaign from his denials—“I did not inhale”—than from his indulgences. If the collaborators were being honest, they would have exposed Obama’s sex life, but that they chose to conceal and/or concoct.


  By the time of the 2008 campaign, Obama had reason to suspect that his parents had never married, that the three members of this little family had never lived together, and that Barack Sr. had skipped out on the family before his first birthday. He clung to the belief, though he may have had his doubts, that he was Obama’s son. He had to. The larger point of Dreams was to establish Obama’s African legacy. Given the importance of that legacy, Obama buried his doubts and allowed his origins story to stand. Scrutiny came only from independent investigators. They may have chased leads down a rabbit hole or two, but to their credit, they sensed something amiss and kept on digging.

  In the official retelling of the origins story, Obama spent his first six years in Hawaii and then moved to Indonesia. Had Obama included the Washington state sojourn in the narrative, he would have spoiled the plotline. Indonesia enhanced the plot. By recounting his years there—five according to Audacity, four according to Dreams, and about three in reality—he reinforced his exotic appeal and his international savvy.

  The collaborators took pains to play down Obama’s Muslim identification and education. Islam had no political capital in Illinois. Christianity did. Central to the story told in Dreams was Obama’s showy embrace of the same. Given his long-term ambitions, Obama miscalculated by tying himself to the Reverend Wright. Ayers did not. In Chicago politics, the affiliation with Wright only helped.

  The Chicago connection was critical. Although Obama spent five years altogether at Columbia and Harvard, he does not write so much as a single sentence about campus life at either Ivy institution. By contrast, he dedicates more than a third of Dreams to his three years as a community organizer in Chicago, easily the book’s most tedious section. The narrative foreshadows his arrival there with prophetic signs like his putative childhood trip to Chicago and his mentoring by legendary Chicagoan Frank Marshall Davis.

  There was no point, however, in getting too explicit about Obama’s relationship to Davis. If Ayers was a small-c communist, Davis was a capital-C one. In 1994, even in Chicago, communism did not play well. Ayers knew enough to soft-sell “Frank” and write himself out of the book. The benignly progressive, aggressively black Obama the reader meets in Dreams had been produced and packaged expressly for political shelf appeal. The intended consumers were lakefront liberals and South Side African Americans, and both consumer groups bought as projected.

  Had Obama restricted his ambitions to Chicago or even Illinois, Dreams would have gone unchallenged. Nothing in it would have troubled the media or the state’s comfortable Democratic majority. For its part, the blogosphere would have had no more reason to dig into Obama’s past than into that of any other self-aggrandizing senator.

  Obama, however, wanted more. He doubled down on his hubris in choosing a collaborator who also wanted more. Had Ayers done what book doctors usually do—mined the thoughts and mimicked the voice of the named author—no one would have been suspicious. Instead he imposed his own voice, his own thoughts, even his own lost love on an already unreliable narrative. The resulting construction propped up the myth of Obama’s genius but so obviously as to invite deconstruction. In his vanity, Ayers had made little attempt to conceal the struts.

  As the myth of Obama collapses, and it will, our established media will sort through the rubble and wonder who or what brought it down. At the end of the day, they will be no more gracious in giving credit than the Smithsonian was to the many amateurs who finally forced it to rethink its position on Indian origins. Today, if illusions die easily, establishments still die hard.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  PAGE

  1 USA Today had accurately: Craig Wilson, “A Glowing ‘Portrait’ of the Obamas’ Rock-Solid Marriage,” USA Today, September 21, 2009.

  3 “There is no underestimating”: David Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (New York: Knopf, 2010), p. 420.

  4 “our constructed reality”: Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist (Boston: Beacon, 2001), p. 44.

  4 “But another part of me”: Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Crown, 2004), p. 63.

  10,000 HOURS

  PAGE

  13 “ten-thousand-hour rule”: Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown, 2008), p. 40.

  13 In his recent memoir: Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir (New York: Twelve, 2010).

  13 Obama’s Hawaii mentor: Frank Marshall Davis, Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).

  14 “the best-written memoir”: Joe Klein, “The Fresh Face,” Time, October 19, 2006.

  14 “the best writer”: Jonathan Raban, “All the Presidents’ Literature,” Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2009.

  14 “Whatever else people”: Oona King, “Oona King on Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father,” Times (London), September 15, 2007.

  14 “I was astonished”: “Writers welcome a literary U.S. president-elect,” Associated Press, November 6, 2008.

  THE STORY

  PAGE

  18 “signature appeal”: Remnick, p. 360.

  18 “carefully constructed narrative”: Toby Harnden, “Barack Obama’s true colours: The making of the man who would be US president,” Telegraph, August 21, 2008.

  19 Almost exactly ten years: For an extended discussion of the Clinton myth, see Jack Cashill, Ron Brown’s Body: How One Man’s Death Saved the Clinton Presidency and Hillary’s Future (Nashville: WND Books, 2004), pp. 94–104.

  19 “our first black president”: Toni Morrison, “Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, October 5, 1998.

  20 “Nobody ever loved”: Virginia Kelley, Leading with My Heart (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 28.

  20 They turned the living room: David Maraniss, First in His Class: The Biography of Bill Clinton (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 37.

  BURYING PERCY

  PAGE

  23 “to let a serious crisis”: Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff, after his nomination by president-elect Barack Obama in November 2008, said, “You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste.”

  24 As George Orwell acknowledged: George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon, April 1946.

  24 “We invented words”: Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones, eds., Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiques of the Weather Underground, 1970–1974 (New York: Seven Stories, 2006), p. 151.

  24 When asked about Obama: “Inside City Hall,” NY1, March 25, 2008.

  26 Shortly after the story: Ben Smith, “Obama camp denies Sutton story,” Politico, September 4, 2008.

  26 A self-appointed: Ben Smith, “Sutton family retracts Obama story,” Politico, September 6, 2008.

  27 Unconvincingly, he claimed: Kenneth R. Timmerman, “Obama’s Harvard Years: Questions Swirl,” Newsmax, September 23, 2008.

  27 In March 2009: Michael Calderone, “JournoList: Inside the echo chamber,” Politico, March 17, 2009.

  AMIABLE DUNCES

  PAGE

  30 “all the contradictions”: Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), p. 161.

  31 “I wanted [Jimmy] Carter in”: “Chevy Chase: I wanted Carter to win,” CNN.com, November 3, 2008.

  31 “After the last eight years”: Alex Spillius, “Sir Paul McCartney ‘should apologise to American people for Bush insult,’” Telegraph, June 4, 2010.

  32 “probably the smartest guy”: Imus in the Morning, Citadel Media, November 10, 2008.

  33 “What am I going to tell”: “Teleprompter Falls and Biden Jokes: ‘What am I going to tell the president when I tell him his teleprompter is broken?,’” ABCNews.com, May 27, 2009.

  BEAUTIFUL OLD HOUSE

  PAGE

  34 “probably the best-known intellectual”: Tony Judt, “The Rootless Cosmopolitan,” Nation, July 19, 2004.

  34 “a
gainst settlements, against Israeli apartheid”: Peter Wallsten, “Allies of Palestinians See a Friend in Obama,” Los Angeles Times, April 10, 2008.

  35 In late October 2007: Janny Scott, “Obama’s Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say,” New York Times, October 30, 2007.

  35 Nearly three years later: Remnick, p. 113.

  35 Said, you see: For a more in-depth look at Said’s lifelong fraud, see Jack Cashill, Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005), pp. 129–34.

  35 “Orientalism is written”: Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 337.

  35 “Mr. Said was born in Jerusalem”: Janny Scott, “A Palestinian Confronts Time,” New York Times, September 19, 1998.

  36 “Virtually everything I learned”: Justus Reid Weiner, “‘My Beautiful Old House’ and Other Fabrications by Edward Said,” Commentary, September 1999.

  37 In a glowing obituary: Richard Bernstein, “Edward Said: Leading Advocate of Palestinians Dies at 67,” New York Times, September 25, 2003.