December 3, 2013
How Author Obama Foreshadowed President Obama
By Jack Cashill

"I've written two books," Senator Barack Obama told a crowd of teachers in Virginia on the campaign trial in July of 2008. The teachers applauded. "I actually wrote them myself," he added with a wink and a nod, and now the teachers exploded in laughter. They got the joke: Republicans were too stupid to write their books.

Although few fussed over Obama's second book, a first-person memoir/ policy brief published in 2006 titled The Audacity of Hope, Obama's 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father had emerged as the sacred text in the cult of Obama "There is no underestimating the importance of Dreams From My Father in the political rise of Barack Obama," David Remnick would later write in his exhaustive look at Obama's life and career, The Bridge.

The only problem, of course, is that Obama did not write either of those books "by myself." He was as incapable of writing those books as he was of guaranteeing that his eponymous health care system would allow millions of individual policyholders to keep the health care plans that they liked. Still, he had no obvious qualms about deceiving the public in either case.

Mendacity was just one of the predictive traits on display in Obama's literary career. As a would-be writer Obama also showed himself to be narcissistic, indecisive, opportunistic, and exploitative -- character flaws that even his allies have come to acknowledge in our forty-fourth president.

Obama owed his literary career to a 1990 New York Times profile on the Harvard Law Review's first black president, a position he attained through an unholy mix of affirmative action and white guilt. The article caught the eye of literary agent Jane Dystel. She submitted a proposal, and Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, authorized a $125,000 advance in November 1990 -- the equivalent of $225,000 today.

With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where the University of Chicago offered him a stipend, benefits, and an office to help him write what Obama told the administrators would be a book on race and voting rights. When he switched topics to pure memoir, Remnick reported, the University brass were "unfazed."

In the spring of 1992, by accepting an assignment with Project Vote, Obama gave himself still another excuse for not being able to meet his generous, 18-month deadline. Simon & Schuster extended it. In November 1992, he and Michelle married. After their honeymoon, in order to finish without interruption, Obama decamped to Bali for a month. Nothing happened. His friends have been at pains to excuse his inability to honor his contract.

Intimate friend Valerie Jarrett would tell Remnick, "He had to come to terms with some events in his life that some people pays years of therapy to get comfortable revealing." She added, "The writing went slowly because everything was so raw."There is a simpler explanation. The writing went slowly because he was not a writer.

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