On August 2, two days before Barack Obama’s reported sixty-second birthday, the Jewish journal Tablet published an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian David Garrow.
Asking the questions and providing extensive commentary of his own was the well-traveled journalist David Samuels. Although Garrow is a progressive and Samuels something of a centrist, their evaluation of Obama’s tenure in the White House borders on cruel.
The exchange between the two deserves to be read in full. Rather than summarize that exchange, I will focus on a few key truths, both those they nailed and those that squirmed away. Most intriguing in the latter category are the questions about Obama’s literary talents and about his birth. Garrow’s opinion matters. His 2017 bio, Rising Star. The Making of Barack Obama, is easily the boldest and most accurate of the Obama biographies.
One thing Garrow and Samuels get right is their take on Obama as president. Says Garrow, “I think even the fanboy journalists would acknowledge, under a little bit of pressure, that it ended up being an underwhelming, disappointing presidency.” On the subject of race relations, Garrow does not equivocate: “There’s no question in anybody’s mind, that on that score, that scale, the presidency was a total failure.”
If anything, Samuels was harsher. Once a “fan” of Obama, Samuels slams his legacy: “America’s emerging oligarchy cementing its grip instead of going bust. The rise of monopoly internet platforms. The normalization of government spying on Americans. Race relations going south. Skyrocketing inequality. The rise of Donald Trump. The birth of Russiagate.” Says Samuels, “It all happened with Obama in the White House,” a man he derisively labels, “the Magic Negro of the billionaire industrial complex.”
Both Samuels and Garrow lament as well the demise of American journalism. Writes Samuels in his introduction, “Rising Star highlights a remarkable lack of curiosity on the part of mainstream reporters and institutions about a man who almost instantaneously was treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult.”
At the same time the media were turning a blind eye to Obama, says Samuels, they spent years “broadcasting fantasies about secret communications links between Trump Tower and the Kremlin.” One symptom of this fantasy was the ready acceptance of the Steele dossier, packaged and sold on Obama’s watch. “From the get-go,” says Garrow, “I realized that Christopher Steele’s shit was just complete crap.”
Obsessed with Trump and still smitten by Obama, the Washington press corps failed, says Samuels, “to imagine, let alone report on, Obama’s role in government.” He believes that Obama is still the man in charge. He points out that Obama’s continued residence in D.C. is an historical first for an ex-president. Then too, “large parts of White House policymaking” belong to Obama in that they’re “staffed by his people, who worked for him and no doubt report back to him.”
More than once, Samuels looks to Garrow for affirmation on this point, but Garrow resists. He knows Obama too well. “The number one thing about Barack this past five years is how completely he’s vanished,” says Garrow. He describes Obama as “lazy” and adds, “He has no interest in building the Democratic Party as an institution… And I don’t think he had any truly deep, meaningful policy commitments other than the need to feel and to be perceived as victorious, as triumphant.”
Here, I tend to agree with Garrow. Obama is not a serious man, never was, more the Hirohito of the imperial left than a Tojo. Garrow calls Obama “hollow.” He paraphrases an intermediary who claimed “Barack once said to him that the only two things he wanted were a valet and an airplane.” Even Samuels cannot dismiss the possibility that Obama might very well be little more than a “celebrity-obsessed would-be billionaire.”
To the surprise of many readers, the two reporters ventured into several journalistic no-go zones, one of which being Obama’s sexual orientation. Garrow speaks candidly about a letter in which the young Obama “repeatedly fantasizes about making love to men.”
As Garrow reports in the paperback version of Rising Star, Obama wrote to girlfriend Alex McNear that he viewed gay sex as “an attempt to remove oneself from the present, a refusal perhaps to perpetuate the endless farce of earthly life.” Obama continued, “You see, I make love to men daily, but in the imagination. My mind is androgynous to a great extent and I hope to make it more so.”
In researching my 2020 book, Unmasking Obama, I reached out to Garrow for an explanation as to why this passage appeared in the paperback but not in the original. As Garrow told me and as he relates in the interview, he was able to access the original only after McNear sold her letters to Emory University.
Obama’s flirtation with homosexuality, perhaps ongoing, should have been big news when Garrow revealed these letters five years ago. Like so many details of Obama’s life, however, the media have obliged Obama by suppressing an inconvenient story line.
When alleged former lover and drug buddy, Larry Sinclair, planned a press conference in 2008, some leftist bloggers launched a petition drive to deny Sinclair a stage at the National Press Club. Others succeeded in getting Sinclair arrested by reporting him to authorities for an outstanding warrant. The mainstream media ignored the story altogether,
In their conversation, Samuels and Garrow dance around another touchy subject, the unreality of Obama’s literary genius. Samuels, for instance, describes Obama’s letters to Alex McNear as “poorly written.” He says of Dreams, however, “The whole book’s really good.”
