The Obama Factor

“He’s not normal—as in not a normal politician or a normal human being.”

by Lloyd Billingsley, FPM    7.8.23 

“He’s not normal—as in not a normal politician or a normal human being.”

That was David Garrow, author of the 1460-page Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, in a recent rambling interview with Tablet’s David Samuels headlined, “The Obama Factor.” Barack Obama is the author of Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, published in 1995. On page 537 of Rising Star, David Garrow writes:

“Dreams from My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction. It featured many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel, and its most important composite character was the narrator himself.” (emphasis original)

“He wants people to believe his story,” said Garrow, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bearing the Cross. “For me to conclude that Dreams from My Father was historical fiction—oh God, did that infuriate him.” Samuels, who writes for Harpers, the Atlantic and New York Times Magazine,  countered that “the pose of being a writer is actually one that he prefers in many ways to being a politician.”

“Oh God, yes. Yes, yes, yes,” said Garrow. “He doesn’t want the writerliness challenged. It’s my story and I’m sticking to it. The book [Dreams] is so fictionalized.” And it “completely omits women. I’ve always thought that there’d eventually be a feminist critique of Obama because his mother and all the girlfriends—they’re not there. They don’t exist.”

As Garrow reveals, the Dreams author wrote to Alex McNear, his girlfriend at Occidental College, “about how he repeatedly fantasizes about making love to men.” But there’s more to the man who is “not normal,” such as the question of his provenance.

Garrow’s go-between with president Obama was lawyer Bob Bauer. “Whatever you do,” Bauer counseled Garrow. “Don’t ask him about his father.” In the Dreams novel, the father is the Kenyan Barack Obama, a student at the University of Hawaii. The Kenyan “bequeaths his name” to the American and by the end of the novel he becomes a nameless “old man.”

The Kenyan’s written communications from 1958-1964, housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, make not a single mention of an American wife and son. Perhaps that is why the president formerly known as Barry Soetoro never accessed the archive, also missing from Garrow’s Rising Star.

In Dreams, the author devotes more than 2,000 words to a happy-drunk black poet known only as “Frank.” In Rising Star, Garrow identifies “Frank” as Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist pornographer. On the other hand, Garrow ignores Paul Kengor’s 2012,  The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis – The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor, which showed the “remarkable similarities” between the politics of the Dreams author and Davis.

The Communist bears a strong physical resemblance to the author but the rising star would “forcefully reject the Davis hypothesis,” Garrow wrote, and “Davis’ Communist background plus his kinky exploits made him politically radioactive.” That is why Barry needed the “historical fiction” of Dreams from My Father, the story about the Kenyan foreign student.

In Dreams, the author visits Kenya and the account bears remarkable similarities to I Dreamed of Africa, published in 1991, and the 1994  African Nights. Both books are the work of Italian writer Kuki Gallmann, a longtime resident of Kenya.

In African Nights, Gallmann and company “camped in the area of Narok, one of the main centers of the proud Maasai tribe.” In Dreams from My Father, the American travels to Narok, “a small trading town where we stopped for gas and lunch.”

In I Dreamed of Africa and African Nights, the reader finds “the ink-black of Arap Langat” and “the ink-black darkness” where fish are approaching. Under a slate sky lies the “ink-black turmoil of the ocean.” Dreams of My Father speaks of “ink-black stairwells” and “tall ink-black Luos and short brown Kikuyus.” In Kenya, men “dive into inky-black waters.” And so forth, with many other passages too similar to be accidental.

If Garrow picked up on the plagiarism, nothing emerges in Rising Star. In 2008, David Samuels re-read Dreams from My Father and came upon the passage where Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro, takes Barry into the back yard and teaches him to fight.

“Wait a minute, I know this scene,” Samuels said. “And then I want back and found the battle royal scene in The Invisible Man.

“Each of us was issued a pair of boxing gloves and ushered out into the big mirrored hall,” Ralph Ellison wrote. “A glove smacked against my head. . . Blows pounded me from all sides while I struck out as best I could.”

In Dreams, Barry has a tussle with a boy down the road. The next day, Lolo “had two pairs of boxing gloves,” and they lace them up. “Keep your hands up,” Lolo tells Barry. “You want to keep moving but always stay low. Don’t give them a target.” And so on.

In Rising Star, Garrow writes that Barry was often seen with a copy of The Invisible Man, and after Samuels pointed out the Ellison passage, Garrow said, “Right, Right, Right.”

Samuels also probed Garrow on what the composite character had done in office. For example, “The Iran deal bothered you?”

“I do find the Iran deal offensive and puzzling,” Garrow said. “I mean, it’s an explicitly antisemitic state.  I also found the Cuba thing deeply puzzling and offensive. It’s a fucking dictatorship that imprisons all sorts of truly progressive, creative people.” Many of the Cuban prisoners are black but the former Barry Soetoro is basically uncritical of the Communist regime. But then, the composite character is not a normal politician or human being.

“For Barack, everything has to be a success,” Garrow said. “Everything has to be a victory.” And on his own terms, Obama may be the most successful president ever. He transformed the nation into a place where the outgoing president picks his successor and deploys the FBI and DOJ to help Hillary Clinton and harm candidate and President Donald Trump.

“From the first time I saw it,” Garrow said, “I realized that Christopher Steele’s shit was just complete crap. It was bad corporate intelligence, even. It was nonsensical.” And Garrow had “always thought that the whole Obamacare thing was, in large part, a fraud.”

Obamacare sought to transform the nation into a place where you get only the care the government wants you to have, as in a totalitarian state. The composite character also showed a fondness for any state opposed to the USA, and disrespect for America’s friends.

In one of his first actions, Obama  canceled missile defense for U.S. allies Poland and the Czech Republic, and Garrow laments his “failure to object to Russia taking Crimea and the Donbas.”

Now, as Samuels notes, Obama is “fixated on Iran after the Iran deal failed.” The easy explanation is that “Joe Biden is not running that part of his administration. Obama is. He doesn’t even have to pick up the phone because all of his people are already inside the White House.” True to form, as Fred Fleitz explains, Biden is planning to evade Congress with a “secret nuclear deal with Iran.”

With that kind of ongoing clout, no surprise that Obama buys mansions and hangs out with celebrities. Remember, according to David Garrow, he’s not a normal politician or normal human being. The former Barry Soetoro is a “composite character,” and Dreams from My Father is a novel, swaths of it plagiarized. David Samuels finds this deception profoundly troubling.

“There was something about this fictional character that he created actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now.” That’s the Obama factor, and there’s more to it.   

“So how do you talk all this foundation-land, community-organizer shit and then preside over the transformation of the country into a Gilded Age oligarchy?” wonders Samuels. “Maybe I just answered my own question: Obama is the Magic Negro of the billionaire industrial complex. And targeting Jews as outsiders and pushing them outside the circle was the way that the Gilded Age oligarchy consolidated itself in America, back then and also now.”

Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Yes I Con: United Fakes of America, Barack ‘Em Up: A Literary Investigation, Hollywood Party, and numerous other works.