The first book under the Obama name, Dreams from My Father, was “kept secret during the 2008 presidential campaign,” Voegeli contends, because his fans “were completely invested in the idea of a post-racial Obama.” Maybe so, but there was more to it, as David Garrow showed in his massive tome Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, from 2017. The book’s “most discussed” revelation, Voegeli explains, was one from former girlfriend Sheila Miyoshi Jager, who said that she believed Obama had not learned much from history. In fact, however, the most significant revelation from that book was something else:
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.
Garrow identified the black poet “Frank” as Frank Marshall Davis, whose “Communist background plus his kinky exploits made him politically radioactive.” Profiled by Paul Kengor in The Communist, this Stalinist was also a prolific pornographer. Obama, who was known as a young man as Barry Soetoro, is the stepson of Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian student whom his white mother Ann Dunham married in 1965. Barry could have adopted an African name in the style of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), but he took a different route.
In the Dreams novel, Barack Obama, Sr., “bequeaths his name” to Barry, and by the end of the book the Kenyan student whom his mother once dated is a nameless “Old Man,” a convenient “prop” in this narrative. Trouble is, Obama Sr.’s writings from 1958 to 1964, housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, mention nothing about an American wife and son. Jump ahead to Garrow’s interview in August 2023 “The Obama Factor” published in Tablet magazine.
“He wants people to believe his story. For me to conclude that Dreams from My Father was historical fiction—oh God, did that infuriate him,” Garrow told Tablet editor David Samuels. Obama lawyer Bob Bauer, “was also coaching me,” and warned Garrow “whatever you do, don’t ask him about his father.” Upon learning all this Samuels, a longtime Obama fan, took it to another level.
“There was something about this fictional character that he created actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now,” Samuels told Garrow (emphasis added). “The easy explanation, of course, 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 his people are already inside the White House. They hold the Iran file. Tony Blinken doesn’t.”
Meanwhile, back at the flak tower: The Obama Death Star is out of hope.