Remnick Takes Up Obama’s Critics: He Calls them Racist
In the current issue of National Review, Jay Nordlinger has a noteworthy article about critics who charged him with being a racist after he wrote that he thought President Obama appeared to be arrogant in his State of the Union address. The word arrogant, he quickly found out, was now held to be “a racist codeword.”
Strangely, when liberals make comments about Obama that actually could be construed as racist code words, no one utters a peep and those guilty of offense are quickly let off the hook. Take Dan Rather, for example. As Nordlinger points out, Rather “described Obama as ‘very articulate’ — there they go again — but said ‘he couldn’t sell watermelons if you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic.’ Watermelons? Rather later said, ‘Anyone who knows me personally or knows my professional career would know that race was not on my mind.’ I’m sure that’s true. But would he give such a break to a conservative who committed a similar faux pas?”
Nordlinger hopes a day will come when race fades from the scene. But judging how crying racist is now a favorite form of attacking critics of Obama, it will not be for quite a while. Take again one of the most recent egregious forms of its use — that by New Yorker editor David Remnick in his new biography of Obama, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.
Remnick, as I pointed out in my last blog post, goes on the attack against Obama’s critics during the campaign. His most extensive and nasty comments are reserved for Jack Cashill, the blogger who penned the now famous article raising questions about whether Obama wrote his memoir Dreams from My Father, or if it might have been ghostwritten by Bill Ayers.
Cashill has solid bona fide academic credentials. He has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University, and author of a respected book on American intellectuals, Hoodwinked. He also acknowledged from the start that “shy of a confession by those involved, I will not be able to prove conclusively that Obama did not write this book.” What he offered is an argument that readers were free to accept, reject or challenge. It is certainly valid to do the latter. I suspect he certainly expected that. At any rate, except for Rush Limbaugh and others on the political right, Cashill convinced very few that he was on to anything.
An exception was writer Christopher Andersen. As I reported earlier, the pop biography Andersen wrote, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, included a tantalizing tidbit. After Obama got a new contract to write his book, Michelle Obama told Andersen that she suggested to her husband that he get advice “from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers” who had a reputation for being a good writer. Andersen claimed that then Obama handed over his oral interviews with relatives, a draft of his manuscript and notes to Ayers. Andersen concluded, in much the same way as Cashill, that “in the end, Ayers’s contribution to Barack’s Dreams From My Father would be significant — so much so that the book’s language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’s own writing.”
Andersen’s claims came out after Remnick’s manuscript was being printed, sparing Remnick from having to comment on them. What is important though is how Remnick dealt with Cashill’s claims. He could, of course, have simply ignored them — especially since he acknowledges that few outside of the right took them seriously. But because Limbaugh endorsed them, Remnick could not resist using his pages to score another blast at Obama’s conservative opponents.
Since so many people had a sense of Obama from his own writings, Remnick argues, any challenge to his authorship “possessed a diabolical potency for those who wished him ill.” (This is certainly so. Friends of mine told me that they supported him from the get go because they had read Dreams From my Father.) Remnick writes: “It suggested that the man poised to become the first African-American President, one celebrated for his language and his eloquence, could not possibly be such a good writer.”
So what, precisely, does Remnick do to put an end to what he considers the dangerous and false claims made by Cashill? First, he calls him “a latter-day Derrida” who has penned a deconstructionist style attack on Obama. Next, he says his attempts “might well have remained a mere twinkling in the Web’s farthest lunatic orbit had not … more powerful voices hoped to give his theory wider currency.” This would be referring to Limbaugh, who used his radio show “to take up the Ayers-as-author theory.” Limbaugh said “there’s no evidence that [Obama] has any kind of writing talent.”
Readers of Remnick’s book will not have had the chance to read Cashill’s article, from which Limbaugh reached that judgement. It is based on the fact that as editor of Harvard Law Review, Obama obtained the position without ever having published anything in the journal. Nor had anyone ever seen examples of prior writing. Moreover, Cashill noted that a long period existed between Obama’s first contract, voided because he failed to turn in an acceptable manuscript, and a new contract which concluded with the now famous and acclaimed memoir.
In Monday, in a blog he posted, Cashill writes:
In late 1994, Obama finally submitted his manuscript for publication. Remnick expects the faithful to believe that a mediocre student who had nothing in print save for the occasional “muddled” essay, who blew a huge contract after more than two futile years, who wrote no legal articles, and who turned in bloated drafts when he did start writing, somehow found the time and inspiration during an absurdly busy period of his life to write what Time magazine would call “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”
Now the above certainly does not prove that Obama did not write his own memoir. It does, however, raise valid issues about how he was able to so quickly develop such a strong literary voice for which there was no prior evidence. After all, how many years did John F. Kennedy’s defenders swear he wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning book Profiles in Courage, which we now know was ghosted by Ted Sorensen? For political reasons, his supporters had good cause to worry that Kennedy’s political future could have come to a halt had the truth been learned at the time.
At any rate, aside from snide comments, Remnick does nothing to take on Cashill’s actual arguments. Saying he is part of a “lunatic orbit” is not exactly any kind of a real answer. But he does more — and this time, Remnick uses the same attack launched on Nordlinger. He calls Cashill’s argument racist! First, he calls the claim that Obama had a ghost writer a “libel” that has a particularly “ugly pedigree.” It is this:
Writing elevated a slave from non-being, from commodity, to human status. … In Frederick Douglass’ narrative, his master, Mr.Auld says, “Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world … if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) to read, there would be no keeping him.”
And yet writers like Douglass had to call on white men to authenticate their texts, the better to disprove the antebellum Jack Cashills and Rush Limbaugh ready to declare fraud.
Remnick continues to argue that Douglass had to assure white readers that he wrote the book, by providing authentication from people such as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips so that he would have the “seal of white endorsement.” Remnick writes:
Garrison vouched for Douglass’ literacy. The title, too, indicates a need to deny a sham. It is called the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself.
A century and a half later, thinking a degree of racial progress had been achieved, Barack Obama and his publisher had not thought to collect such endorsements. (my emphasis.)
That ends the chapter. Remnick, instead of showing how, why and where the questions raised by Cashill have no merit, simply asserts that like in the times of slavery, white critics today argue that Obama might not have written his book and needed a ghost writer to help him because they too are racist and believe that Obama or any other articulate, smart and educated African-American cannot write his own book!
Cashill’s arguments may indeed be wrong and not have merit. I emphasize this because I am not writing to endorse his theory. I am only arguing that Remnick does not even try to disprove or challenge him. Instead, he deals with him and Limbaugh by playing the race card in an absurd way.
Cashill is also correct when he writes in his American Thinker blog:
The defense of Obama by Wills and Remnick should not surprise. As I discovered five years ago in the research for my book, Hoodwinked, America’s intellectual elite has been crafting and enabling intellectual fraud for nearly a century. “Not unnaturally,” I wrote, “people of influence in the cultural establishment are inclined to promote, praise, and protect those creative individuals who think as they do.” The protected, by the way, include people of all colors, genders, and orientations. The protectors usually vote, sound, and condescend just like [Gary] Wills and Remnick.
As one of the most quoted comments ever made about intellectuals go, they are the “herd of independent minds.”
All this should not be surprising. The New Yorker, along with The New York Review of Books and The New York Times, has become the epitome of acceptable liberalism and a chorus of cheer-leaders for Barack Obama. If David Remnick had reached any different conclusions about Obama’s critics than the one he did reach, that would have been the real surprise.
David Remnick and his buddies are coming unglued. The irony is that Barack Obama’s skin color was the number one reason why they supported his presidential campaign. Race guilt pervades American culture and it was obvious that Obama’s darker pigmentation would be a major plus. The stuff has now hit the fan. Purple and red state voters realize that the president is a soft despot trying to “nudge” away their liberties. The leftist community is running scared. It thought that victory was inevitable. Remnick is also an editor of the New Yorker. What is the financial situation of this publication? Is it near bankruptcy? Will Remnick even have a job a year from now?
David Thomson raises an excellent question about the continued viability of The New Yorker. It is part of the Conde Nast publishing group, which has killed off a number of its magazines recently in an effort to stay afloat. Remnick has so politicized it, along with Hendrik Hertzberg, that they must be losing subscribers by the thousands who don’t share their zealotry and their ceaseless slanting of the entire magazine, from TALK OF THE TOWN to the last, annoying page.
But what I wanted to post, before reading Thomson’s comment was this:
I applaud Cashill for his work. Anyone who doesn’t think a writer has distinct, unmistakable tics that will reveal him or her as the actual author of work attributed to others should remember Mae West’s immortal line as Flower Belle Lee in MY LITTLE CHICKADEE (1940), “A man’s kiss is his signature, his identification.”
The same is true of speech and writing. It can be imitated or concealed, but a writer’s signature cadences, choice of words, and other identifiable hallmarks leak out in the end.
Has anyone who has heard Obama speak without his trusty teleprompter ever found him “eloquent”?
If so, I refer you to Roger L. Simon’s blog of April 3rd, http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2010/04/03/president-weirdo/
David Remnick will not starve to death. But will he see a sharp decline in his earnings in another year? Other lesser-known journalists may soon be lucky in finding a job teaching grade school kids. These people are worried sick about the future. Their world is collapsing around them. Obama was supposed to save their sorry rear ends. He can’t even save his own. Fear is definitely a major factor in explaining their recent irrational rants. It is only likely to get worse.
There is doubt but that Remnick often shares a few glasses of white wine with colleagues who are about to receive the dreaded pink slip. Everything is falling apart. It was not so long ago when an experienced journalist enjoyed a de facto tenure agreement with their employer. Job security and a lavish expense account were the norm. One may not have been able to earn enough money to move next door to Bill Gates—but an above average middleclass income was guaranteed.
David Thomson said: “These people are worried sick about the future. Their world is collapsing around them. Obama was supposed to save their sorry rear ends. He can’t even save his own. Fear is definitely a major factor in explaining their recent irrational rants.”
This also applies to universities, another stronghold of leftwing politics. They are beginning to cut employment in an effort to stay afloat. A lot of teaching jobs will be lost before this is over.
University employees definitely have much to worry about. The awful U.S. Supreme Court decision Griggs vs. Duke Power inadvertently did much to increase the enrollment figures in the last some 40 years. This eventually resulted in inflated grades and credentials that are held in contempt by prospective employers. There are simply too many horror stories concerning recipients of soft science bachelor degrees who can’t even read at an 8th grade level.
“Now the above certainly does not prove that Obama did not write his own memoir. It does, however,” … give right-wingnuts something to talk about while the President passes healthcare, reaches a nuclear arms treaty with Russia, convenes a conference to deal with proliferation, proposes new regs for Wall Street, etc…..
then it will be such a shame when we boot him out in 2012.
you talk as if any of those things are actually a good idea
If any good has come of the Obama presidency and the Democratic Congress it is that finally liberals[?], the left, have shed all pretense of even a minimal civility and tolerance. At this point they show themselves as the intolerant & totalitarian threats they always were, Remnick being no exception.
We are in for some tough times ahead with people like this, but at least now we see them for the real threat they are, dangerous and on the edge.
Joseph: It does, however,” … give right-wingnuts something to talk about while the President passes healthcare, reaches a nuclear arms treaty with Russia, convenes a conference to deal with proliferation, proposes new regs for Wall Street, etc…..
As if the right-wingers have nothing to talk about…
Like Obama’s destruction of healthcare…
surrendering missile defense to appease Russia…
Conferencing while Iran is building the nukes…
And trying to destroy our economy through horrible new regulations.
Yao, Josie, we really have nothing to talk about.
BTW, did Obama took the money from his stash and pay for your healthcare already? Is he already paying for your gas? Did you stop worrying about the mortgage?
Don’t take the New Yorker seriously. It has all the sophistication of what used to be known as a Reform Democratic Club. Rarely these days they publish something of value like a William Trevor short story, very rarely. Sad really, I’ve read it for over fifty years and once it truly was something.
yes, it was once wonderful, literate and sassy, featuring the best writers, and not the least of it were the sophisticated profiles and of course the extraordinary covers and new yorker cartoons.
Joseph, I hope you enjoy paying for the health care for the next four years, Before it kicks in. You do that all the time, pay for four years before getting what you pay for, right? Damn, you’re smart!
And of course we need a plan that will cover the entire nation even though it was premised on the 10%,[that's ten per cent]that supposedly didn’t have health care. Wow, you’re getting brighter by the minute.
But the best is yet to come, bet you can’t wait to pay that 15% to 20% VAT, can you? Don’t wait for me, start sending your money in now, voluntarily, you do really believe in this crap, don’t you?
Double Wow, now you’re a genius.
And don’t worry about the deficits, they were only bad in the Bush years.
Even though now they will be from 4 to 6 times larger.
Your IQ just went through the roof!!! Wow!
A
Ron, it seems as if you are not merely investigating the idea that Obama’s book was ghost-written; you’re passionately interested in proving that it was.
This makes you sound as if you are more interested in your political goals than the truth. It’s beneath you.
Assembling evidence to support a thesis proves that you are biased in favor of your thesis and therefore can’t be trusted.
It must be nice to be a liberal, and never have to worry about actually using your brain.
Mark you don’t know me or my political views so there’s no point in criticizing them.
I didn’t say that the authorship of Obama’s book is not a legitimate issue to pursue.
You might be an Obama supporter and yet have a hunch that something is fishy there and have a passion to discover the truth because you have a passion for the truth.
What Ron seems to have done is assume that Obama is not the author simply because he dislikes Obama politically.
That’s not a passion for the truth. (And I don’t read Ron because I dislike him.)
The true tragedy here is that these constant false charges of racism are starting to dull the word in the minds of the public. Soon, through over-use, a charge of racism, valid or not, will be ignored by most people. This will hurt the true victims of racism.
For more information, refer to the story of the boy who cried wolf.
Anyway, Bill Ayers has already outed himself as the author of Dreams of My Father. The confession hit the news wires and then immediately dropped out of site like a stone, like it was sarcasm or something.
Do your own test. Read a Chapter of Dreams and then of the second book Audacity of Hope and assess whether they match in literary worth and style. Cashill says the first on all objective tests is written on a 10th grade level, the second on a 7th grade level. What writer retrogresses as he or she gains more experience? There is no big deal if Ayers was correct in admitting that he helped a politician with crafting a book. Happens all the time, particularly with political speeches. What is wrong with this picture is the dishonesty. I bet in our lifetime we’ll never hear Obama address the issue. Ever.