Obama compares himself to Abraham Lincoln

OPINION:

Did you know this? “Not since Lincoln has there been a president as fundamentally shaped — in his life, convictions and outlook on the world — by reading and writing as Barack Obama.”

Frankly, I did not know President Obama was so wedded to books and the printed word as to be compared to Abraham Lincoln, author of the Gettysburg Address, magisterial Second Inaugural, and devotee of Shakespeare.

To be honest, I did not think that Mr. Obama by the wildest leap of imagination could be compared even to Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, Ph.D., or U.S. Grant, the author of — until now — the finest presidential autobiography of all time. That is, if Mark Twain is to be believed. Twain compared Grant’s memoirs to “Caesar’s Commentaries.”

Yet Michiko Kakutani, the literary critic of the famed Times of New York, has delivered up the above testimonial. Moreover, others who have had the pleasure of reading Mr. Obama’s earlier writing have been equally lavish in their praise of his literary saga.

I had known him to deliver passable speeches from a teleprompter, ad lib tolerably well on contemporary life, and to watch sports on television. But to be shaped by books as Lincoln was? As these other presidents were? Michiko, baby, what have you been smoking? What has Barack been smoking?

I know that in Mr. Obama’s January interview with Michiko, he mentioned a dozen or so authors and books that had caught his fancy, but so far as I know that is about the only time he ever mentioned them.

Though, of course, there is a very good reason for his artsy name-dropping. He wants to hook a big, fat literary contract from a big, fat lazy publisher of books that are bought but rarely read. Do I hear talk of a $30 million contract?

In this endeavor he has already had help from the likes of Jonathan Raban, Joe Klein and Britain’s Guardian. All have read — or claim to have read — “Dreams from My Father,” Mr. Obama’s 1995 best-selling memoir. Supposedly after immersing himself in “Dreams,” Mr. Raban called Mr. Obama “the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln.”

Mr. Klein called “Dreams” “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.” And the Guardian’s reviewer esteemed the book the fifth-best nonfiction book “of all time” — yes, “of all time.”

Unfortunately, others have also read “Dreams” along with the pathetic drivel that came from Mr. Obama’s pen before “Dreams.” One, The New York Times best-selling author Christopher Andersen, wrote in his 2009 book that Mr. Obama, a “hopelessly blocked” writer facing a contract deadline, realized that he had taken on more than he could deliver.

So he turned to his Chicago neighbor, Bill Ayers, who was a proven writer, to finish what became “Dreams.” Bill has remained relatively reticent about his work, but then he shares Mr. Obama’s politics. As for Mr. Andersen, he has sources that he has never divulged. Maybe he will when the former president snags his $30 million.

An even more interesting critic is Jack Cashill, a scholar and literary critic. He actually read Mr. Obama’s literary outpouring that came before “Dreams.” Possibly, this is what excited Michiko Kakutani, though Mr. Obama’s “outpouring” was limited. It consists of but two essays. In all those years just two essays.

This week in The American Spectator, Mr. Cashill has demonstrated that the two essays are littered with risible grammatical errors, “awkward sentence structure, inappropriate word choice, a weakness for cliches,” and — an Obama trademark — “continued failure to get verbs and nouns to agree.”

For instance, in his 1988 essay Mr. Obama writes, “The election of Harold Washington in Chicago or of Richard Hatcher in Gary were not enough to bring jobs .” Mr. Obama means “was.”

Now we are expected to believe that a few years later, Mr. Obama was capable of writing what Mr. Cashill calls a graceful and sophisticated memoir, namely, “Dreams from My Father.”

Well, after a mere eight-and-a-half months in the White House he would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In Mr. Obama’s world anything is possible.

Mr. Cashill’s point, and Mr. Andersen’s, and mine, is that “Dreams” was, almost certainly, not written exclusively by Mr. Obama.

For a publisher to claim that it was is to commit fraud. To claim that Mr. Obama alone is going to write a book on the order of U.S. Grant’s memoirs is a fraud and a horselaugh.

• R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is author of “The Death of Liberalism,” published by Thomas Nelson Inc.