I should caution that the analysis I have just offered, according to Remnick, at least, is "mere twinkling in the Web's farthest lunatic orbit." In the complacently flat earth that Remnick inhabits, I am a "little-known conservative writer" with a racist axe to grind, and Christopher Andersen, despite his many bestsellers, does not exist.
On this and even weightier subjects, Remnick would rather you content yourself with his interpretation, which is often no interpretation at all.
By Jack Cashill
April 18, 2010
The blogosphere abhors a vacuum. So when the mainstream media (MSM) leave holes in a given narrative -- in this case, the biography of the president -- bloggers individually, incrementally, and indefatigably strive to fill in the blanks -- sometimes successfully, sometimes less so.
In his comprehensive, 600-plus-page biography of Barack Obama titled The Bridge, New Yorker editor David Remnick lays down the baseline of what the mainstream media know about the president -- or at least what they want us to know.
Where Remnick falls oddly silent -- not even to scold the blogosphere, which he does often -- is on the question of Obama's love life. This would not be particularly noteworthy save that Obama's 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father is in large part a racial coming-of-age story.
In Obama's all-consuming search for identity, and in Remnick's effort to document that search, Obama's romantic life should surely have featured. Whether he dated white women or black women -- and what he might have learned from either -- matters.
In Obama's ten years of bachelorhood before he met Michelle in 1989, Remnick creates a credible picture of him as a popular, good-looking man about town. Obama's Chicago mentor Jerry Kellerman tells Remnick that Obama dated various women and "was more than capable of taking care of himself." Another Chicago friend, John Owens, claims, "Barack tends to make a strong impression on women." And Remnick refers specifically to an "old girlfriend" that Obama rather coolly abandoned upon leaving Chicago for Harvard in 1988.
And yet, unless I missed something, despite scores of interviews with Obama acquaintances, never do we actually hear from a woman who dated Barack Obama. The same vacuum is apparent in the book Barack and Michelle, Portrait of an American Marriage, by Christopher Andersen. Andersen quotes Obama's New York roommate, Sohale Siddiqi, on the subject of Obama's allure: "I couldn't outcompete him in picking up girls, that's for sure" -- but we do not hear from any of the girls he might have picked up or dated.
In Dreams, Obama creates a similarly romantic image of himself. At one point, when his half-sister Auma visits him in Chicago pre-Michelle, he tells her about a ruptured relationship with a white woman back in New York. He adds, with more than a little calculation, "There are several black ladies out there who've broken my heart just as good," but we do not read as much as a single sentence about any of these.
In Dreams, Obama recalls his early days in Indonesia, when he began to notice "that Cosby never got the girl on I Spy." Curiously, in his own book, he does not do much better.
In Dreams, in fact, the only lover Obama talks about is the mystery woman in New York. Although he speaks of her only briefly and in retrospect, he does so vividly and lovingly. "She was white," he tells Auma. "She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime." This is no casual relationship. "We saw each other for almost a year. On the weekends, mostly. Sometimes in her apartment, sometimes in mine."
One weekend, the woman invites Obama to her family's country home, which had been her grandfather's, and "he had inherited it from his grandfather." The library is filled with old books and photos of the grandfather with presidents, diplomats, industrialists. "It was autumn," Obama recalls, "beautiful, with woods all around us, and we paddled a canoe across this round, icy lake full of small gold leaves that collected along the shore."
It is during this memorable weekend that Obama experiences something of a racial epiphany. "I realized that our two worlds, my friend's and mine, were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I'd eventually live in hers." This realization inspires Obama to break off this relationship despite a gracious reception by the girl's parents.
Remnick concedes that Dreams is not to be taken at face value. He calls it a "mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping." On any number of points, all fairly trivial, he attempts to sort out the fact from the fancy. On the subject of this critical relationship, the one and only in Dreams before Michelle, he falls conspicuously silent. The reader of The Bridge would not know that Obama had such a relationship.
Christopher Andersen was more curious but made little headway in confirming the story or identifying the woman. "No one," he writes, "including his roommate and closest friend at the time, Siddiqi, knew of this mysterious lover's existence."
Abhorring a vacuum, I have ventured to fill it. Given Remnick's list of the allowable ways to interpret Dreams -- verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping -- I choose "D" for the mystery woman: "invention." In the absence of any contrary information, best evidence argues for an invention largely of Bill Ayers' contrivance.
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