Last August in “The Obama Factor,” Tablet’s David Samuels asked David Garrow if he could imagine Obama joining the Supreme Court. “He’d be terrible because he’s too lazy,” Garrow said. “This in the book. It goes back to him being Hawaiian. At one point, he says, ‘I’m fundamentally lazy and it’s because I’m from Hawaii.’ That’s close to the actual quote.”
Garrow’s massive Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama reveals that Dreams from My Father is a novel and the author a “composite character.” Garrow also outs girlfriends such as Genevieve Cook, who like the rising star grew up in Indonesia. Toward the end of their relationship, Garrow notes, Cook composed a poem about Obama that said: “You masquerade, you pompous jive, you act,” and so on.
Garrow’s contact on the book project was Obama’s lawyer Bob Bauer, who “was also coaching me,” telling the author “whatever you do, don’t ask him about his father.” In the Dreams novel, that’s the Kenyan Barack Obama, who allegedly “bequeathed his name” to the American. Trouble is, Obama was born in 1961, and in all his writings from 1958-1964, housed at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture in New York, the Kenyan makes not a single mention of an American wife and son.
Barack H. Obama was born in 1934 and after his death in 1982, eldest son Malik managed a foundation named after his father. Before the 2009 inauguration, the composite character demanded that Malik shut down the website and stop the foundation. “He was the kind of person that wants people to worship him,” Malik Obama told reporters. “He needs to be worshiped and I don’t do that.”
Malik Obama also charged that Dreams from My Father was inaccurate and freighted with “embellishments.” Indeed, in Dreams the composite character describes the Kenyan Barack Obama as a “useful fiction” and “a prop.” The book claims the Kenyan looks like Nat King Cole, like saying Bill Clinton looks like Elvis Presley. Parts of the Kenya section were plagiarized from I Dreamed of Africa and African Nights, by Italian author Kuki Gallmann. David Samuels spotted a section lifted from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
In Dreams, the composite character is very fond of happy-drunk poet “Frank.” Garrow identifies him as Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist pornographer. As Garrow explained, “Davis’ Communist background plus his kinky exploits made him politically radioactive.”
“Frank” disappeared from the audio version of Dreams and makes no appearance in anything under the Obama brand. That includes the 2020 A Promised Land, which gives Dreams from My Father only a single mention. The book is a novel, and as Samuels told Garrow, “there was something about this fictional character that he [Obama] created actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now.”
The fundamental transformation of the United States of America is visible on every hand. Things are going to get worse before they get worse.
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