The most extraordinary article appeared Tuesday, seemingly unsung and stealthily by moonlight, and that’s all I’m going to talk about it. It was published in something called Tablet Magazine (John and I have both linked to it in the Headline section in the past 18 hours), but it is just so gobsmacking, I wanted to put it front and center. Tablet’s literary editor David Samuels has a lengthy, fascinating, horrifying discussion about and with historian David Garrow. Mr. Garrow is the author of a 2017 book titled Rising Star – an in-depth look at Barack Obama’s early years as described in Obama’s Dreams from My Father.

This story is horrifying. https://t.co/fYmc0Xk3Mw

— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) August 3, 2023

To which we all raise a universal “Nothing could be more boring,” right? Also partly why, I’m sure, there wasn’t much of splash for Mr. Garrow’s truly impressive gumshoe work – he actually tracked down and interviewed the people Obama spoke of and lived with in his Dreams effort.

But by 2017, we were almost universally delighted to be shut of Mr. Perfect Creases, and the world was already wholly enveloped in the sturm und drang ushered in with the Trump presidency.

Mr. Garrow’s book came and went with barely a peep.

Until day before yesterday.

What Samuels’ extensive interview and article exposes are not only the fabrications and fantasies that made Barack Obama the premier poseur we see today – documented in meticulous detail – but it also builds the true picture of the “free” American press as the compliant, obedient regime lapdogs we all knew them to be. How their fawning complicity by incuriously allowing the establishment of the Obama public façade…

…has enabled this evil manifestation to continue to rule the country for a third term through his surrogates managing the supine and venal puppet currently in the White House.

A pivotal moment in Obama’s melodramatic autobiography begins the journey, and is proven to be a lie. A lie not one boot-licking Washington “journalist” thought to pick up a phone and parse with the other person involved in the emotional contretemps that supposedly changed the course of Obama’s life.

There is a fascinating passage in Rising Star, David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama’s early years, in which the historian examines Obama’s account in Dreams from My Father of his breakup with his longtime Chicago girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism. As readers, we know that the stakes of this decision would become more than simply personal: The Black American man that Obama wills into being in this scene would go on to marry a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago named Michelle Robinson and, after a meteoric rise, win election as the first Black president of the United States.

Yet what Garrow documented, after tracking down and interviewing Sheila Miyoshi Jager, was an explosive fight over a very different subject. In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.

…Perhaps the most revealing thing about Jager’s account of her fight with Obama, though, is that not one reporter in America bothered to interview her before David Garrow found her, near the end of Obama’s presidency….

…The idea that the celebrated journalists who wrote popular biographies of Obama and became enthusiastic members of his personal claque couldn’t locate Jager—or never knew who she was—defies belief. It seems more likely that the character Obama fashioned in Dreams had been defined—by Obama—as being beyond the reach of normal reportorial scrutiny. Indeed, Garrow’s biography of Obama’s early years is filled with such corrections of a historical record that Obama more or less invented himself…

The mainstream media, Mr. Samuels says, almost instantly became Obama’s cult following even as Mr. Garrow, on the other hand, seemed to be into asking questions of everyone involved, exposing Obama’s fiction as he did so.

Samuels also noticed the Obamas hadn’t left Washington as other ex-presidents tend to.

…By then, it was clear to any informed observer that the Obamas’ continuing presence in the nation’s capital was not purely a personal matter. To an extent that has never been meaningfully reported on, the Obamas served as both the symbolic and practical heads of the Democratic Party shadow government that “resisted” Trump—another phenomenon that defied prior norms. The fact that these were not normal times could be adduced by even a passing glance at the front pages of the country’s daily newspapers, which were filled with claims that the 2016 election had been “stolen” by Russia and that Trump was a Russian agent.

Given the stakes, then, it seemed churlish to object to the Obamas’ quiet family life in Kalorama —or to report on the comings and goings of Democratic political operatives and office-seekers from their mansion, or to the swift substitution of Obama as party leader for Hillary Clinton, who after all was the person who had supposedly been cheated out of the presidency. Why even mention the strangeness of the overall setup, which surely paled next to the raw menace of Donald Trump, who lurched from one crisis to the next while lashing out at his enemies and probably selling out the country to Vladimir Putin?

After all, Obama himself had never said he’d turn down a third term.

…That Obama might enjoy serving as a third-term president in all but name, running the government from his iPhone, was a thought expressed in public by Obama himself, both before and after he left office. “I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony,” he told Steven Colbert in 2015, “I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.” Even with all these clues, the Washington press corps—fresh off their years of broadcasting fantasies about secret communications links between Trump Tower and the Kremlin—seemed unable to imagine, let alone report on, Obama’s role in government.

The actual Q and A with Garrow is…wow. I excerpt a few here: the bold type is Samuels question or commenting on Garrow’s answers – emphasis, mine.

…Bob [Bauer[ is Barack’s lawyer, but he was also coaching me. My clearest memory, and there’s nothing officially off the record with Bob, so I think I can say this, and boy, it’s the clearest thing I remember of all my conversations with Bob. … This is close to a quote: “Whatever you do, don’t ask him about his father.”

From the author of Dreams from My Father, that’s very strange.

He’s not normal—as in not a normal politician or a normal human being.

David Garrow was on friendly speaking terms with the 3 pivotal girlfriends in Obama’s life prior to marrying Michelle. Obama and those who are trying to maintain the carefully constructed façade are not happy and refused to make his research easy.

How did you get those three women, Obama’s college and law school girlfriends, to give you Obama’s love letters to them, and what was the most surprising thing you found in them?

With Alex [McNear, Obama’s girlfriend at Occidental College], I think she wanted to have her role known. So when Alex showed me the letters from Barack, she redacted one paragraph in one of them and just said, “It’s about homosexuality.”

And then sometime, right about when Rising Star came out, Alex indirectly sold the original, sold those letters, and they ended up at Emory. So Emory put out a press release saying, “We’ve gotten these rare letters by Barack Obama.” And no mention of this paragraph that was too sensitive. None of the papers mentioned it. Emory didn’t mention it

…Yes. So I emailed Harvey, said, “Go to the Emory archives.” He’s spent his whole life at Emory, but they won’t let him take pictures. So Harvey has to sit there with a pencil and copy out the graf where Barack writes to Alex about how he repeatedly fantasizes about making love to men.

Obama’s life is a cold, calculating work of fiction that he guards jealously, and constantly maintains the stage set for.

Barack’s love letters to Alex, if they are actually love letters, are hard to read. Not just because they’re so poorly written, but because of the clear lack of any human interest in the person he’s writing to. The letters are completely performative. She may as well have been a tree or some kind of theater backdrop. Maybe all young men are guilty of this fault, but these examples seem pretty egregious.

It’s pretty clear to me, and this is me putting little pieces together with Alex and with Sheila, but I’m 97 percent convinced that Barack either drafted all those letters in his journal and then made them into letters, or he wrote the letters and then copied them into the journal.

The first time—again, I can say this—the first time I saw him at the White House in the Oval, he’s sitting in that usual chair back at the fireplace. I’m at the right end of that, the couch that’s facing toward Lewinsky territory. And over on the desk, the only thing on the desk is this big pile of all his journals over the years. And he’s arranged it this way on purpose—to show me that he has them, and so he can tell me that I can’t see them. He’s got this big sack, I want to call it a cloth sack or a canvas sack, in the bottom of which are the journals. And then on the top of it is the typescript printout of my manuscript. So he’s carrying them around together.

The letters to and from Sheila. Are we ever going to see them? Not in my lifetime or yours. Certainly not in Barack’s lifetime will those journals see the light of day. I wouldn’t be astonished if he burns them.

Why? What can’t he let anyone see?

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.

Remember how Obama threw his grandmother under the bus, the one who raised him as his mother flitted all over the earth?

What’s wrong with that? At this point in time, only a very naive person would think of memoir as anything other than a literary genre that is cousin to the novel. It’s not history.

It’s so inaccurate, whether about the dynamics among the guys in Hawaii or what’s going on in the community group on the far South Side. And it completely omits women. I’ve always thought that there’d eventually be a feminist critique of Obama because his mother and all the girlfriends—they’re not there. They don’t exist.

There is so much here to absorb – absolutely so much we knew in our heart of hearts – but the machinations have been laid bare. The pretentious aspirations of a wandering, anchorless boy. The arrogant intellect who won’t have equals anywhere near him. The fantasy member of the gay elite, who orchestrates his public appearance, his own history, and private life as tightly as his razor creases.

A hollow man.

I hope you have a chance to read it.