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Obama didn't write his own love letters
Exclusive: Jack Cashill compares new prose with O's 'syntactically challenged' writings
WND
Jack Cashill
5/14/2012
Excerpt:
"In observing the campaign of the Obama administration, a correspondent asked me whether we were watching some diabolically clever strategy at work or just “sloppy chess being played by amateurs.”
In the case of the recently discovered Obama girlfriends, I will have to argue for B – “sloppy chess.” I will focus here not on Genevieve Cook, the presumed diarist who has gotten most of the attention, but rather on Alexandra McNear, who allegedly kept Obama’s love letters for 30 years before sharing them with biographer David Maraniss.
In a recent Vanity Fair excerpt, Maraniss reprints two extended excerpts from one of those letters. I believe that these letters were volunteered to Maraniss to impress the kind of people who read the New York Times.
If so, the Times took the bait. Reporter Adam Hirsch gushes over the young Obama’s “literary sensibility” and his “ironic, literary mind.” Although regretting that Obama’s “authenticity” has not made him a transformative figure, Hirsch remains “certain” that Obama “has it in him to produce the best post-presidential memoir ever – if he is willing to let that unguarded early voice speak again.”
What Hirsch refuses to question is whether that “unguarded early voice” is Obama’s own. On this question, Maraniss does nothing to enlighten him. As an Obama biographer – his book “Barack Obama: The Story” is due out next month – Maraniss obviously knows that controversy surrounds Obama’s writing skills.
Given that controversy, he owes his reader some proof of the letter’s legitimacy. He should tell us whether he saw a hard copy of the letter, whether it was typed or hand-written, and why it reads so much better than Obama’s published work of the same period. He does none of the above.
To this day, Obama writes first drafts of just about everything longhand. During the 2008 campaign, he explained his style to Daphne Durham of Amazon: “I would work off an outline – certain themes or stories that I wanted to tell – and get them down in longhand on a yellow pad.”
In 1982-1983, when the Vanity Fair letters were written, college students did not use word processors. If they typed, they did so on a typewriter. The odds are that this letter, if an original, was not typed.
This make the excerpts’ second sentence as it appears in Vanity Fair hard to explain, “But I will hazard these statements – Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats.”
Recall that Obama, in the words of friendly biographer David Remnick, was an “unspectacular” student. A Northwestern University prof who wrote a letter of reference for Obama reinforces the point, telling Remnick, “I don’t think [Obama] did too well in college.”
And yet writing longhand, presumably from memory, Obama has the wherewithal to put an umlaut over the “u” in Münzer. In college, I was an Honors English student and a Classics minor, not a political science major like Obama. I had not even heard of Münzer before reading this letter.
That Obama could embark upon a sophisticated, spontaneous discussion of T.S. Eliot – he claimed not to have read “The Waste Land” for a year and never bothered “to check all the footnotes” – should have alerted Maraniss.
Nowhere in “Dreams” is there any mention of T.S. Eliot, Münzer or Yeats, or any of the themes in this letter that so excited Adam Hirsch. As Obama tells it, he and his pals “discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.” This I can believe."
..........................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.wnd.com/2012/05/obama-did...-love-letters/
Exclusive: Jack Cashill compares new prose with O's 'syntactically challenged' writings
WND
Jack Cashill
5/14/2012
Excerpt:
"In observing the campaign of the Obama administration, a correspondent asked me whether we were watching some diabolically clever strategy at work or just “sloppy chess being played by amateurs.”
In the case of the recently discovered Obama girlfriends, I will have to argue for B – “sloppy chess.” I will focus here not on Genevieve Cook, the presumed diarist who has gotten most of the attention, but rather on Alexandra McNear, who allegedly kept Obama’s love letters for 30 years before sharing them with biographer David Maraniss.
In a recent Vanity Fair excerpt, Maraniss reprints two extended excerpts from one of those letters. I believe that these letters were volunteered to Maraniss to impress the kind of people who read the New York Times.
If so, the Times took the bait. Reporter Adam Hirsch gushes over the young Obama’s “literary sensibility” and his “ironic, literary mind.” Although regretting that Obama’s “authenticity” has not made him a transformative figure, Hirsch remains “certain” that Obama “has it in him to produce the best post-presidential memoir ever – if he is willing to let that unguarded early voice speak again.”
What Hirsch refuses to question is whether that “unguarded early voice” is Obama’s own. On this question, Maraniss does nothing to enlighten him. As an Obama biographer – his book “Barack Obama: The Story” is due out next month – Maraniss obviously knows that controversy surrounds Obama’s writing skills.
Given that controversy, he owes his reader some proof of the letter’s legitimacy. He should tell us whether he saw a hard copy of the letter, whether it was typed or hand-written, and why it reads so much better than Obama’s published work of the same period. He does none of the above.
To this day, Obama writes first drafts of just about everything longhand. During the 2008 campaign, he explained his style to Daphne Durham of Amazon: “I would work off an outline – certain themes or stories that I wanted to tell – and get them down in longhand on a yellow pad.”
In 1982-1983, when the Vanity Fair letters were written, college students did not use word processors. If they typed, they did so on a typewriter. The odds are that this letter, if an original, was not typed.
This make the excerpts’ second sentence as it appears in Vanity Fair hard to explain, “But I will hazard these statements – Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats.”
Recall that Obama, in the words of friendly biographer David Remnick, was an “unspectacular” student. A Northwestern University prof who wrote a letter of reference for Obama reinforces the point, telling Remnick, “I don’t think [Obama] did too well in college.”
And yet writing longhand, presumably from memory, Obama has the wherewithal to put an umlaut over the “u” in Münzer. In college, I was an Honors English student and a Classics minor, not a political science major like Obama. I had not even heard of Münzer before reading this letter.
That Obama could embark upon a sophisticated, spontaneous discussion of T.S. Eliot – he claimed not to have read “The Waste Land” for a year and never bothered “to check all the footnotes” – should have alerted Maraniss.
Nowhere in “Dreams” is there any mention of T.S. Eliot, Münzer or Yeats, or any of the themes in this letter that so excited Adam Hirsch. As Obama tells it, he and his pals “discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.” This I can believe."
..........................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.wnd.com/2012/05/obama-did...-love-letters/
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