Obama Can Be a Prick

I hear all the complaining, but I’m a lefty and I’m not worried about Obama. Ronald Reagan’s conservative movement is the best historical precedent for the progressive movement that lifted Obama this year, and Reagan made a lot of gestures toward the center in 1980. I remember thinking that Reagan was trying to trick people then, to think he was an ultra-conservative. And today I believe that Obama is at heart a leftist who will bring about great progressive changes–notwithstanding his sick-making collapses on FISA, on campaign finance, on the death penalty, etc. I believe that about Obama because of his amazing lefty mother and his strong once-anti-assimilationist wife, and because of his own background and intelligence. There’s a hard progressive core there. Check back with me in 10 years.

People may be confusing Obama’s political values with his character. And we’re learning about that character slowly. I think he’s a cold, calculating guy, even a bit of a prick. I base that on his major accomplishment, which is literary; never forget that Obama is where he is now because of his writing: the 2004 keynote address, the reissuance that summer of the 1995 book Dreams from My Father, which became a runaway bestseller. A beautiful book indeed, about a kid brought up white mostly, seeking his blackness, and understanding the fluidity of identity.

I looked into his publishing history early this year for the New York Observer but never wrote anything about it. Partly because Janny Scott scooped me in the Times (though her piece was careful, not very critical). Partly because my wife said she would cut my nuts off if I said anything mean about Obama. Now Hillary’s gone and my wife’s calmed down.

In the winter and spring of 2004, when Obama was still a nobody, an Illinois state senator running for the Senate, his then-agent Jane Dystel contributed $3000 to his campaign, according to FEC records. Dystel was obviously loyal. She had represented Obama a decade before when he sold his first book (in part on the basis of another piece in the Times, celebrating the election in 1990 of the first black as president of the Harvard Law Review). That book, Dreams From My Father, had sold respectfully but not anything to write home about. But everyone associated with the book, including the editor Henry Ferris, and publisher Peter Osnos (whose piece on this affair is the best one I’ve seen about Obama), recognized that Obama was the real thing: a real writer, with sky’s-the-limit potential.

As I’ve written here before, I think there are some weird aspects of that beautiful book. His mother and grandfather simply disappear from the account, he doesn’t credit Ntozake Shange for writing he liberally quotes from her, his acknowledgments are paltry. There is a lack of empathy, a lack of ability to give others credit. The guy who comes off best is the guy who left him, his father. Obama can be cold. For instance, the book gives a pseudonym to one of the most important characters, the community organizer who hired Obama in Chicago, who we learned from the Times yesterday is named Gerald Kellman. In the book, Obama calls him “Marty Kaufman” and is at times nearly-vicious to him in the book–patronizing anyway. That bugged me. I wanted a real name, and a real story, and gratitude. It wasn’t there.

When Obama changed the culture with his speech at the Democratic convention in Boston in 2004, Crown reissued the book and it became a giant hit. The editor Rachel Klayman had the smarts to go find the book right after the speech. Then Jane Dystel started working for a new deal for Obama, for more books, and apparently was negotiating it for big money, when Obama dumped her. He signed a new agent, the lawyer Robert Barnett, who also represents the Clintons. The reasons given for this shift were that Barnett is not a literary agent and would get less of a cut on Obama’s deal than a literary agent’s customary 15 percent. Also that Dystel had failed to retrieve the rights to Dreams From My Father from Crown after the book lay dormant and out of print for 9 years. Supposedly a good agent would have taken care to do that. I don’t know. Dystel has a fine reputation (and declined to talk to me). But if she had recovered those rights, then she could have conducted a bidding war right after the convention, for the right to reissue the book. As it is, Crown owned the rights, and so it could republish without another advance.

Then that fall Random House announced a three book multimillion dollar deal with Obama, including a children’s book. It was December 17, 2004. Obama was still a state senator, a U.S. Senator-elect. He hadn’t yet been sworn in. As I recall from my research, it was important he sign the deal before he get into office, because certain disclosure or ethics policies would kick in.

Peter Osnos (who like me supports Obama) has questioned the deal. He points out that Obama got an estimated $2 million from a German company, Bertelsmann, for work he hadn’t performed. Yes it’s the way of the world, Osnos says, but should it be? Should people who go into public office be able to use their prominence to make so much money? Use the public election in this case? Osnos is oldfashioned, but he has a good point. Obama has been enriched by a foreign company to the tune of a couple of million because he was elected by the American people. Funny. (Funny like a fish, not funny ha-ha).

Apparently when Obama moved to Washington, he bought a nice house. He wasn’t sharing an apartment, like any Frank Capra type senator. (This is wrong: At that time, he bought a big house in Chicago. I don’t know where he lives in D.C.) And in fact, that is what surely galled Hillary and Bill as much as anything else, Obama’s jumping to the head of the class, with their agent no less. Jumping to the front of the line, with a big book deal.

Obama was able to do so because of his incredible talents, and yes because he was in the right place at the right time, but the story still leaves me cold. If anyone had given me $3,000 I wouldn’t be able to leave them, as Obama left Dystel (surely with some sort of payment; she is credited in this announcement with having “initiated” the book deal). The lesson here is that Obama uses people, as successful politicians often do, and moves on. As he’s using us now: us, his progressive base. I don’t mind. I’ll keep my distance, try not to fall in love. I don’t have to work for him or live with him. And I believe in his political values. So as Bill Withers said, Just keep on using me, till you use me up.