The New Neo

This WaPo article from last Sunday describes the reading habits of former presidents, including the much-maligned Bush who was apparently a voracious reader, and President Obama who sometimes mentions books he’s reading and is presumed to be one.

It’s always difficult to know whether a president is actually reading a book he says he’s reading, especially if the reading of said book would send some message the president wishes to convey. But the next time Obama mentions a book he’s reading or has read, I would dearly love to see the interviewer actually ask him a few penetrating questions about it and see what answers he gives.

Would they be very general—sort of like in a school book report when the student writes, “I liked this book; it was very good”? Or would they show that he’s actually read and thought deeply about it? My guess is that the man doesn’t read nearly as much as he claims he does, although perhaps that’s true of most politicians.

That’s not to say (as Bush’s critics falsely claimed of Bush) that Obama lacks the basic intelligence to do so. I have always believed Obama to be an intelligent man in the academic sense (yes, he was magna cum laude at Harvard Law, which does mean something), although certainly not the super-genius he’s purported to be.

It’s not been my impression that Obama is especially interested in most books, though, except for political strategy books, or books about other matters highly relevant to his goals and agenda. That perception of mine is based on his interviews; he almost never makes a literary reference in passing conversation, only when directly asked about his reading tastes, and then his remarks about the books he’s read seem to be rather general.

In researching this post, I kept coming up with articles such as this. They mention how obviously erudite and bookish Obama is (after all, he wrote the great Dreams From My Father!), and then deal with lists he’s provided of influential books in his life. But I haven’t yet found any links to an interview in which he’s asked more detailed questions, and discourses at length on just what passages he liked or what he thought was so fine about it. Perhaps such interviews exist; if so, feel free to provide a link in the comments section, and I’ll take a look.

What I found instead was the curious assertion that Obama didn’t really take up book reading until college. This is not usually the case for writers, and makes me even more suspicious of the provenance of Dreams. Speaking of which:

Apparently, Obama’s childhood was not particularly bookish but his love of literature was sparked at Occidental College in California where he admitted to reading “tons of books”. In December 1997, he even reviewed a book for the Chicago Tribune ”“ William Ayers’ A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of the Juvenile Court.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say (there, that’s a literary reference from one of my favorite works; it just slipped out. Book aficionados usually are first and foremost avid readers, ordinarily from early childhood, and we’re always quoting this and that author or poem.)

And now that I’ve said that, I’m trying to think of a good literary quote to end this post—and of course I’m having trouble doing so. So I’ve turned to trusty Google and I get this:

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read. ~G.K. Chesterton

[NOTE: The blogger “zombie” has done some research on that Obama book review of Ayers’s work. It’s not a full review, but was part of a feature in the Tribune called “Mark My Word,” in which “Chicago notables praise their favorite current books.” So we can conclude that, despite the fact that the Ayers book does not appear on any present-day list of Obama’s favorite literary works (pity, that), in the year 1997 it headed the pack.

Here’s the review in full, as far as I can see:

A searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.

I assume it was in the nature of an “you scratched my back, I’ll scratch yours” thank-you note to Ayers, although for what I can hardly say. Perhaps for the campaign kick-off party for Obama in 1995. Or maybe for the help in writing Dreams, if Jack Cashill is correct.

A guest blogger at Michelle Malkin’s dug up another nugget, this time from Ayers’s book A Kind and Just Parent itself. On page 82 Ayers wrote of his Hyde Park neighborhood [emphasis mine]:

Our neighbors include Muhammad Ali, former mayor Eugene Sawyer, poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and writer Barack Obama.

At that point in time (1997), “writer” was certainly not Obama’s most salient characteristic—unless for some reason Ayers wanted to emphasize it. You can draw your own conclusions about that. But Obama had started his political campaign in 1995 (right around the same time as the publication of Dreams) and had been elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996, before Ayers wrote A Kind and Just Parent. Obama’s biggest claim to fame at the time besides that was probably having been the first black president of Harvard Law Review.

At first, Obama’s book Dreams appears to have had only modest sales; it was long out of print until it was reissued in 2004 as a hot property in light of Obama’s Democratic Convention speech. What’s more, if you look at the notes here, all of the great praise of Dreams as a fabulous literary work seems to have come after its 2004 reissue (here’s the original 1995 NY Times review, which is mostly descriptive), and especially during the 2008 campaign when Obama was a celebrity and people were taking a look back at it. But Ayers knew about the book way back in 1997 and even characterized lawyer/activist/politician Obama as a “writer” and nothing else.

As I said, curiouser and curiouser.]

[NOTE II: Here’s an audio interview with Obama in 1995 on the publication of his book. It’s interesting that even in this interview he specifically mentions his grandmother as having had a fear of “black men on the street.” That’s the incident he cited in his famous post-Reverend-Wright race speech in which he used her as an example of bigotry. But if you look at the story Obama actually relates in his book, it is nothing of the sort: his grandmother mentioned being harassed by one particular aggressively panhandling man on the street, and it was Barack’s grandfather (and Frank Marshall Davis) who pointed out that the man was black and that the grandmother was racist in fearing him.]