The Democrat-media complex built Barack Obama up to be a mythical hero.
But Obama and the left only accomplished this goal by concealing his past from the American people.
Now his secrets are out in the open.
David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, recently published his book, ‘Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama’.
The 1,000 page work is an exhaustive study of Obama’s life and rise to power.
But it goes into too much detail for the left.
Garrow strips away much of the Obama legend and reveals him to be a flawed and complicated man.
This outraged the left who portrays Obama as the perfect human being.
David Greenberg writes in Politico that reviewers are doing their best to bury the book:
“So why isn’t the book on everyone’s nightstand? No doubt some readers have been deterred by its formidable length; at 1,460 pages, 1,078 of them narrative text, it’s not so much a doorstop as a nightstand itself. But some would-be readers have mentioned to me a prominent pre-publication dismissal by the dean of book reviewers, the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani, who trashed Rising Star (in her lead paragraph no less), as “a dreary slog of a read … bloated, tedious and—given its highly intemperate epilogue—ill-considered.” Four days later, a caustic viral tweet by the Washington Post’s David Maraniss (a Pulitzer-winner in his own right whose admirable—though briefer—Barack Obama: The Story Garrow’s volume effectively supersedes), probably scared off more readers: “Will say this once only. David Garrow, author of new Obama bio, was vile, undercutting, ignoble competitor unlike any I’ve encountered.” Maraniss, whom I know a bit, is a decent and generous man; he doesn’t lash out lightly.”
Greenberg writes that critics were upset Garrow demystified the Obama legend by highlighting the inaccuracies and exaggerations in Obama’s recollections, as well as instances where Obama falls short of greatness:
“More notable than the digs at his competitors are the gratuitous and even petty swipes at Obama himself. Garrow notes, for example, that while Obama was on his “modest” book tour for Dreams from My Father, his celebrated 1995 memoir, the future president “mispronounced W. E. B. DuBois’s surname, wrongly using a French enunciation” in one interview. He tells us, too, that the letters Obama sent as a state senator to Illinois housing officials on behalf of the shady real estate developer Tony Rezko were “grammatically incorrect.” But who among us hasn’t split the occasional infinitive? Even Rising Star—as fluidly, briskly and engagingly written as it is—contains in its pages a dangling modifier, a misplaced apostrophe and “impact” used as a verb.
The gotcha tone is most pronounced when Garrow compares his research to Obama’s recollections of his own life, which are continually exposed as incomplete, exaggerated or inaccurate. In Dreams and in other retrospective accounts of his past, Garrow finds, Obama overstated his facility in learning Indonesian, misrecalled a disturbing magazine article he read as a kid about a black man bleaching his skin, inflated his own importance to the Punahou basketball team, wrongly described himself as a bad boy during his teens, mischaracterized his post-collegiate work for the New York Public Interest Research Group and fudged or misstated the record in countless other ways.
Garrow seems to take pleasure in catching Obama in these mistakes, and I suspect that Rising Star’s critics were put off by his manifest skepticism about the Obama legend. Obama, after all, still has his cheering gallery. In the last year of his presidency, media coverage displayed much of the same solicitous protectiveness toward him that was rampant during the 2008 campaign and never quite disappeared, a sense that this phenom was somehow … different from all other politicians. Many of Obama’s long-standing admirers seemed during his valedictory months to want to restore the shining vision of him that reigned in 2008—the quasi-messianic figure, the rare authentic voice amid a fallen political world. This image was, of course, a carefully crafted illusion; Garrow quotes Bob Schieffer, the longtime CBS newsman, conceding, with understatement, that “maybe we were not skeptical enough” about Obama’s candidacy. But that sentiment, however common among workaday Washington journalists, was never widely shared among the literati and the intelligentsia.”
Now that Donald Trump is President, liberals are even more desperate to uphold the myth of Obama.
The left is enraged by the fact that Trump is setting out to undo Obama’s political legacy.
And adding in insult to injury, Garrow’s book rips away the facade liberal pundits and activists built around Obama’s life and gives Americans a clear picture of just who Barack Obama really is.
