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The stories Barack Obama invents to define himself*

May 3, 2012 by B. Daniel Blatt

“Why,” asks the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley writing about the excerpt in Vanity Fair from David Maraniss’s soon-to-be released biography of Barack Obama,

. . . didn’t we know all these details four years ago – even though some of them were published in a best-selling autobiography that was sold to us as if it was a fifth gospel? And yet we knew everything there was to know about Sarah Palin, despite the fact that she was in the race for a much shorter space of time than Obama – and only running for veep.

Via Powerline Picks where John Hinderaker, who has read a good chunk of the excerpt, highlights an event that Obama apparently manufactured for his memoir, Dreams From My Father. Genevieve Cook, a woman he once dated in New York, says he never took her to the theater despite Obama’s claim that he had taken a girlfriend in New York to the show:

No such play, no such dialogue. Maraniss charitably supposes that the event involved a different, later girlfriend in Chicago who was part of the “composite” girlfriend character. But Obama places the play in New York, not Chicago. My guess is that the incident never happened at all: one nice thing about fictionalizing an autobiography and including fake characters is that it gives you license to include events that didn’t happen but, from an artistic standpoint, should have.

When people who read my novel asked if it were autobiographical, I quipped that I changed the facts to make the truth more manifest, but I made clear that I was writing a novel.  I made clear I wasn’t telling the story of my life. By calling his a memoir, Obama indicates that he is telling the story of his.

There is a real question here not just about the misrepresentation, but also about the stories Obama chooses to tell (and apparently invents) to define who he is.

*NB:  Changed the title to more accurately reflect the meaning of the post.

And this story then deserves far greater consideration than inquires into Mitt Romney’s mode of transporting his pet in the early 1980s.  And Ann Romney’s wardrobe.  More on this anon.

UPDATE:  “The composite girlfriend“, writes James Taranto,

. . . raises another interesting question: What exactly is nonfiction? Using a “composite” character wouldn’t be acceptable in newspaper work; the practice cost Janet Cooke her Pulitzer Prize. On the other hand, it’s fine in a based-on-a-true-story movie dramatization like “Shattered Glass,” the 2003 biopic of New Republic fabricator Stephen Glass.

“Dreams From My Father” seems to have been based on a true story, but is it really nonfiction? True, as Politico notes, Obama discloses “the use of composite characters,” but is that enough? Shouldn’t he tell us which characters are composites? For that matter, if disclosing the use of a fictional narrative device is sufficient to meet the standards of nonfiction, isn’t every fiction book a nonfiction one, so long as it has FICTION stamped on the cover?

UP-UPDATE:   “‘Composite character‘”, writes Hugh Hewitt, “is code for “‘lie'”:

Recall James Frey, author of the non-memoir A Million Little Pieces.  He made it up key parts of his “memoir,” and got slammed by Oprah when this lying was revealed. “Composite events” like “composite characters” don’t fly when the MSM doesn’t want them to take off.

Read the whole thing.

Filed Under: Obama Arrogance, Obama Watch

Comments

  1. EssEm says

    May 3, 2012 at 3:46 pm - May 3, 2012

    Can you spell “Rigoberta Menchu”?

    And btw, questioning this president’s veracity or…well, anything….is racist!!!

  2. perturbed says

    May 3, 2012 at 5:51 pm - May 3, 2012

    What got me, looking at it from the Australian perspective, is how this guy publishes a memoir out of nowhere, having done precious little, and then the very next minute he’s being given a leg over the wall, so to speak, for the Presidency. WTF? It had a smell of manufacture from start to finish.

    Whether or not McCain was up to the job, I suspect you’d have done far better with Mrs Clinton. At least from where I stand, she understood, if only at second hand, what being President was about. And she was a known quantity with public exposure, going back to the early 90s, something that can’t be said for Obama.

  3. Sebastian Shaw says

    May 3, 2012 at 5:53 pm - May 3, 2012

    Barack Hussein Obama is a fraud. He should feel uncomfortable as the walls come tumbling down that it’s not 2008 anymore…

  4. V the K says

    May 3, 2012 at 6:14 pm - May 3, 2012

    Hey, Bill Ayers couldn’t be expected to get everything in Obama’s “autobiography” right.

  5. Rattlesnake says

    May 3, 2012 at 7:28 pm - May 3, 2012

    Yes, there is a lot that seems “off” about Obama’s past.

    EssEm, not only is it racist to question the president’s “veracity,” but it also makes you a crazy, racist conspiracy theorist. Might as well throw in misogynistic and homophobic as well, just for the hell of it. Oh yeah, and Islamophobic, too (because Obama’s not a Muslim, or something).

  6. Moses Lambert says

    May 3, 2012 at 8:07 pm - May 3, 2012

    Novel? You have a novel out? What’s the title? What’s it about? Is it on Amazon? Drop me a line to let me know.

  7. B. Daniel Blatt says

    May 3, 2012 at 8:32 pm - May 3, 2012

    Moses, here’s a bit of the story about my novel.

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