Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America's First Postmodern President

Jack Cashill

Feb 2011 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

Did Obama write his own books and is the story they tell true?

“I've written two books,” Barack Obama told a crowd of teachers in July of 2008. “I actually wrote them myself.” The teachers exploded in laughter. They got the joke: lesser politicians were not bright enough to do the same. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama supporters pointed to the first of those two books, the 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, as proof of Obama’s superior intellect. Time magazine called Dreams “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.” The Obama campaign machine traded on the candidate’s literary reputation, encouraging volunteers to “get out the vote and keep talking to others about the genius of Barack Obama.”

There was just one small flaw, as writer and literary detective Jack Cashill discovered months before the November 2008 election: nothing in Obama’s history suggested he was capable of writing either Dreams or his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope. In fact, as Cashill continued his research, he came to the shocking conclusion that the real craftsman behind Dreams was terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers.

“This was a charge,” David Remnick admits in his definitive Obama biography, The Bridge, “that if ever proved true, or believed to be true among enough voters, could have been the end of the candidacy.”

Deconstructing Obama tells the story of what happens when a citizen journalist discovers a game-changing reality that the media refuse to acknowledge. Despite their rejection, Cashill expanded his research into Obama’s literary canon. As he came to see, if Dreams serves as sacred text, the poem “Pop” is the Rosetta stone, the key to deciphering Obama’s shrouded past, his fragile psyche, and his uniquely cryptic political life. In unlocking that past, Cashill discovered that the story that Obama has been telling all his life varies from the true story in ways big and small. In fact, much of Obama’s life story appears to be a wholly constructed fabrication, one that Jack Cashill “deconstructs” to show the world just who Barack Obama really is.

Ratings and reviews

The author, Jack Cashill, has a knack for untangling the mistruths and half-truths surrounding seemingly obvious subjects. Before reading "Deconstrucing Obama" I thought our president was the product of an improbable love between a woman from Kansas and a man from Kenya, and that mom and dad lived together during their child's first two years. Maybe the "improbable love" part is true, but the first two years part comes under serious question in Cashill's well-researched book. What amuses me, after reading this book, is reading other so-called biographies of mom and dad -- and then finding the factual fudging of these other authors. That the major media steadfastly ignore this book says a lot. I think Cashill, in his well-written and easy-to-understand way, has pointed out the lies and done it convincingly. Two thumbs up.

Horrible book. Wish i could have given it a negative rating

I love it

About the author

An independent writer and producer, Jack Cashill has written a dozen nonfiction books and appeared on C-SPAN’s Book TV ten times. He also produced a score of feature-length documentaries. Jack serves as executive editor of Ingram’s Magazine. He writes regularly for American Thinker, American Spectator, and WorldNetDaily and has also written for the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, the Washington Post, and the Weekly Standard. Jack has a Ph.D. from Purdue University in American studies and has taught at a French university under the auspices of the Fulbright program.