What New Obama Bio Fails to Reveal

© Jack Cashill
WND.com- May 17, 2017

Pulitzer Prize-winner David Garrow has written the ultimate “bubble book.”

Garrow’s massive new biography about Barack Obama’s pre-presidential years, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, pulls its information almost exclusively from within the liberal bubble. Information generated from outside the bubble is pure irritant.

For instance, Obama has been using a Connecticut social security number since 1980. It first appeared on his Selective Service document. This is a fact, not a speculation.

The semi-major media have acknowledged as much but fail to offer an explanation as to why. There is no good one. But since the information was introduced from outside, by Susan Daniels, a licensed PI from Ohio, Garrow feels free to ignore it completely.

In March 2008, veteran black politico Percy Sutton appeared on a local New York City talk show. When asked about Obama, Sutton calmly explained that he had been “introduced to [Obama] by a friend.”

The friend's name was Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, and the introduction had taken place about 20 years prior.  Sutton described al-Mansour as "the principal adviser to one of the world's richest men." The billionaire in question was Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.

They wanted Sutton’s help to get Obama into Harvard Law. Sutton provided it. The video did not surface until after Obama had won the primary so the bubble media suppressed it, and Garrow ignored it.

Obama sealed his grades, SAT scores, and LSAT scores as well as his Occidental College financial aid records, his Harvard Law School records, his Columbia senior thesis, his Columbia College records, his record with Illinois State Bar Association and his passport records. 

There is a nicely symbiotic explanation as to why these records remain sealed: Obama has not wanted to show them and the media have not wanted to see them. Garrow showed little or no interest in them either.

As to the birth certificate, Garrow tells a story that beggars belief. Obama was visiting his Chicago home in 2011 for only the third time since elected. There he discovers “a Kapilolani Hospital booklet documenting his August 4, 1961, birth among his late mother’s papers.”

“Charmed by the keepsake,” Garrow continues, “Barack directed his attorneys to release his long-withheld “long form” birth certificate.”

Charmed? Garrow makes no reference to Obama’s well-documented legal battle to keep the birth certificate sealed or of the pressure being brought to bear in 2011 by Donald Trump and the impending release of Jerry Corsi’s book.

Garrow does mention, however, that Obama revealed the birth certificate five days before his “signature accomplishment,” the capture of bin Laden. To him, the timing was pure coincidence.

Even when Garrow discovers new information through his exhaustive interviews, he chooses not to connect certain dots.

He reveals, for instance, that Bill Ayers and Obama both dated the same woman, Genevieve Cook, in New York City in 1984. If he asked Cook whether Obama had met Ayers, he does not provide an answer.

In Garrow’s retelling, Ayers and Obama meet for the first time in 1995 immediately—and conveniently--after Obama receives prepublication galleys for “Dreams from My Father.”

This is Garrow’s oblique way of saying Ayers had nothing to do with the book’s writing. To discuss that possibility is beneath his bubble dignity.

Garrow believes that he himself has discovered Obama’s real muse, Obama law school pal Rob Fisher, a Maryland-based economist. His explanation could only convince another bubble dweller. It is pure hogwash on any number of levels.

Dwelling outside the bubble—in “the Web’s farthest lunatic orbit,” according to Obama bubble biographer David Remnick—I am not mentioned in the text of the book.

I am, however, mentioned in the endnotes. The reference is amusing. It involves a poem Obama submitted to his college literary magazine as a sophomore called “Pop.”

Garrow writes that most critics, Remnick included, presumed the poem was about Obama’s grandfather, but “hostile critics,” namely me, claimed the poem was about Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis.

Unlike earlier biographers, Garrow admits Davis was a pornographer and a card-carrying Communist. The evidence that Davis was the subject of Pop is inarguable. Earlier biographers suppressed it to deny Davis his influence on Obama.

Rather than admitting I was right, however, Garrow closes this brief discussion with an insistence by Obama that he was writing about his grandfather.

When Garrow cites his endnotes, however, he adds in parentheses, “someone who is cited with the greatest reluctance.” He might just as well have said, “An irritant who dwells outside the bubble.”

For all of his acts of suppression, Garrow is no Obama fan. He concedes that “Dreams” is “historical fiction,” something WND readers knew before his 2008 election.

He reveals that Obama and Ayers were, in fact, “paling around”—as Sarah Palin said--for years leading up to his Senate run.

The critique of Obama he spins in the lengthy epilogue is almost exactly the same as the one I offered in my 2014 book, “You Lie.”

“Although immersed in leftism since childhood,” I wrote, “[Obama] never left the shallow end of the pool. He proved so adept at breaking promises because he did not care deeply enough to ensure they were realized. What mattered more was that he be seen striking the right pose, finding the right groove, spinning the right narrative. He is not a serious man, never was.”

Yet even in his critical summary of Obama’s presidency, Garrow cannot bring himself to mention the scandals that most troubled those outside the bubble—Fast and Furious, the IRS assault on the Tea Party, even Benghazi.

It is hard to imagine spending ten years on a book and missing so much that was so obvious. He should have given me a call.

Jack Cashill’s newest book, TWA 800: The Crash, the Cover up, the Conspiracy can now be ordered at Amazon.