Obama's Signature: Another Specimen Emerges

Scholars researching the writings of author Barack Obama now have another specimen to ponder. I noticed it in the September/October issue of Columbia College Today. Columbia grads who get the publication should check out the Class Notes column for the Class of 1983 (p. 70). There they will find the text of a letter that Obama sent to his 25th class reunion earlier this year, where it was read in his absence. For those who can't lay hands on a copy of CCT themselves, I reproduce Sen. Obama's letter here.

"Dear Friends,

"I want to thank you for the opportunity to welcome everyone to the Columbia College Class of '83 Reunion. I'm sorry that I am unable to join you all today, but it sounds like you have a great program planned to celebrate the 25th anniversary of our graduation and the accomplishments of our class over the last quarter-century.

"It's hard to believe that so many years have passed since we left this instititution to take on the world as new college graduates. I learned a lot at Columbia, found my focus, studied and came out with a determination to do something about the injustices I had seen and read about.

"While it may seem like we graduated yesterday, I don't have to tell you how much has changed. Since our time at Columbia, the world has transformed into a place where graduating from an American college without using the Internet is impossible. Medical advancements have turned many terminal illnesses into treatable disorders. New York City has recovered from an unspeakable tragedy. The challenges, but also the promise, of an increasingly interconnected world has [sic] been laid in front of us in myriad ways.

"Twenty-five years ago, we left Columbia with the wind at our backs. But in spite of our successes, many in our nation have not shared in the prosperity of the last quarter-century, and some are worse off than before. We must continually be reminded of the work that remains to protect our union and repair our world.

"Once again, I want to thank you all for the opportunity to share these thoughts with you today. I wish you all continued success and happiness in the years to come.

"Sincerely,

Barack Obama"

The Class Notes item added that one member of the Class of '83, evidently no victim of injustice, had contributed $100, 000 to Columbia in Obama's honor. That gift was also matched by another classmate who is CEO of an investment management firm. The Class of '83 column then continues with personal news about class members and their families.

What does the new specimen of Obamiana add to our understanding of Obama the writer?

At his current stage of literary development, the acclaimed author of Dreams from My Father strongly displays the influence of that popular voice of platitudinous epistles, Hallmark. Anybody who wanted to market a pre-inspired greeting card for liberal politicians to send their 25th college reunion couldn't surpass the formulaic banality of Sen. Obama's letter to his classmates.

Does the style contribute anything to research on the authorial signature of Dreams from My Father? I wouldn't think so. On the one hand, it offers no indication that it shares common authorship with Dreams, and thus does nothing to disprove or weaken Jack Cashill's thesis that Dreams was ghostwritten by William Ayers. On the other hand, any weight the letter might add to Cashill's argument is dwarfed by the material Cashill has already assembled by comparing passages in Dreams to texts by Ayers. For all we know Obama may have assigned a staffer to write this letter to his classmates, and it wouldn't be considered surprising or seriously unethical for a busy political candidate to sign a letter he hadn't written himself (although some guys at the reunion, the letter's addressees, might feel manipulated if they found out about it). A letter is also not a book, and the same author might write both in different styles for a variety of reasons. And then there's the passage of years. Perhaps at 47 Obama's literary creativity has burned out, and formula is all he's got left. That's not a recommendation for the U.S. presidency, but it wouldn't make him a liar when he claimed to be the author of Dreams from My Father.

But style aside, the utterly banal content of Obama's reunion letter sounds an errant note, at least to my ear. I find it hard to believe that the author of this letter ever wrote a memoir. Here is Barack Obama, a 1983 graduate of Columbia, gesturing toward a formative experience in his life, an experience that in some acknowledged measure he shared with his addressees, for whom it was also formative--yet he cannot mention one concrete personal detail that might render vivid his experience at Columbia and evoke the recollections of others who were there at the same time. Obama mentions no professors or courses that influenced him. He mentions no books that challenged his thought. He offers no reminiscences of all-night conversations about Machiavelli, Marx, and girls from Barnard (or Marymount...). He doesn't mention Alpha Phi Alpha or Omega Psi Phi, which as I recall were the African-American frats. No chess games in the Furnald lounge (and according to Dreams the young Obama was a chess player). No poker games in the John Jay basement. No pals, no subways, no volunteer tutoring on the far side of Morningside Park. Nothing. As a presidential candidate Obama can come on TV and tell the camera about a working class American he supposedly met in Toledo (inhabitants now 18, 000, 000, the second largest population of anecdote-worthy Americans after Youngstown), but he can't bother to recall one person he knew, one place he went, or one thing he did in two years spent at Columbia! If Joe Biden had been invited to address the Columbia reunion as a guest and had to decline, he could have sent virtually the same letter Obama did, and nothing would have seemed amiss.

The person who wrote Obama's letter to the Columbia Class of '83 is not someone who thinks of his own life, or anybody's else's, as material for a memoir--not that I can see. This observation would apply to anyone who might have written the letter. And it would apply to Obama, who signed it, even if he did outsource the wording of the letter to a staffer. If presidential candidate Obama was going to send a letter to his Columbia reunion at all, why not include some personal touch? For a Chicago pol, this would be a chance to lay on a double-grip handshake--and lay it, I might add, on a group possessed of some disposable income and lively interest in liberal politics. But Obama passed up the golden opportunity to make that personal connection with his Columbia classmates. If this man was ever interested in personal memoirs, he must have suffered brain trauma and lost all awareness of it. He's a case for Oliver Sacks.

Well, perhaps I'm being too hard on the busy Sen. Obama; perhaps I'm applying an inappropriate standard. After all, in his Preface to the 2004 reissue of Dreams Obama strenuously insisted that his career as a memoirist was merely a temporary diversion from "the business of my life," and that after a few months of promotional appearances he put it completely behind him. So is it fair to expect him to sound like a memoirist when he writes to the Columbia Class of '83?

I'm willing to cut Sen. Obama some slack on his Columbia letter. He never claimed to be a memoirist, and his Introduction and 2004 Preface to Dreams don't claim he wrote it. The letter he wrote, or at least sent, to his 25th Columbia reunion is nothing but what we'd expect from any on-message liberal politician, or an actor playing one.

The Postliberal is a 1972 graduate of Columbia College.