©Jack Cashill
WorldNetDaily.com - November 18, 2009

A few weeks back, the new head of the National Endowment for the Arts, Rocco Landesman, said of Barack Obama, "This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln."

Landesman was not alone in his praise. This month’s GQ has a faux-exhaustive article on “the untold story of the first man since Teddy Roosevelt to serve as author in chief.”

In truth, however, if Teddy Roosevelt came back to life today, he would find that he would have much more in common with Sarah Palin than Barack Obama, both as a fellow adventurer and as a fellow writer.

I am not being ironic here: Palin’s new memoir, Going Rogue, is superior to the 1995 memoir that made Obama’s reputation, Dreams From My Father.

A clue as to why can be found in one choice moment from Dreams.

At the time, 1988, community organizer Obama was contemplating law school, and he announced his potential choices as “Harvard, Yale, Stanford.”

What makes any narrative compelling is when the protagonist confronts obstacles and overcomes them through force of will and character.

But when a mediocre student with LSAT scores too humble to reveal can casually limit his law school choices to Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, the reader winces.

It is as if the good witch told Dorothy to click her heels together on day one and skip the damn yellow brick road. There is no drama here.

In fact, Obama’s career has been greased by affirmative action and its bastard offspring—“diversity”--from prep school on.

His path to power proved particularly stressless because of what a black friend called “his solidly middle-class” manners. By advancing the white-raised Obama, his mentors and bosses could ease their anxieties and still enhance their “metrics.”

Ironically, a program originally intended for those who have descended from slaves and survived the rough and tumble of urban life ended up most benefiting people like Obama who did neither.

As a consequence, Obama never developed the character that comes with earned success. Lacking real obstacles, he has had to fabricate—or have fabricated for him--a whole string of racial slights and injustices.

In his recent book, Barack and Michelle, Chistopher Andersen quotes a black friend of Obama’s from Hawaii who rejected Obama’s claimed reason for being benched in a basketball game.

“No, Barry, it’s not because you’re black. It’s because you missed two shots in a row.”

Many of the moments of racial reckoning in Dreams have proved equally false: the Life Magazine exposé of skin whiteners, the insensitive white girlfriend in New York, the suit-and-tie job “behind enemy lines” in corporate America. Others, though unfalsifiable, sound equally mendacious and, if true, merely trivial.

Palin, like Obama an unusual duck from an outlier state, also played basketball. She writes not about her slights, however, but about the accomplishment of her team.

In Dreams, there is no sense of team or game, and the only scores the reader is aware of are those are the racial ones that need to be settled.

The language of Dreams is, to be sure, more lyrical, but it is not Obama’s language. He never breathed it before and has not done so since. Skillful as it is, the style rings as false as the book’s fabricated details.

Unlike Obama, Palin has admitted to having a collaborator. Whoever put pen to page, however, did so in Palin’s voice. There is not a sentence of the book she could not have written.

Palin’s book is not great art, but her story is captivating and humbly told. As a woman in a series of historically male professions—sports journalism, commercial fishing, Alaska politics—she actually does overcome genuine resistance to achieve unlikely success.

Along the way, Palin never whines. She charms. She also appreciates and enthuses. Her evocations of small town Alaska life and big sky Alaska adventure cheer the soul. There is no equivalent appreciation of anything in Dreams.

Half way through Going Rogue, I look forward to the further adventures of our plucky heroine and the Palin family, especially husband Todd whose history is so much more “diverse” and manly than Obama’s that Dreams should have been written about him.

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