Jack Cashill - Barack Obamas Promised Land: Deplorables Need Not Apply

Also by Jack Cashill

Unmasking Obama:
The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency

The Hunt

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

ISBN: 978-1-64293-905-7

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-906-4

Barack Obamas Promised Land:

Deplorables Need Not Apply

2021 by Jack Cashill

All Rights Reserved

Cover art by Joel Gilbert

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

To my always supportive wife, Joan Dean, the rare university professor who would have tolerated me.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Aldous Huxley

Contents

In no small part, Barack Obamas newest memoir, A Promised Land , is a tale of what Obama aptly calls sausage making. He takes us back stage to witness the creation of TARP and the 2009 Recovery Act and the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank, all of which, in his book, were successes, if not downright triumphs. He offers the same detail with his foreign policy decisions. In all of these deliberations, he pictures himself as calm, confident, reflective, prudentthe very model of a modern major president. As cool and in control as he imagines himself to be, however, Obama hides the fear that has haunted him throughout his career and that undermined his presidency.

Many of the books reviewers, literary people for the most part, accept these details uncritically. They simply dont know enough about recent history to sort fact from fiction. What the reviewers missand what this book will provideare the details that Obama omits, the major stories he has chosen to bury, and his reasons for doing both.

In editing out so much that is true, Obama spares himself any serious introspection. By refusing to understand himself, he cannot begin to understand his critics. Rush Limbaugh may have said, I hope he fails, but in the one arena most critical to the nations future, Limbaugh wanted Obama to succeed. So did every other conservative and centrist that I know. It was Obamas friends who wanted him to fail. Unfortunately for America, they had their way.

O n Fathers Day 2008, Obama made easily his best speech on race, arguably his best speech ever. The setting was the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago.

Here at Apostolic, said Obama, after quoting from the Sermon on the Mount, you are blessed to worship in a house that has been founded on the rock of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. This is the same Lord and Savior who, alas, makes no appearance of consequence in the pages of A Promised Land.

Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important, Obama continued. And we are called to recognize and honor how critical every father is to that foundation. Obama spoke here from the heart. More than any previous presidential memoir, A Promised Land is a tribute to the joys and responsibilities of fatherhood. Would that all children in America could grow up with the love and support Malia and Sasha have enjoyed. Far too many have not. Obama knew this.

But if we are honest with ourselves, he continued, well admit that what too many fathers also are is missingmissing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it. Obama proceeded to explain the consequences of fatherlessness in words that his 2004 Senate opponent, Alan Keyes, might have saidwords that bte noire Sarah Palin would have cheered, words that the hated Tea Party would have welcomed.

You and I know how true this is in the African-American community, said Obama. We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubleddoubledsince we were children. We know the statisticsthat children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.

Here, Obama correctly identified family breakdownnot racism, not police brutality, not even the legacy of slavery and Jim Crowas the reason Americas inner cities have become the most dangerous and dysfunctional in the developed world. This breakdown, he strongly implied, was a byproduct of the modern welfare state. Just as pointedly, Obama acknowledged that the problem was getting worse, exponentially worse. He knew.

On this particular Fathers Day, thirteen-year-old Trayvon Martin and twelve-year-old Michael Brown had no idea they would prove out the truth of Obamas statistics. This memoir ends triumphantly with the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011ten months before Trayvon would be killed in Sanford, Florida, and three years before Michael Brown would be killed in Ferguson, Missouri. Obama does not tell their stories. Thats too bad because he understood what caused them to die so senselessly and so young.

On Fathers Day 2008, Trayvon was likely having dinner with his father, Tracy Martin, and Tracys second wife, Alicia Stanley. Tracy had split from Trayvons mother, Sybrina Fulton, ten years earlier, and each had a child with another partner before they had Trayvon in 1995. Thanks to the support of Mama Licia, however, Trayvon had survived his parents divorce in better shape than many young people do. Trayvon was in our home, 85 to 90 percent of the time, Stanley told CNNs Anderson Cooper after her stepsons death. Im the one that went to football games. Im the one who was there when he was sick. I want people to know he wanted to live with me and his father.

A year or so after Obamas Fathers Day speech, Tracy Martin abandoned his responsibility once again and acted more like a boy than a man. He deserted Alicia and shattered the one home Trayvon could always go home to. Two years after he lost his rock, Trayvon had descended fully into a life of drugs, guns, truancy, burglary, and street fighting. The cheerful boy in the Pop Warner uniform who dreamed of becoming a pilot existed only in the nations recklessly dishonest newsrooms. Trayvon knew he had gone wrong, and he probably knew why. His last words after being shot by the innocent man he had savagely attacked: Tell Mama Licia Im sorry.

Obama had the opportunity to set the record straight, but he chose not to. Long before Trayvons death in 2012, Obama got the word that stories like Trayvons were not something America needed to explore. In an election year like 2012, in a battleground state like Florida, the message of black victimization, repeated endlessly, worked much better in a stagnant economy than did hope and change.

Speaking from experience, black commentator Jesse Lee Peterson has explained why the message is so readily received. This pattern is so obvious I am still shocked almost no one talks about it, writes Peterson in his book The Antidote . It is this simple: children, black or white, when deprived of fathers, grow up angry at their parents. White children displace their anger in many different directions: suicide, bullying, and school shootings, to name a few. Black children, for the most part, channel theirs in a single destructive directiontoward and against white people.