(LifeSiteNews) — Former President Barack Obama is celebrity-obsessed, more similar in personality to his successor Donald Trump than many would care to admit, and used to “repeatedly fantasize” about having sex with other men, says biographer David Garrow among a litany of bombshell claims in a new interview.
On August 2, Tablet Magazine published an extensive interview with Garrow, a Pulitzer-winning biographer whose subjects have included Obama and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
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The piece opens with a summary of Obama’s version of his breakup with college girlfriend Sheila Miyoshi Jager (now an Oberlin College professor), which in his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father Obama says stemmed from a disagreement after attending a play by black playwright August Wilson (although in Dreams, Jager is not identified but rather combined with other ex-girlfriends into a composite character). In the book, Obama presents his girlfriend as insufficiently sensitive to the black experience.
Garrow, who interviewed Jager for his 2017 book Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, relays that according to her, the breakup actually followed an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.
“In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism” of the type perpetuate by extremists such as Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, he says. “[W]hat upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn [black Chicago mayoral aide Steve] Cokely’s comments [accusing doctors of intentionally infecting black babies with AIDS]. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.”
After Obama left office, a photo surfaced of him having met with Farrakhan in 2005 for a Congressional Black Caucus event. During his candidacy and presidency, he also faced scrutiny from Republicans, but not the mainstream press, about the influence of another black radical, his longtime Marxist “spiritual advisor” Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
“Garrow’s biography of Obama’s early years is filled with such corrections of a historical record that Obama more or less invented himself,” Tablet’s David Samuels writes. “Based on years of careful record-searching and patient interviewing, Rising Star highlights a remarkable lack of curiosity on the part of mainstream reporters and institutions about a man who almost instantaneously was treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult. Yet when it came out six years ago, Rising Star was mostly ignored.”
Among those shocking details Samuels and Garrow discussed are a letter shared by another ex-girlfriend, Alex McNear, in which he allegedly wrote to her “about how he repeatedly fantasizes about making love to men,” a detail redacted from the original version of the letter Garrow saw for the book but later found in the letter itself, which was in the archives of Emory University.
Garrow recalls from his interactions with Obama attorney Bob Bauer, who acted as intermediary in arranging interviews with the 44th president, that Bauer told him “whatever you do, don’t ask him about his father,” which was considered strange given the prominence of Obama’s father to his own memoir. “He’s not normal – as in not a normal politician or a normal human being,” Garrow says of Obama.
Garrow summarizes Obama’s account of his life story as “so fictionalized” to the point that he does not expect the president’s personal journals to ever be released to the public. “I wouldn’t be astonished if he burns them,” he says. “For me to conclude that Dreams from My Father was historical fiction – oh God, did that infuriate him.”
These days, Garrow says, the most interesting thing about Obama “this past five years is how completely he’s vanished” since leaving office.
Obama “has no interest in building the Democratic Party as an institution,” he contends. “I think that’s obvious. And I don’t think he had any truly deep, meaningful policy commitments other than the need to feel and to be perceived as victorious, as triumphant. I’ve sometimes said to people that I think Barack is actually just as insecure as Trump, but in ways that are not readily perceived by the vast majority of people. I think that’s probably my most basic takeaway.”
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The interview also touches on other subjects of Garrow’s career, including the history of the American abortion debate. Garrow describes himself as “totally pro-choice” (while conceding a “tremendous biological and emotional difference between a 10-week procedure and an 18-week procedure”), but says “there’s no getting around the fact that Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Barrett are intellectually superior justices to what the Supreme Court had in 1973.”
On the possibility of a Democrat president appointing Obama to the Supreme Court (a proposal occasionally fantasized about by left-wing activists), Garrow says, “He’d be terrible because he’s too lazy. This is in the book. It goes back to him being Hawaiian. At one point, he says, ‘I’m fundamentally lazy and it’s because I’m from Hawaii.’ That’s close to the actual quote.”
“I’ve always found [the Obamas’] need to hang out with celebrities bizarre,” Garrow adds. “Because the people they both were, all the way up through at least 2000, would’ve had no desire to do that. It wouldn’t have crossed their minds to be with Beyoncé and Jay-Z or Richard Branson, or you name it.”
Garrow also pans the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal as “offensive and puzzling” and his signature health legislation Obamacare as largely a “fraud” but a “great achievement for the health insurance industry,” and predicts that the top legacy of his presidency “is going to be the failure to intervene in Syria and the failure to object to Russia taking Crimea and the Donbas.”