RANT
OR RAVE
“The whole point
of the book is
complexity. If
you wanted to
say something
simple about
Obama, you’d
write a tweet.”
– Jodi Kantor
dia may focus more on this sweeping,
multi-generation narrative, but some in
conservative media have specifically zeroed in on parts that paint the Obama in
a more negative light: details of youthful
drug use and factual discrepancies with
the president’s 1995 memoir, Dreams
from My Father.
When Maraniss was writing his 1995
biography of former President Bill Clinton, First in his Class, he recalls getting
anonymous faxes from Clinton haters
sent to his hotel in Little Rock, Ark.,
where he was staying at the time. Nowadays, criticism comes in the form of
anonymous comments on, or blasts from,
conservative news and opinion sites. In
June, Breitbart editor-at-large John Nolte
called Maraniss “a shill” who is “deter-
HUFFINGTON
09.09.12
mined to downplay Obama’s lying.”
“I’m not in this to defend Obama,”
Maraniss says. “I have my own questions
about some of the ways he compressed
and used composites in his book. I’m not
defending that, but I’m trying to defend
common sense.”
“He was writing a book from the lens
of race. It shouldn’t be taken as rigorous
factual autobiography.”
But although Obama’s memoir mentions the use of composites in the introduction, Politico treated Maraniss’ casual reference to Obama’s use of composite
characters from an early excerpt in Vanity Fair as a headline-grabbing revelation.
Drudge gave big play to the Politico item,
thus starting a right-wing meme of the
president being a fabricator. Although
Politico later added a lengthy editor’s
note to its post, the notion that the president lied in his memoir had spread.
“I sort of knew from the start of this
book that it would be thrown in the maw
of this bitterly divided and ideological
political culture,” he says. “I can’t pretend to be naïve about it. I figured that
would happen, but it is still unpleasant
that it has.”
Even the Drudge-fueled conservative
blogosphere reaction didn’t surprise him.
“I knew the right wing would simultaneously dismiss the book as hagiography and then cherry-pick every negative
thing they can from it,” he says.
Journalists are quick to praise his
work even if it’s not atop the best-seller