Book Slam: The Amateur

Book Slammed: The Amateur

Author: Edward Klein

Date: 2012

Publisher: Regnery

ISBN: 978-1-59698-785-2

Length: 277 pages including index

Illustrations: color photo insert

Quote: "Barack Obama...is at bottom temperamentally unsuited to be the chief executive."

Conservative contacts have been sending me enthusiastic e-mails about this book, so when it turned up at the local library I had to read it, cover to cover, and tell you what I think: It stinks.

Some people actually like "negative campaigning" with books that bash the political history of the candidate(s) they're not supporting. If you like that kind of book, and you're not supporting Obama for reelection, I recommend Laura Ingraham's Obama Diaries. Although Ingraham's book came out too early to include some of the breaking news found in The Amateur, it's fact-packed, funny, mostly good clean political satire, and it also contains more of the factual "dirt" you'll need if you want to debate about Obama's political record.

Edward Klein, to his credit, doesn't just repeat the stories told in The Obama Diaries. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a lot of new stories to add. If you were hoping for a serious, hard-hitting, man-to-man bash comparable to Roger Morris's Partners in Power, and if the opening line "This is a reporter's book" led you to hope for that...that's precisely what The Amateur is not.

Is that because Klein is, compared to Morris, an amateur collector of "dirt"? I don't think so...although Morris is a far more skilful writer. Despite the amount of unsubstantiated filth that's circulated about President Obama (which Klein, again to his credit, ignores), there just isn't that much legitimate political "dirt" on him. Bill Clinton had picked up tons of "dirt" by being a controversial governor during those long hot years in Arkansas. Barack Obama's early years of quiet private life, and one not-too-controversial Senate term, left a relatively clean record. Klein could have dug up more facts about Obama's "Chicago-style politicking," but he didn't, presumably because he thinks that kind of politicking is normal.

So, no, this book is worse than amateurish. It's a document of hate. It's a piece of overt discrimination. Klein doesn't go into the details of any pork-barrel compromises because he thinks it's more disparaging to label President Obama...an introvert.

Do we need a liberation movement, Gentle Readers?

If Alfred Regnery's heirs had been on their job when they accepted the proposal for this book, they would of course have reminded Klein that introversion is an hereditary trait, like race, sex, or height. Calling someone an introvert is like calling him a man. Since the choice of actively campaigning for elective office can usually be read as evidence that the person is not in fact an introvert, the case might be made that calling Barack Obama an introvert is more like calling him a woman. However, although making the case that President Obama is an introvert, or a woman, or that President Clinton was Black, or any similar chitchat about any other public figure, might be amusing for a fifteen-minute talk-show segment, it's hardly enough to make a $27 book.

However, Klein makes it obvious that he doesn't recognize any introverted tendencies President Obama may have as just another genetic feature like the shape of his ears. Klein doesn't recognize introverts' ability to relate to politics and society in our own, probably ineluctably superior, way. For him an introvert's style of management is merely unsuccessful management.

The result is that when Klein obviously thinks he's bashing Obama as hard as he can, I think I'm reading the nicest endorsement our President could possibly receive. I'm not actually convinced that Barack Obama really is an introvert, although I could believe that Michelle Obama is. I think the reserved, gentlemanly manner that has to be the best thing our current President has going for him is more easily explained as an effect of class and background than of temperament. Real introverts don't campaign; they advise the extroverts they use as frontmen. But admit it...after the last Democrat we've had as President, isn't it refreshing to have one who could be mistaken for an introvert?

Klein claims, on page 82, that Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter were also introverts. It would be interesting to know whether Klein is aware that introversion is a positive trait--or, more accurately, one or more of several different positive traits--and not merely a lack of success at learning extrovert social skills. Nixon was a classic "Type A," strong-willed, hostility-driven individual, but Type A's are usually classified as mildly extroverted. Jimmy Carter may in fact have a long brain stem (even in Georgia many people talk faster than he does), but he's never been known for any particular interest in creative solitude. And where's the positive comparison with a candidate who, although too liberal for Regnery's best customers, really has shown positive evidence of some degree of introversion--John McCain? Or what about Elizabeth Hanford Dole?

Face it, Republican friends: although nobody is perfect, the Obamas really are a class act. If you want to bash them, forget about trying to bash them personally. Bash them politically. While they present themselves as nice, quiet, wholesome family types, the Obamas are endlessly bashable on just one front: they have presented themselves as true believers in an ideology that has been presented as anti-American, can certainly be described as un-American, and has done measurable harm to America.

Klein could and should have found more to say about the abomination called Obamacare, about Obama's peculiar shift of position on same-sex marriage, about the appalling fascism of the "Safe Food Act," and most of all about the story Harry C. Alford handed him, which Klein allows only four paragraphs on pages 188-189. "[Obama's] view of business is that it should be a few major corporations[,] which are totally unionized and working with the government, which should also be massive and reaching every level of American society," Klein quotes Alford as saying. "George W. Bush [observed that]...'unions discriminate against small business, women, and minorities.' So here we were with the first [B]lack president who deliberately discriminates against small business, women, and minorities. How ironic!"

That's the stuff of which a valid anti-Obama book would have been made. The ball slammed into his chest...and Klein dropped it, and went doping off instead on long whines about how Obama failed to kiss up to--points for guessing this, because it's so obvious you wouldn't have thought Klein would have tried to get away with it--the Jewish Establishment and the Kennedy clan. (If the connection's not obvious to you, that's because you've not read the front flyleaves of The Amateur, which mention that Edward Klein has written six other books about the Kennedy clan. He may have collected endorsements from Don Trump and Norman Podhoretz, but Klein is not a Real Republican.)

I'm not planning to vote for Obama in November, although I don't look forward to voting for his White twin either. And I would have liked to have boosted the signal for a book that exposed the real scandals in the Obama administration, the public displays of religiosity taken together with the private remarks about people who "cling to guns and religion," the way our President went down like a sub on the individual mandate he claimed not to want in Obamacare, the as yet largely ignored evils of a Safe Food Act that literally criminalizes small farms, the inherent hypocrisy of cap-and-trade "environmentalist" gestures that amount to pure fascism (and don't clean up the environment), the consistent boosting of big businesses over small ones...

And this is the best Regnery can do? Being an introvert, I'm attracted to the oldfashioned word choices of periods when my kind of people were making the English-speaking world great. For shame!