Now about Obama's Teenage Years!

[Geee]

American Thinker:

Now that it has been established that a candidate's teenage years help define the man to come, it might be time to take a new look at the adolescent Obama and his then-mentor, the late Frank Marshall Davis.

I would guess that not one Obama voter out of one hundred could identify Davis by name, and I doubt if one media person out of a thousand has read his memoir, Livin' the Blues. This is unfortunate on any number of levels. For one, Davis's book captures the ebb and flow of 20th-century black American life as well as any ever written.

For another, no one individual influenced the young Obama more than Davis has. This combination should have made Davis a staple of the multicultural canon and a pin-up in every reporter's cubicle, but it did neither. Like Boo Radley, Davis remains in the shadows for one reason: the media fear what the light would do to him. For all of Davis's gifts, and they are many, his lifelong flirtation with darkness makes him a little too creepy for his own display case in the Barack Obama presidential library.

The light is beginning to shine. David Maraniss is sure to address the Davis legacy in his much-discussed book due out in June, Barack Obama: The Story. Davis is the title character of Paul Kengor's new book, due out in July, The Communist. And producer Joel Gilbert has made Davis the centerpiece of his provocative and highly entertaining new documentary, Dreams from My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception.

Gilbert argues that it is Davis who is the "real" father in question, not Barack Obama, Sr., as assumed. This argument, which I explore in my 2011 book, Deconstructing Obama, is not as far-fetched as it might sound. What drew my interest initially was a poem published under Obama's name when he was an Occidental College sophomore, titled "Pop."

To show how truly blinded by the Obama aura the media were during the 2008 campaign, all critics who reviewed the poem insisted it was about his grandfather, Stanley Dunham. Rebecca Mead, for instance, writing in the New Yorker, unhesitatingly describes the poem as a "loving if slightly jaded portrait of Obama's maternal grandfather." Biographer David Remnick makes the same point: "'Pop,'" he says as though a given, "clearly reflects Obama's relationship with his grandfather Stanley Dunham."

At least a few critics have seen in the poem an early flowering -- please! -- of Obama's inherent progressive decency. Writes poet Ian McMillan in the U.K. Guardian, "There's a humanity in the poem, a sense of family values and shared cultural concerns that give us a hint of the Democrat to come."