Public Enemy Read Free

Arabic name and a record of advocacy on behalf of the Palestinian people; and eventually an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” That last bit part would be played by me or my stunt double, and if I refused to cooperate, fading pictures of me recovered from my blazing youth would have to do. Each of us was cast as a public enemy, an opponent, and a treacherous foe of the decent people.
    I had joined the civil rights movement in the mid-sixties, true. I’d later resisted the draft, become a full-time community organizer and antiwar activist with Students for a Democratic Society, and at the end of the decade, in the ashes of a Greenwich Village explosion that took the lives of three comrades, was one of the team that cofounded the Weather Underground. However, not only did
I
never kill or injure anyone, but in the six years of its existence, the Weather Underground never killed or injured anyone either. We crossed lines of legality to be sure, of propriety, and perhaps even of common sense, but it was restrained, and those are the simple, straightforward facts.
    Never mind—Senator Obama, contaminated by his links with these dodgy characters, must immediately and repeatedly denounce, deny, and dissociate. The dramatic action involved selectively highlighting the histories and outrageous perspectives of these “un-American” eccentrics, ferreting out every secret tie and dangerous affiliation, and then insisting that the senator defend his associations. It was a war, and bloggers, commentators, and intrepid aspiring Jimmy Olsens on steroids began to man their forward outposts 24/7.
    There had been a lot of chatter for several months on right-wing blogs about Hyde Park, the now-notorious “neighborhood,” which was in fact a close-knit community on Chicago’s South Side where folks actually knew one another; about the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, the school that all of our kids had attended; and about the Woods Fund. Somehow, these scraps of facts were whipped into a toxic gobbledygook, including a story with growing traction in the self-referencing chat rooms of the Right that we were secret Muslims sharing a shadowy
masjid
in Hyde Park (proof: one of our kids was named Malik; one of theirs, Malia!), and another that I had ghostwritten his two wildly successful memoirs (proof: maritime allusions appear both in his book
Dreams from My Father
and in my first memoir,
Fugitive Days
!).
    On Fox News, Sean Hannity quickly made me into a special project, asserting again and again that Barack Obama had blurbed one of my books and chalking that up as one of his many sins. In reality, the
Chicago
Tribune
had run a feature in its book review section for many years in which they called people and asked them on the phone what they were reading. When Barack Obama was contacted, he was reading my book
A Kind and Just Parent
, and he had called it “a searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.” Hannity never bothered to find out if the book was indeed searing and timely.
    Hannity had thrashed around for a time, trying out a wide range of other fantastic plot points. I had written an editorial extolling the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he claimed, and I had killed several police officers. None of this was true. In the end, he simply adopted the story as it was crafted first by Hillary Clinton and eventually by John McCain and Sarah Palin: Barack Obama and I knew one another—no more than that.
    Slightly more surprising was George Stephanopoulos’s willingness to parrot Hannity’s story. Stephanopoulos, an old friend of Clinton’s, denied he was doing Hillary’s or Hannity’s bidding, but the day before the debate, in a radio interview, Hannity prompted him: “There are . . . questions that I don’t think anybody has asked Barack Obama, and I don’t know if this is going to be on your list tomorrow. . . . The only time he’s ever been asked