Caesar Obama – by Robert Spencer | FrontPage Magazine

Caesar Obama – by Robert Spencer | FrontPage Magazine

The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Rocco Landesman, provoked ridicule when he said last week that “Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar.” He didn’t mean that Barack Obama is a literary titan who doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus while petty men like Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves. But what he did mean, while no less fatuous, is also disquieting in its implications: for the first time, the United States of America has a president whose supporters talk about him in the same effusive and worshipful tones usually reserved for the likes of Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong Il.

What Landesman really meant that since Obama was the most powerful man in the world and a writer as well, the President was the most politically powerful writer since Caesar. “This is the first president,” Landesman asserted, “that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln.” Landesman is wrong about this in several ways: as Scott Johnson at Powerline pointed out that Lincoln never actually wrote a book, and that Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon wrote books without employing ghostwriters. Johnson also mentions Bill Clinton, although I believe his direct authorship is a bit more in doubt, and John F. Kennedy, whose Profiles in Courage was ghostwritten; “my guess,” Johnson concludes, “is that JFK and Obama share the attribute of authorship in roughly equal measure.”

Probably so. But that didn’t stop Landesman from exulting: “If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.” Ludicrous? Yes. After all, the inevitable question is, “What has he done to deserve this?” Do Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope really merit being placed above Churchill’s The Second World War, The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, or even Theodore Roosevelt’s The Strenuous Life?