Harking back to a day when rival editors did not bow to each other but rather took it to each other tooth and nail, Harper’s Magazine editor (and, full disclosure, Melville House author) John R. MacArthur takes apart

Barack Obama and David Remnick

David Remnick‘s “idolatrous new biography” of Barack Obama — The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barrack Obama — in a blistering, in-depth review for England’s The Spectator.

The book has been getting uniformly lavish praise here in the US, but why is it so refreshing to see passages like this one early in MacArthur’s review:

… the book has all the tell-tale signs of an authorised biography, crammed as it is with knowing inferences based on insider sources, both named and anonymous. Clearly, Obama and his advisers granted to Remnick access to friends and personal letters that were previously unavailable to journalists. Sitting presidents and their media counsellors take care who they talk to, and there’s every indication that Obama’s inner circle trusted Remnick to relay their version of the story, which he does dutifully, often at excruciating length.

MacArthur, of the Chicago MacArthurs, makes a point one wishes had been made in at least one of the American reviews, even if it seems a point of common knowledge: “To understand Obama’s cautious, essentially non-reformist conduct thus far as president, it is crucial to know how he got ahead in politically corrupt Chicago, but Remnick is either not interested in finding out or not up to the journalistic task.”

MacArthur also brings up a point he detailed in his book with Melville House, You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America:

There is nothing in Remnick’s biography about Obama’s eager courting, once he gets to the US Senate, of the sleazy Democrat-turned-‘independent’ Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, who continues to champion the invasion of Iraq that Obama once said he opposed. We hear almost nothing about his dogged pursuit of Wall Street and K Street lobbyist money (including the law firm of convicted felon Jack Abramoff) for his own and his party’s campaigns; nothing about his unfailing respect for the prerogatives of congressional committee chairman, or the spoils system that rules Washington, DC, through the awarding of pork-barrel projects and patronage appointments.

Finally, in a book that is “Deeply read — if not rooted — in the civil rights movement,”and claims Obama “derived his spectacular political success from the great and martyred prophet Martin Luther King, Jr,” and says his “life journey began, metaphorically, on 7 March 1965, in the middle of the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, when hundreds of black marchers … were halted by state troopers, reinforced by a deputised white mob, who bludgeoned and tear-gassed the demonstrators as they knelt and prayed …” — well, says, MacArthur Barrack Obama, Remnick version, may not really represent “what Dr King had in mind for the Selma marchers when they reached the other end of the bridge.”