This week's literary quiz: is barack Obama a) an amateur, b) a socialist anticolonialist radical or c) a great destroyer? The answer, according to recent New York Times best-seller lists, is all of the above, which may be bad news for the President but is very good news for the uncannily sure-footed conservative publishing machine.
In fact, Regnery Publishing Inc. of Washington claims to have "the highest batting average" at producing best sellers in the entire industry--"by far." Two of the top three hits on the most recent list are from the Regnery lineup. At No. 2, Obama's America by Dinesh D'Souza makes the case that the President is secretly anti-American, bent on weakening the nation to atone for our imperialist sins. The No. 3 book, Edward Klein's The Amateur, is a brisk mixture of previously reported stories and unverifiable anecdotes, salted liberally--I mean, conservatively--with warnings about European-style socialism.
Neither book is aimed at undecided voters; instead, they both offer a backslap and a high five to readers ticked off at the President and ready to be reminded of all the reasons why. And neither is likely to join the pantheon of Regnery titles by such seminal conservatives as Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., Whittaker Chambers and Willmoore Kendall. Founded in 1947 by Henry Regnery--who also co-founded the influential magazine Human Events--the house has been a leading force in the American conservative movement from the start. As the country moved to the right, the firm became a hit machine, first under Henry's son Alfred, now under president and publisher Marji Ross. She credits a loyal core of readers, primarily men, who pay close attention to conservative media, along with a small outer circle of outraged liberals who want to know what their foes are saying.
Published in May and spurned by the mainstream media but given a splashy launch by buzzmaster Matt Drudge, The Amateur bounced straight to the top of the best-seller list; according to Ross, nearly 400,000 hardcover copies are in print. Meanwhile, D'Souza's book is the product of a remarkable feat of multiplatform repackaging: Obama's America renders into book form the author's smash-hit documentary, 2016: Obama's America, which is rapidly climbing the list of the highest-grossing documentaries in history. The film follows D'Souza as he travels the world in search of the roots of the President's supposed hatred of America, finding them at last in the anticolonialism of his deceased father Barack Obama Sr. It is perhaps the first movie to attempt to make a cell-phone interview with a historian seem like nail-biting drama, and it's certainly the first movie to show D'Souza learning to hula.
The documentary, in turn, is a dramatization of arguments that D'Souza made in his 2010 best seller for Regnery, The Roots of Obama's Rage. In other words, the new book is based on a film that is based on the earlier book.