Book Review: “The Brief Against Obama”

It is a natural occurrence in the political cycle to experience a degree of argument against those who currently hold power. It has become custom to expect a horde of punditry and political books that analyze and denigrate policies, politics, and politicians. Obama’s tenure seems to have produced an industry of its own accord as the political right has produced droves of titles in recent years. Obama, love him or leave him, is an extremely polarizing figure, if not the most polarizing in the last 50 years. This polarization has created a market for mass anti-Obama consumption. The Brief Against Obama is another such a book churned out for mass consumption. Rather than offering any hard analysis of Obama policy, or offering any new insight, Hewitt’s book serves as an index of talking points.

Hugh Hewitt is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. He is also a lawyer. He frames his book on the idea that only the facts will be presented against Obama and for the most part Hewitt does stick to these facts. There are, however, two distinguishing problems with this book. The first is that Hewitt offers nothing new for the anti-Obama crowd to feed on. If you’re a regular listener of conservative talk radio or viewer of Fox News, you’re heard every case discussion in this book many times over the last three years. Obamacare. The border. The stimulus packages. Obama’s partisanship. Fast and Furious. Dodd-Frank. Gas prices. In many chapters Hewitt uses large excerpts from his own radio show to illustrate his point. Granted, many of these excerpts are from esteemed minds, such as Henry Kissinger and John Huntsman talking on China/U.S. relations, but if you’re a listener to Hewitt’s radio show you’ve already received this information for free.

Without new insight or facts the book is just a reference guide. But as I stated, if you’ve been following this administration at all in the last three years you already know all of this information.

The second shortcoming of this book is just how quickly it abandons “the facts” to deliver Hewitt’s own political pundit interpretations. When he dives into the border, he does nothing to dispute any of Obama’s facts, he simply uses Obama’s delivery of those facts to highlight Obama’s hyper-partisanship. Often he uses vague facts and sweeping generalities to deliver these viewpoints directly to the reader rather than sticking to hard facts and letting the reader draw their own conclusions.

Most of the subjects covered here could fill volumes on their own. Obamacare, foreign relations, the wars, the Arab spring, each could fill hundreds of pages on their own and each is more deserving of an in depth analysis rather than the rehashed glossing over that Hewitt does in the book.