D’Souza’s movie presents a new take on Obama

Dinesh D’Souza

Dinesh D’Souza is the part-time Rancho Santa Fe resident and full-time conservative behind “2016: Obama’s America.” This new documentary argues that our 44th president is motivated by his African father — a Kenyan who barely knew his son, but advocated the end of colonial power around the world — rather than America’s founding fathers.

On the political right, D’Souza is a powerful force. “If you were to make a list of the 25 or 30 most influential intellectual thinkers of the conservative movement,” said Jon Fleischman, publisher of FlashReport, a conservative online site, “Dinesh has risen into that category.”

Yet even many of admirers shrink from D’Souza’s current cause. “2016” is not yet in wide release — the movie, which opened in Houston two weeks ago, debuts today in Nashville and Kalispell, Mont. — but its thesis is drawn from two D’Souza books, the upcoming “2016” and “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.” When “Roots” was published in 2010, some of its toughest critics were fellow Obama-bashers.

The book, The Weekly Standard charged, is rife with “misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation.”

Ramesh Ponnuru, a National Review senior editor, agreed: “Again and again, the author attributes Obama’s positions to anti-colonialism when less exotic explanations would be given for any other politician who took the same positions.”

D’Souza, 51, didn’t mind these brickbats. Since “Illiberal Education,” his 1991 attack on political correctness in higher education, he’s courted controversy. This Indian-American declared “The End of Racism” in a 1995 book; a dozen years later, in “The Enemy at Home,” he placed much of the blame for 9/11 on the American left.

“He is most well-known for thrusting his arguments into whatever hornet’s nest he can find,” Fleischman said. “He uses controversies to educate people on the issues.”

Besides, that Obama-as-anti-colonial-crusader position? Other may regard it as indefensible; D’Souza insists it’s indispensable: “You plug in the colonial theory and everything about Obama makes sense. You pull it out and it doesn’t.”

Life-changing

Born in Mumbai, D’Souza first traveled to the United States in 1978 to attend an Arizona high school as part of a Rotary Club exchange program. He quickly determined to stay in the States, if not that state. Accepted at Dartmouth, he moved to New Hampshire and set out to become an American and star of the conservative movement.

“I think he’s a perfect example of what an American is,” said Gerald Molen, 77, the Oscar-winning producer (“Schindler’s List”) who came out of semi-retirement to co-produce “2016.” “Here’s a guy who was born in India, comes to America and says, ‘Wow, look at all the opportunity!’”

As an editor and writer for conservative Dartmouth publications, he assaulted affirmative action and other liberal causes. After graduating with an English degree, Phi Beta Kappa, he became an editor at Policy Review, a conservative journal. In 1988, he became an adviser in the Reagan White House. The next year, he took a position at the American Enterprise Institute and soon after became the Robert and Karen Rishwain Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

His tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue changed his life in two profound ways. He gained an idol, Reagan, whom he saluted in a 1997 biography, and a wife, White House intern Dixie Brubaker, whom he married in 1992.

In 1999, the D’Souzas and their daughter moved to Rancho Santa Fe, near Dixie’s parents. They bought a home that, while hardly modest (the 7,700-square foot residence was recently appraised at $2.1 million), is far from extravagant by Rancho standards. D’Souza loves San Diego, but couldn’t resist when invited to become a college president in 2010.

One problem: The King’s College, a private Christian school, is in New York City.

“It is difficult,” admitted D’Souza. “I’ve worked it out so basically I spend one week in New York and one week in California.”

Sparring partners

On both coasts, his calendar often contains out-of-town appointments. Born a Goan Catholic and now an evangelical Christian, D’Souza is a popular speaker and debater who has dueled dozens of notable atheists. In December, he lost one of his most frequent sparring partners when the journalist Christopher Hitchens died.

“I miss him as a debater, but also as a friend,” said D’Souza, who is as civil in person as he is pugnacious in print. “We would often have dinner after our debates. He was a lot of fun — I think we genuinely liked each other.”

Today, though, there’s little time for that brand of fun. D’Souza is busy promoting his movie, a major task as this independently produced film has not been picked up by a studio. While the movie grossed an impressive $36,000 from one weekend in a single Houston theater, so far it has opened in a handful of Red State America’s most scarlet pockets. According to the film’s official website, the six theaters now showing it will be augmented by two more — one in Anchorage, the other in a smaller Alaskan town, Wasilla, whose former mayor knows a bit about national politics.

“This is a scaled release,” D’Souza said.

Neither D’Souza nor the film’s publicist knows when “2016” will open in a theater near Rancho or Manhattan.

‘I help myself’

Posters for “2016” carry this slogan: “Love him. Hate him. You don’t know him.” Some conservatives, though, insist that Obama — who was not interviewed for the film — is nothing like the man D’Souza depicts on film and in print.

“To the notion that Obama has a ‘Kenyan, anti-colonial’ worldview, the sensible response is: If only,” George Will wrote in a 2010 column. “Obama’s natural habitat is as American as the nearest faculty club; he is a distillation of America’s academic mentality; he is as American as the other professor-president, Woodrow Wilson.”

D’Souza, though, points to an article written by the president’s father, Barack Obama, urging the dismantling the last vestiges of the world’s colonial empires. Then D’Souza turns to the son’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” When he first picked up the book, D’Souza expected an African-American’s reflections on civil rights in America.

“Then I see, wait a minute, this has nothing to do with the civil rights movement,” he said. “Segregation is not a big theme of Obama’s book. Colonialism is.”

D’Souza also dings President Obama for “traipsing about the country, saying ‘we are our brother’s keeper,’” but not rescuing a half-brother from a life of squalor in Kenya.

The Obama campaign, asked to comment on the movie earlier this week, never responded. As for George Obama, who has met his American half-brother twice, he doesn’t seem upset. “I think he has a family of his own,” he said in a clip from “2016” shown on “Hannity,” the Fox News show. “I’m part of his family but I’m over-age. I help myself.”

Will “2016” influence this year’s presidential contest, or will it merely preach to — and occasionally baffle — an anti-Obama congregation? Even successful political documentaries can’t seem to translate box office clout into the ballot box muscle. “Fahrenheit 9/11,” the genre’s all-time moneymaker, was an impassioned attack on President George W. Bush. A few months after Michael Moore’s film was released, Bush defeated Democrat John Kerry.

FlashReport’s Fleischman hasn’t seen “2016” and isn’t sure if he agrees with its thesis.

Still, he enjoys seeing D’Souza kicking another hornets’ nest.

“He is a hero to the right,” Fleischman said. “He is willing to challenge the orthodoxy of the left.”

And, on occasion, his allies on the right.