Obama Shafted his agent

The guy isn't very nice.  And is nothing like his press clippings say.  Morality is for little people.  World historical figures like Obama are Ubermensches, striding above bourgeois morality.  Read the whole thing.

You may recall that, having failed to finish his book on time and having blown through a remarkable six-figure advance and had his contract canceled by Simon and Schuster, Obama was faced with the prospect of paying back the money. So Dystel saved his bacon by negotiating a smaller $40,000 advance — for a first-time proven failure at fulfilling an author’s basic responsibility to his publisher! — with Times Books, which he then spent in part on a trip to Bali, thus prefiguring BHO II’s passion for exotic vacations at other people’s expense. Somehow, he finished the book — which bears little or no stylistic resemblance to anything he’s written before or since — and it finally was published in 1995 to middling response.

Let’s let publisher Peter Osnos pick up the story in this piece from 2006, “Barack Obama and the Book Business”:

When Obama was selected to be the keynote speaker at the Democratic Convention in Boston, Dystel, who had stayed in touch with Obama, had the idea of reclaiming rights to the book and reselling it. But an alert editor at Crown had already spotted it on the proverbial shelf and it was quickly reissued in paperback. After Obama’s brilliant speech at the convention, the book took off. . .
Now comes the part in which Obama showed a steely side and displayed an element of character which, while completely legal and entirely within his rights as a writer, makes me uneasy . . .  After his victory, Obama, on the advice of friends I have been told, decided to replace Dystel as his agent with Robert Barnett, the formidable Washington lawyer who has represented the Clintons and a host of other major Washington political figures and writers. Whereas agents take a flat percentage of all the clients’ earnings—usually 15 percent these days—Barnett charges by the hour, which means that the bill is substantially smaller as a portion of the proceeds on big deals. Dystel, a feisty sort, was furious. I have no idea about the details of interaction between Barnett, Dystel, and Obama, but I would bet it was not warm and fuzzy.

This is stunning moral malfeasance. The relationship between a writer and his agent is predicated on shared risk: The agent takes on an unknown author with no sales track record as a leap of faith, hoping for a payoff down the line; the writer benefits from the imprimatur of representation, since few publishers accept over-the-transom manuscripts. For Obama to shaft Dystel the way he did is simply disgraceful — and, in retrospect, indicative of his fundamentally amoral personal character and his arrogant, manipulative nature.