Monday, October 13, 2008
  From Jack Cashill / World Net Daily : "Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write Dreams From My Father, he had written very close to nothing.
As an undergraduate, Obama had written what he justifiably calls some "very bad poetry." He published nothing under his own name in The Harvard Law Review, where he served as an editor and as president. And after leaving Harvard, he published nothing in its review or in any law journal.
Then, in 1995, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called--with a straight face-- "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
The public is asked to believe Obama wrote this on his own. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. In writing a book on intellectual fraud, Hoodwinked, I developed an eye for literary humbug, and Dreams serves up an eyeful.
[...]
I had never even thought of Bill Ayers as a likely ghostwriter until I ordered his memoir, Fugitive Days, and began to read it. He writes very well and very much like "Obama."
Unlike Dreams, however, where the high style is intermittent, Fugitive Days is infused with the authorial voice in every sentence. That voice is surely Ayers'.
"What makes Fugitive Days unique is its unsparing detail and its marvelous human coherence and integrity," writes left wing literary guru and Obama pal, Edward Said.
Said adds that Ayers' "family background, his education, his political awakening, his anger and involvement . . . all these are rendered in their truth without a trace of nostalgia." He could have said very much the same about Dreams From My Father.
Obama's memoir was published in June 1995. In January 1995, Ayers had chosen Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, to chair the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grants.
In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, launched Obama's ascent to political stardom with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.
In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama's career...
Bill Ayers and Barack Obama have a good deal in common. Indeed, their respective memoirs, Fugitive Days and Dreams From My Father, read like they could have been written by the same person -- and, in fact, they may very well have been.
[...]
In the way of background, Ayers and Obama both grew up in comfortable white households and have struggled to find an identity as righteous black men ever since.
Just as Obama resisted "the pure and heady breeze of privilege" to which he was exposed as a child, Ayers too resisted "white skin privilege" or at least tried to.
"I also thought I was black," says Ayers only half-jokingly. He read all the books Obama did -- James Baldwin, Leroi Jones, Richard Wright, The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
[...]
Ayers was fully capable of crawling inside Obama's head and relating in superior prose what the Dreams' author calls a "rage at the white world [that] needed no object."
Indeed, in Dreams, it is on the subject of black rage that the author writes most eloquently. Phrases like "full of inarticulate resentments," "knotted, howling assertion of self," "unruly maleness," "unadorned insistence on respect" and "withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage" lace the book.
In Fugitive Days, "rage" rules and in high style as well. Ayers tells of how his "rage got started" and how it evolved into an "uncontrollable rage -- fierce frenzy of fire and lava."
Indeed, the Weathermen's inaugural act of mass violence was the "Days of Rage" in 1969 Chicago.
As in Chicago, that rage led Ayers to a sentiment with which Obama was altogether familiar. Ah, yes, "audacity!"
Ayers writes, "I felt the warrior rising up inside of me -- audacity and courage, righteousness, of course, and more audacity." This is one of several references.
The combination of audacity and rage has produced two memoirs that follow oddly similar rules. Ayers describes his as "a memory book," one that deliberately blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history.
Obama says much the same. In Dreams, some characters are composites. Some appear out of precise chronology. Names have been changed.
" Is this then the truth?" writes Ayers of Fugitive Days. "Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me."
"What I've tried to do," says Obama in the same spirit, "is write an honest account of a particular province of my life."
The reader knows that Ayers -- with some justification -- has much to hide. He senses that Obama does too, but he is never quite sure why.
[...]
On several occasions I have gotten calls from publishers to rescue a book, almost always one written by a celebrity. They have a vested interest in seeing that the book come out on time and in good style, especially if it is a projected bestseller.
My job is to match the voice of the author, capture their content, and refine their style.
Whoever rescued Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father went much further. He invested considerable time to invent a distinctive voice and style for an unknown author. In essence, he created the "Barack Obama" we know and did so for reasons that defy any marketing imperative
Obama, who had nothing in print until Dreams save for some awful undergraduate poetry, could no more write a book like this than I could paint the Mona Lisa. He has done nothing since, either spoken or written, to even hint at the eloquence of the memoir's authorial voice.
Lacking digitized, full text versions of Dreams or Bill Ayers' Fugitive Days, I have been reduced to close readings and yellow highlighters.
That much said, a textual comparison of the two books and the additional circumstantial evidence of time, place, means, and motive make Ayers a highly likely candidate for Obama's ghostwriter.
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