Who Wrote "Dreams From My Father" B.H.Obama or Bill Ayers

[Warph]

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/09/andersen_book_blows_ayers_cove.html
September 24, 2009
Andersen Book Blows Ayers' Cover on 'Dreams' (updated)
Jack Cashill

In his new book, "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage," Best-selling celebrity journalist, Christopher Andersen, has blown a huge hole in the Obama genius myth without intending to do so.

Relying on inside sources, quite possibly Michelle Obama herself, Andersen describes how Dreams came to be published -- just as I had envisioned it in my articles on the authorship of Dreams.  With the deadline pressing, Michelle recommended that Barack seek advice from "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers."

To flesh out his family history, Obama had taped interviews with various family members.  Andersen writes, "These oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers." Andersen quotes a Hyde Park neighbor, "Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together.  It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both."

Andersen continues, "In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant--so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."

More to come!

Update: Ron Radosh takes up the case.


Finally, Christopher Andersen concludes: "In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant - so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."


September 23rd, 2009 8:52 pm
An Old Claim Arises Once More: Did Barack Obama Write 'Dreams From My Father'?
by Ron Radosh

http://pajamasmedia.com/ronradosh/2009/09/23/an-old-claim-arises-once-more-did-barack-obama-write-dreams-of-my-father/

Those who were skeptical of Barack Obama's bona fides before the campaign, particularly the nature of  his apparent relationship (or non-relationship, if you believe Obama) with Bill Ayers, will be stunned by Jack Cashill's new revelation. Remember Cashill? He is a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University and a blogger at American Thinker, one of the multitudes of conservative websites.
In October 2008, Cashill penned a much discussed blog, in which he suggested the possibility that Bill Ayers actually was the ghost writer for Barack Obama's powerful memoir, Dreams From My Father. His claim was so reminiscent of the discussion before Bill Clinton's first campaign about who wrote the novel Primary Colors, which bore only the name "Anonymous." Some suspected Joe Klein, the political journalist. Klein vehmently denied the allegation. Then, he was forced to admit authorship when a literary detective compared phrases in Klein's writings and those in the novel for New York magazine, and Klein was forced to hold a press conference admitting that he indeed was the author.
In this case, Barack Obama did not pull a Klein, especially since, as Cashill wrote, "no reviewer of note has so much as questioned Obama's role in the writing." That left him, a rather unknown figure, isolated in trying to make the case. And as he also acknowledged, his arguments, although many found them compelling, could not be proved to everyone's satisfaction. As he put it: "Shy of a confession by those involved, I will not be able to prove conclusively that Obama did not write this book.  As shall be seen, however, there are only two real possibilities: one is that Obama experienced a near miraculous turnaround in his literary abilities; the second is that he had major editorial help, up to and including a ghostwriter."
And so his effort became just another one of those apparent conspiracy theories so prevalent in the ranks of both the left and the right. Then at the end of June 2009, Cashill returned to his original article. This time, he wrote yet another blog, reporting about many who sent him more material that they thought would corroborate his original suspicions about authorship of Obama's first memoir. Two contributors whom Cashill does not name, he writes, made a  contribution that "should dispel the doubts of all but the willfully blind that Ayers played a substantial role, likely the primary role, in the writing of Dreams." Again, the two contributors and Cashill played literary detective, offering more examples of strange similarities in the metaphors used in both Ayers' Fugitive Days and in Obama's Dreams. One of them found 759 striking similarities. Cashill found one of his contributor's analysis to be "systematic, comprehensive, and utterly, totally, damning." You can read his article and judge for yourself.
And now, Cashill picked up the new bestseller about Obama and his wife, Christopher Andersen's Barack and Michelle:Portrait of an American Marriage. What he found simply threw him for a loop because, I suspect, it was the last thing Cashill expected to find. Andersen writes in his book that after Obama finally got a new contract to write a book, Michelle Obama suggested that her husband get advice "from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers."

Obama had not as yet written anything. But he had taped interviews with family members. Andersen writes: "These oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers." Look over those words. A man Obama said before the campaign — after conservative pundits continually raised the issue that he was friends with an "unrepentent terrorist" — that he knew only in passing as someone in the neighborhood. He was simply an acquaintance — not someone he had any real friendship or relationship with. Yet Obama evidently gave Ayers his notes, tapes, and the small amount that he had already written.
On the latter point, Andersen also writes, quoting a Hyde Park neighbor of Obama: "Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together.  It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both." Why should it be secret? We know the answer to that. Obama was denying this relationship, as well as suggesting it was not true they worked on projects together. Everything that was ferreted out at the time that proved this was hardly likely was simply ignored by the MSM.
Finally, Christopher Andersen concludes: "In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant — so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."
Let me make the point as sharply as possible. A book about the relationship of the first couple, their history together, and their road to the presidency makes the point in passing that is precisely the same as that made by Jack Cashill. Most reviewers, and readers, will probably read this in passing and go on. As far as I know, no reviewers to date seemed to have noticed this. All they seem to have noticed is the one quote from Michelle Obama to her husband when he was considering whether to put Hillary Clinton on the ticket: "Do you really want Bill and Hillary just down the hall from you in the White House?"  And since the reviews of the book have not been particularly good, it might disappear from the public's notice fairly soon.
Now Andersen gives no sources or names; the Obamas did not cooperate with him. Skeptics will argue that we have no way of knowing whether his claims can be verified, and we have no way of knowing the veracity of those he interviewed. Who, for example, was the Hyde Park neighbor he spoke with? Some might even argue that he reached his conclusion after reading Cashill's original blog, without citing it. Andersen faces the same credibility problem Bob Woodward faces, since he is often charged with making outrageous charges in some of his books without offering any proof that conversations he could not have been privy to took place. But Woodward's use of such a technique never has hurt his reputation. After all, he is Bob Woodward. Reviewers of Andersen's book have had no compunction in labeling much of what he writes as pure "gossip."
In the meantime, Cashill promises us more is coming. I, for one, look forward to reading what he comes up with.

[Warph]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/breakthrough_on_the_authorship_1.html
June 28, 2009
Breakthrough on the Authorship of Obama's 'Dreams'
By Jack Cashill

Within days of my going public last September with the speculation that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers helped Barack Obama write his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, I learned that I was not alone in that intuition.

Since then, I have received helpful contributions from serious people in at least five countries and any number of states and have integrated many of their observations into my ongoing narrative, summarized here.  If you are unfamiliar with this research, please read this before going forward. 

About a week ago, however, I heard from a new contributor.  I will refer to him as "Mr. West." Like most contributors, he prefers to remain anonymous.  The media punishment that Joe the Plumber received has much to do with this nearly universal reticence.

A week before that, I heard from another excellent contributor, Mr. Midwest.  Their collective contribution should dispel the doubts of all but the willfully blind that Ayers played a substantial role, likely the primary role, in the writing of Dreams.

As a reminder, there is no reliable computer science for determining authorship.  In assessing the value of the existing science, think polygraph, not DNA.  Polygraph-level scholarship may suffice for harmless speculation about the authorship of Midsummer's Night Dream, but not for Dreams From My Father.  Too much is at stake for the latter.

The experts in the field have told me to stick with old-fashioned literary detective work, and I have done just that.  Mr, Midwest has helped.  His most recent contribution is a good example of keen-eyed detection. 

Going forward, I will be referring to five books.  These include Ayers' 1993 To Teach, his 1997 A Kind and Just Parent (shorthand: Parent), his 2001 memoir Fugitive Days, and Obama's 1995 Dreams From My Father (Dreams). Casual critics of this research have repeated the canard that I attributed both Obama books, Dreams and the 2006 Audacity of Hope (Audacity), to Ayers.  I never have.  From the beginning, I have asserted that the two books appear to have two different authors, and so I will leave Audacity out of the equation until the end.

What Mr. Midwest noticed recently is that both Ayers in Parent and Obama in Dreams make reference to the poet Carl Sandburg.  In itself, this is not a grand revelation.  Let us call it a C-level match. Obama and Ayers seem to have shared the same library in any case.  Both talk of reading the books of Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois and Frantz Fanon among others.  In fact, each misspells "Frantz" as "Franz."

Ayers and Obama, however, go beyond citing Sandburg.  Each quotes the opening line of his poem "Chicago."  From Dreams:

He poured himself more hot water. "What do you know about Chicago anyway?"

I thought a moment. "Hog butcher to the world," I said finally.

From Parent:

"At the turn of the century, Chicago had a population of a million people and was a young and muscular city - hub of commerce and industry, the first skyscraper city, home of the famous world exposition, "hog butcher to the world" - bursting with energy."

This I would call a B-level match.  What raises it up a notch to an A-level match is the fact that both misquote "Chicago," and they do so in exactly the same way.  The poem actually opens, "Hog butcher for the world."

Last week, the first email I received from Mr. West had in the message box "759 striking similarities between Dreams and Ayers' works."  This claim seemed so outsized I did not take it seriously.  When I was unable to open the documents, I emailed Mr. West back, asked him to reformat, and then forgot about the email.  He resent his documents a few days later.

This time I was able to open them and was promptly blown away.  Mr. West's analysis was systematic, comprehensive, and utterly, totally, damning.  Of the 759 matches, none were frivolous.  All were C-level or above, and I had no doubt of their authenticity.  I had been gathering many of them in my own reserve waiting for a book-length opportunity to make my case.  Mr. West had done the heavy lifting.  He even indexed his matches.  This represented months of works.  As I learned, he had been patiently gathering material since November when he first began building on my own research.

I read through all 759 matches and culled out those that I would consider B-Level or above.  There were 180 of these.  As a control, I tested them against my own 2006 book Sucker Punch, like Dreams and Fugitive Days a memoir that deals extensively with race.  In that I am closer to Ayers in age, race, education, family and cultural background than Obama is, our styles should have had more chance of matching.  They don't.  Of the 180 examples, I matched, strictly speaking, on six.  Even by the most generous standard, we matched on only sixteen.

Let me just cite a few matches between Ayers' work and Dreams that I found intriguing.  Rather astonishingly, as Mr. West points out, at least six of the characters in Dreams have the same names as characters in Ayers' books: Malik, Freddy, Tim, Coretta, Marcus, and "the old man." Many of the stories involving these characters in Dreams seem as contrived as their names.

In one instance, Obama reflects on his own first days as a ten year-old at his Hawaiian prep school, a transition complicated by the presence of "Coretta," the only other black student in the class.

When the other students accuse Obama of having a girlfriend, Obama shoves Coretta and insists that she leave him alone.  Although "his act of betrayal" buys him a reprieve from the other students, Obama understands that he "had been tested and found wanting."

Ayers relates a parallel story in Parent.  He tells of a useful reading assignment from the 1992 book, The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, by black author Reginald McKnight.  The passage in question deals with the travails of Clint, the first black student in a newly integrated school, who repudiates Marvin, the only other black boy in the school.  Upon reflection, Clint thinks, "I was ashamed.  Ashamed for not defending Marvin and ashamed that Marvin even existed."

As Mr. Midwest pointed out in a recent missive, Ayers' interest in education bleeds into Dreams.  The tip-off once again is the contrived name, in this case "Asante Moran," likely an homage to the Afro-centric educator, Molefi Kete Asante.  Moran lectures Obama and his pal "Johnny" on the nature of public education.

"The first thing you have to realize," he said, looking at Johnnie and me in turn, "is that the public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period."

"Social control" is an Ayers' bugaboo.  "The message to Black people was that at any moment and for any reason whatsoever your life or the lives of your loved ones could be randomly snuffed out," he writes in Fugitive Days.  "The intention was social control through random intimidation and unpredictable violence."

In Dreams, "Moran" elaborates on the fate of the black student,  "From day one, what's he learning about? Someone else's history.  Someone else's culture. Not only that, this culture he's supposed to learn is the same culture that's systematically rejected him, denied his humanity."

If this character were real, and Obama had actually met him, there would be no reason to phony up his name.  In fact, however, Moran is spouting exactly the same educational philosophy that Ayers does in To Teach. 

"Underneath it all," Ayers says of standard school textbooks, "the social studies and literature texts reflected and promoted white supremacy.  There were no pictures or photographs of African Americans . . . there was throughout an assumed superiority and smug celebration of the status quo." 

Both authors, by the way, use the phrase "beneath the surface" repeatedly.  And what they find beneath the surface, of course, is the disturbing truth about power disparities in the real America, which each refers to as an "imperial culture."  Speaking of which, both insist that "knowledge" is "power" and seem consumed by the uses or misuses of power.  Ayers, in fact, evokes the word "power" and its derivatives 75 times in Fugitive Days, Obama 83 times in Dreams.

More exotically, both authors evoke images of a "boy" riding on the backs of a "water buffalo" and prodding the beast not just with sticks, but with "bamboo sticks."  Ayers places his boy in Vietnam.  Obama puts his in Indonesia.

Both authors link Indonesia with Vietnam. In each case, clueless officials - plural -- with the "State Department" try to explain how the march of communism through "Indochina" will specifically imperil "Indonesia." The Ayers account, however, at least sounds vaguely real.  The Obama account sounds like an Ayers' memory imposed on Obama's mother.  She allegedly discussed these geo-political strategy sessions in Indonesia with her pre-teen son.

Ayers and his radical friends were obsessed with Vietnam.  It defined them and still does. To reflect their superior insight into that country, they have shown a tendency to use "Mekong Delta" as synecdoche, the part that indicates the whole.

In Fugitive Days, for instance, Ayers envisions "a patrol in the Mekong Delta" when he conjures up an image of Vietnam.  Ayers' wife, Bernadine Dohrn, pontificated about "a hamlet called My Lai" in a 1998 interview, but to flash her radical chops, she located it "in the middle of the Mekong Delta," which is in reality several hundred miles from My Lai.

Given Obama's age, "Mekong Delta" was not likely a part of his vocabulary, but that does not stop him from writing about "the angry young men in Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta."  Ayers, of course, would also have had a much deeper connection than Obama to "Detroit," whose historic riot took place shortly before Obama's sixth birthday.  Ayers worked in Detroit the year after those same riots.

Returning to the exotic, in his Indonesian backyard Obama discovered two "birds of paradise" running wild as well as chickens, ducks, and a "yellow dog with a baleful howl."

In Fugitive Days, there is even more "howling" than there is in Dreams.  Ayers places his "birds of paradise" in Guatemala.  He places his ducks and dogs together in a Vietnamese village being swept by merciless Americans.  In Parent, he talks specifically about a "yellow dog."   And he uses the word "baleful" to describe an "eye" in Fugitive Days. For the record, "baleful" means "threatening harm."  I had to look it up.

Ayers is fixated with faces, especially eyes.  He writes of "sparkling" eyes, "shining" eyes, "laughing" eyes, "twinkling" eyes, eyes "like ice," and people who are "wide-eyed" and "dark-eyed." 

As it happens, Obama is also fixated with faces, especially eyes.  He also writes of "sparkling" eyes, "shining" eyes, "laughing" eyes, "twinkling" eyes, and uses the phrases "wide-eyed" and "dark-eyed." Obama adds "smoldering eyes," "smoldering" being a word that he and Ayers inject repeatedly. Obama also uses the highly distinctive phrase "like ice," in his case to describe the glinting of the stars.

If Ayers is fixated on eyes, about eyebrows he is positively fetishistic. There are six references to "eyebrows" in Fugitive Days -- bushy ones, flaring ones, arched ones, black ones and, stunningly, seven references in Dreams -- heavy ones, bushy ones, wispy ones.  It is the rare memoirist who talks about eyebrows at all.

On three occasions in Dreams, Obama speaks of people with "round" faces.  On four occasions in Fugitive Days, Ayers does the same.  Both speak of "grim-faced" people, people with "soft" faces, and, most unusually, people with "tight" faces. 

Both Ayers and Obama describe acquaintances who smile like a "Cheshire cat."  Some of their characters have a countenance -- grin, squint, or scowl -- that is "perpetual."  Others are "suppressing" their smiles or their grins.

To this point, I have just skimmed the 759 items in the bill of particulars in my case against Obama's literary genius.   Not familiar with the term "bill of particulars?"  Uncertain myself, I looked that one up too.  It means a list of written statements made by a party to a court proceeding.  Ayers and Obama each refer knowingly to a "bill of particulars." Doesn't everyone?

The answer, of course, is no.  In Audacity of Hope, Obama does not use this phrase or most of the distinctive words or combinations of words in Dreams.  In Audacity, for instance, there are virtually no descriptions of faces or eyes, and the few that the author does use are flat and clichéd -- like "brave face" or "sharp-eyed." In Dreams, seven different people "frown," twelve "grin," and six "squint."  In Audacity, no more than one person makes any of these gestures.

Mr. West independently came to the same conclusion that I did, namely that Ayers was not meaningfully involved in Audacity.  These two Obama books almost assuredly had different primary authors.   What should be transparent to any literary critic is that the author of Audacity lacked the style and skill of the author of Dreams.  There are a few pockets in Audacity that evoke the spirit of Dreams but without the same grace.

A likely suspect for these imitative passages, perhaps the whole of Audacity, is Obama's young speechwriter, Jon Favreau.  Favreau joined the Obama team in 2005, time enough to play that role.  The London Guardian reports that Favreau carries Dreams wherever he goes and can "conjure up his master's voice as if an accomplished impersonator."  If so, in Audacity he played the classic role of the ghostwriter -- one who absorbs his client's thoughts and relates them in a refined version of his client's voice.

Bill Ayers was no one's ghostwriter.  The now overwhelming evidence strongly suggests that he used the frame of Obama's life and finished it off with his own ideas, his own biases, his own experiences, his own passions, his own friends, even his own romances, all of this toned down just enough to keep Obama viable as a potential candidate. 

I would argue that Ayers played Cyrano to Obama's Christian.  His personal history was too ugly for him to woo Roxane/America himself.  But Obama -- "articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," as Joe Biden reminded us -- could and did make America's heart melt.

[Warph]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/who_wrote_dreams_and_why_it_ma_1.html
May 24, 2009
Who Wrote Dreams and Why It Matters
by Jack Cashill

Video: The Washington Times asks Ayers about his "collaboration" with Obama on "Dreams From My Father." http://www.thefoxnation.com/politics/2009/05/19/bill-ayers-back-and-hurls-insult-reporter


Jack Cashill has written six books this decade, one of which, "Hoodwinked," dealt with literary fraud.  Cashill has also served as "literary doctor" on several other books, two of which were best sellers by household names.  He has a Ph.D. in American studies from Purdue University.
=====================================================

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/12/the_improvised_odyssey_of_bara.html
December 28, 2008
The Improvised Odyssey of Barack Obama
By Jack Cashill

======================================================

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/evidence_mounts_ayers_cowrote.html

October 17, 2008
Evidence Mounts: Ayers Co-Wrote Obama's Dreams
By Jack Cashill
See also:  Who Wrote Dreams from my Father?

Evidence continues to mount that Barack Obama had substantial help from Bill Ayers in the creation of his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, a book that Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." The evidence falls into five general categories, here summarized.

The discovery of new matching nautical metaphors from both Ayers and Obama that almost assuredly came from the same source: Ayers, a former merchant seaman.

The discovery of a Bill Ayers' essay on memoir writing, whose postmodern themes and phrases are echoed throughout Dreams.
A newly discovered book chapter from 1990 that shows clearly and painfully the limits of Obama's prose style the year he received a contract to write Dreams.

The revelation by radical Islamicist Rashid Khalidi that Ayers made his "dining room table" available for neighborhood writers who needed help.

A refined timeline that shows Ayers had the means, the motive and the time to help Obama when he needed it most.

The timeline:

A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama's election as the Harvard Law Review's first black president in 1990 caught the eye of agent Jane Dystel. She persuaded Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to authorize a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama's proposed memoir.

Obama repaired to Chicago with advance in hand and dithered.   At one point, in order to finish the book without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali.  Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. Simon & Schuster canceled the contract.  His agent hustled him a new, smaller contract.

Ayers published his book To Teach in 1993.  Between 1993 and 1996, he had no other formal authorial assignment than to co-edit a collection of essays.  This was an unusual hole in his very busy publishing career.

Obama's memoir was published in June 1995.  Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant.  In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama's path to political power 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. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama's belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.


Neighborhood assistance
Allow me to reconstruct how Obama transformed himself into what the New York Times has called "that rare politician who can write . . . and write movingly and genuinely about himself." There is an element of speculation in this, but new evidence continues to narrow the gap between the speculative and the conclusive.  One clue comes from an unexpected source, Rashid Khalidi, the radical Arab-American friend of Obama's and reputed ally of the PLO.

In the acknowledgment section of his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire, Khalidi writes of Ayers, "Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family's dining room table to do some writing for the project." Khalidi did not need the table.  He had one of his own.  He needed the help.

Khalidi had spent several years at Chicago University's Center for International Studies.  At a 2003 farewell dinner on the occasion of his departure from Chicago, Obama toasted him, thanking him and his wife for the many dinners that they had shared as well as for his "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases."

Chicago's Hyde Park was home to a tight, influential radical community at whose center were Ayers and Dohrn.  In this world, the Ayers' terrorist rap sheet only heightened their reputation.  Obama had to know.  The couple had given up revolution in 1980 for the long slow march through the institutions.  By 1994, if not earlier, Ayers saw a way to quicken that march.

I believe that after failing to finish his book on time, and after forfeiting his advance from Simon & Schuster, Obama brought a sprawling, messy, sophomoric manuscript to the famed dining room table of Bill Ayers and said, "Help."

Obama's limited skills

Obama needed all the help he could get. Prior to 1990, he had written very close to nothing.  In 1981 Occidental College published two of Obama's poems-"Pop" and "Underground.  Obama calls it some "very bad poetry," and he does not sell himself short. 
From "Underground":

Under water grottos, caverns

Filled with apes

That eat figs.

Stepping on the figs

That the apes

Eat, they crunch.

The apes howl, bare

Their fangs, dance . . .

It would be another decade before Obama had anything in print, and this only an edited, unsigned student case comment in the Harvard Law Review unearthed by Politico. Attorneys who reviewed the piece for Politico described it as "a fairly standard example of the genre."

Once elected president of the Harvard Law Review -- more of a popularity than a literary contest -- Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal.

In 1990 Obama also contributed an essay to a book published by the University of Illinois at Springfield, an anthology called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois.

Although the essay covers many of the issues raised in Dreams and uses some of the memoir's techniques, it does so without a hint of style, sophistication, or promise. The following two excerpts capture Obama's range or lack thereof:

"Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda."

"But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well . . . and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts."

These cliché-choked sentences go beyond the merely unpromising to the fully ungrammatical.  "Organizing" does not "face." "Efforts" do not leave "skeletons." "Agendas" do not have "anathemas." Indeed, the essay is clunky, pedestrian, and wonkish, a B- paper in a freshman comp class.

In "Why Organize" Obama makes use of the fully re-created conversation, a technique used to somewhat better effect in Dreams.  Here, his ungainly conjuring of black speech makes one cringe:

"I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer."

"Why's that?"

" 'Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don't nobody appreciate you."

To read "Why Organize" in its entirety is to understand the profound limits of Obama's literary talent.   I am sure he sensed those limits if no one else did.


Postmodern themes
Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir Fugitive Days and Obama's Dreams From My Father 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.

Dreams and Fugitive Days are both suffused with repeated reference to lies, lying and what Ayers calls "our constructed reality." A serious student of literature, Ayers has written thoughtfully on the role of the first person narrator in the construction of a memoir.

In true postmodernist fashion, he rejects the possibility of an objective, universal truth.  He argues instead that our lives are journeys, whose "narratives" we "construct" and, if we have the will and the power, impose on others.

Curiously, Obama says much the same in Dreams and in much the same language. "But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie," writes Obama, "something I'd constructed from the scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother."

The evidence strongly suggests that Ayers transformed the stumbling literalist of "Why Organize" into the sophisticated postmodernist of Dreams, and he did not so not by tutoring Obama, but by rewriting his text.  The Ayers' quotes that follow come from an essay of his, "Narrative Push/Narrative Pull."

The Obama quotes come from Dreams:

Ayers:
"The hallmark of writing in the first person is intimacy. . . . But in narrative the universal is revealed through the specific, the general through the particular, the essence through the unique, and necessity is revealed through contingency."

Obama:
"And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged . . . "

Ayers:
"Narrative begins with something to say-content precedes form."

Obama:
"I understood that I had spent much of my life trying to rewrite these stories, plugging up holes in the narrative . . . "

Ayers:
"Narrative inquiry can be a useful corrective to all this."

Obama:
"Truth is usually the best corrective."

Ayers: 
"The mind works in contradiction, and honesty requires the writer to reveal disputes with herself on the page."

Obama:
"Not because that past is particularly painful or perverse but because it speaks to those aspects of myself that resist conscious choice and that--on the surface, at least--contradict the world I now occupy."

Ayers:
The reader must actually see the struggle. It's a journey, not by a tourist, but by a pilgrim.

Obama:
"But all in all it was an intellectual journey that I imagined for myself, complete with maps and restpoints and a strict itinerary."

Ayers:
"Narrative writers strive for a personal signature, but must be aware that the struggle for honesty is constant."

Obama:
"I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America."

Ayers:
"But that intimacy can trap a writer into a defensive crouch, into airing grievances or self-justification."

Obama:
"At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap."

Although I cite one example for each, Dreams offers many more.  There are ten "trap" references alone and nearly as many for "narrative," "struggle," and "journey."  To be sure, there are other postmodernists in Chicago, but few who write as stylishly and as intelligibly as Ayers and fewer who make their dining room tables available to would-be authors of a leftist bent.

The sea metaphors

A newly discovered anecdote from Bill Ayers' 1993 book, To Teach, solidifies the case that he is indeed the muse behind Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father.

In the book, Ayers tells the story of an adventurous teacher who would take her students out to the streets of New York to learn interesting life lessons about the culture and history of the city.  As Ayers tells it, the students were fascinated by the Hudson River nearby and asked to see it. When they got to the river's edge, one student said, " Look, the river is flowing up." A second student said, "No, it has to flow south-down."

Not knowing which was right, the teacher and the students did their research. What they discovered, writes Ayers, was "that the Hudson River is a tidal river, that it flows both north and south, and they had visited the exact spot where the tide stops its northward push."

In his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama shares a stunningly comparable anecdote about tidal rivers from his own brief New York sojourn.  He tells of meeting with "Marty Kauffman" at a Lexington Avenue diner, the man from Chicago who was trying to recruit him as a community organizer.

After the meeting, Obama "took the long way home, along the East River promenade." As "a long brown barge rolled through the gray waters toward the sea," Obama sat down on a bench to consider his options.  While sitting, he noticed a black woman and her young son against the railing. Overly fond of the too well remembered detail, Obama observes that "they stood side by side, his arm wrapped around her leg, a single silhouette against the twilight."

The boy appeared to ask his mother a question that she could not answer and then approached Obama:  "Excuse me, mister," he shouted. "You know why sometimes the river runs that way and then sometimes it goes this way?"

"The woman smiled and shook her head, and I said it probably had to do with the tides."  Obama uses the seeming indecisiveness of this tidal river as a metaphor for his own.  Immediately afterwards, he shakes the indecision and heads for Chicago.

Even were there no other clues, Obama's frequent and sophisticated use of nautical metaphors like this one makes a powerful case for Ayers' involvement in the writing of Dreams.  Despite growing up in Hawaii, Obama gives no indication than he has had any real experience with the sea or ships. Ayers, however, knew a great deal about the sea. After dropping out of college, he took up the life of a merchant seaman.

Although Ayers has tried to put his anxious ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go. "I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience," Ayers writes of his maritime adventures. Yet curiously, much of this same nautical language flows through Obama's earth-bound memoir.

"Memory sails out upon a murky sea," Ayers writes at one point. Indeed, both he and Obama are obsessed with memory and its instability. The latter writes of its breaks, its blurs, its edges, its lapses. Obama also has a fondness for the word "murky" and its aquatic usages.

"The unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs," he writes, one of four times "murky" appears in Dreams.  Ayers and Obama also speak often of waves and wind, Obama at least a dozen times on wind alone. "The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed," he writes in a typical passage. Both also make conspicuous use of the word "flutter."

Not surprisingly, Ayers uses "ship" as a metaphor with some frequency. Early in the book he tells us that his mother is "the captain of her own ship," not a substantial one either but "a ragged thing with fatal leaks" launched into a "sea of carelessness." Obama too finds himself "feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship." He also makes a metaphorical reference to "a tranquil sea."

More intriguing is Obama's use of the word "ragged" as an adjective as in the highly poetic "ragged air" or "ragged laughter."  Both books use "storms" and "horizons" both as metaphor and as reality. Ayers writes poetically of an "unbounded horizon," and Obama writes of "boundless prairie storms" and poetic horizons-"violet horizon," "eastern horizon," "western horizon."

Ayers often speaks of "currents" and "pockets of calm" as does Obama, who uses both as nouns as in "a menacing calm" or "against the current" or "into the current."  The metaphorical use of the word "tangled" might also derive from one's nautical adventures. Ayers writes of his "tangled love affairs" and Obama of his "tangled arguments."

In Dreams, we read of the "whole panorama of life out there" and in Fugitive Days, "the whole weird panorama." Ayers writes of still another panorama, this one "an immense panorama of waste and cruelty." Obama employs the word "cruel" and its derivatives no fewer than fourteen times in Dreams.

On at least twelve occasions, Obama speaks of "despair," as in the "ocean of despair." Ayers speaks of a "deepening despair," a constant theme for him as well.  Obama's "knotted, howling assertion of self" sounds like something from the pages of Jack London's The Sea Wolf.

My own semi-memoir, Sucker Punch, offers a useful control here too. The book makes no reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to ships, seas, oceans, calms, storms, wind, waves, horizons, panoramas, or to things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, or murky.  None. And yet I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean.

If there is any one paragraph in Dreams that has convinced me of Ayers' involvement it is this one, in which Obama describes the black nationalist message:

"A steady attack on the white race . . . served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair."

As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as "ballast" unless I knew exactly what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely did.

Why this matters

Obama's handlers have "constructed" his persona around his presumably superior intelligence.  Bill Buckley's son Christopher, smitten by Obama's literary skills, is among those who have yielded to this imagery and joined the Obama crusade.  Even if someone benign had ghostwritten the book it would present a problem for Obama.

The question is often asked why Obama associated with Ayers.  The more appropriate question is why the powerful Ayers would associate with the then obscure Obama.  Before Obama's ascendancy, it was Ayers who had the connections, the clout, and the street cred.  Ayers could also write and write very well.  By the mid-1990s he had had several of his books published.  What Ayers could never do, however, was run for office on his own.

My suspicion is that Ayers saw the potential in Obama, and chose to mold it.  The calculation in Dreams is palpable.  Nothing about the book would deny a black Democrat the White House.  If it were revealed that the ghostwriter is Ayers, it would suggest that Ayers has played a major role all along in the shaping of Barack Obama.  It is unlikely that the McCain camp would have invested so much energy in establishing the Ayers-Obama link if they did not think this was the case.

At the end of the day, the observer is left with only two conclusions: either Barack Obama experienced a quantum surge in his writing skills almost overnight; or someone made a major contribution to the rewriting of his book.

The dispassionate observer has to choose the latter -- the former has no precedent.  If he can endure the consequences, he concedes that that contributor had to be Bill Ayers.

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