Barack Obama could easily clear this up!

Might Bill Ayers have ghost-written Barack Obama's "Dreams from My Father"?

It's an intriguing question, and Jack Cashill offers a fascinating analysis. It's long, but here's an excerpt:

To add a little science to the analysis, I identified two similar "nature" passages in Obama's and Ayers' respective memoirs, the first from Fugitive Days:
"I picture the street coming alive, awakening from the fury of winter, stirred from the chilly spring night by cold glimmers of sunlight angling through the city."
The second from Dreams:
"Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds."

These two sentences are alike in more than their poetic sense, their length and their gracefully layered structure. They tabulate nearly identically on the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), something of a standard in the field.

The "Fugitive Days" excerpt scores a 54 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. The "Dreams'" excerpt scores a 54.8 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. Scores can range from 0 to 121, so hitting a nearly exact score matters.

A more reliable data-driven way to prove authorship goes under the rubric "cusum analysis" or QSUM. This analysis begins with the measurement of sentence length, a significant and telling variable. To compare the two books, I selected thirty-sentence sequences from Dreams and Fugitive Days, each of which relates the author's entry into the world of "community organizing."

"Fugitive Days" averaged 23.13 words a sentence. "Dreams" averaged 23.36 words a sentence. By contrast, the memoir section of "Sucker Punch" averaged 15 words a sentence.

Interestingly, the 30-sentence sequence that I pulled from Obama's conventional political tract, Audacity of Hope, averages more than 29 words a sentence and clocks in with a 9th grade reading level, three levels below the earlier cited passages from "Dreams" and "Fugitive Days." The differential in the Audacity numbers should not surprise. By the time it was published in 2006, Obama was a public figure of some wealth, one who could afford editors and ghost writers.

(Via Roger L. Simon, a writer himself, who finds the Cashill analysis "jaw-dropping.")

While the possibility of Ayers ghost-writing Obama's book certainly is astounding, there is nothing illegal (or even unethical) in using or hiring ghostwriters. Busy and successful people do it all the time, and if Obama had help from Ayers, there's no crime in that. But it would be tough to continue to paint him as just "a guy in the neighborhood."

But speaking of the guy in the neighborhood, why would Ayers refer to Obama (a state legislator) as "a writer" in his book?

In his 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, Bill Ayers walks the reader through his Hyde Park neighborhood and identifies the notable residents therein. Among them are Muhammad Ali, "Minister" Louis Farrakhan (of whom he writes fondly), "former mayor" Eugene Sawyer, "poets" Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and "writer" Barack Obama.

In 1997, Obama was an obscure state senator, a lawyer, and a law school instructor with one book under his belt that had debuted two years earlier to little acclaim and lesser sales. In terms of identity, he had more in common with mayor Sawyer than poet Brooks. The "writer" identification seems forced and purposefully so, a signal perhaps to those in the know of a persona in the making that Ayers had himself helped forge.

It certainly does seem forced. Downright peculiar, I'd say. (Read the page in question here.) And especially if they barely knew each other, wouldn't Ayers have known Obama more as a state legislator -- whose career-launching event was held in his home -- than as a "writer"? Something does not make sense about that. (At the very least, it begs the question of whether Ayers and Obama knew each other well before 1995.)

And something else does not make sense.

In the New York Times account of the Obama book's background,

Mr. Obama's story first surfaced publicly in February 1990, when he was elected as the first black president of The Harvard Law Review. An initial wire service report described him simply as a 28-year-old, second-year student from Hawaii who had "not ruled out a future in politics"; but in the days that followed, newspaper reporters grew interested and produced long, detailed profiles of Mr. Obama.

The coverage prompted a call to him from Jane Dystel, a gravelly-voiced literary agent described by Peter Osnos, then the publisher of Times Books, as "a good journeyman with a hard edge." The home page of her firm's Web site currently features clients' best sellers including "Lies at the Altar: The Truth About Great Marriages." Ms. Dystel suggested Mr. Obama write a book proposal. Then she got him a contract with Poseidon Press, a now-defunct imprint of Simon & Schuster. When he missed his deadline, she got him another contract and a $40,000 advance from Times Books.

Mr. Obama's original plan was to write a book about race relations. But, sitting down to write, he found his mind "pulled toward rockier shores." So the book became more personal -- the record of an interior journey, as he put it in the introduction, "a boy's search for his father, and through that a search for a workable meaning for his life as a black American."

Mr. Obama was given an office to write in at the University of Chicago through a surprising connection. Douglas G. Baird, a professor who was head of the law school's appointments committee, had learned of Mr. Obama from Michael W. McConnell, a conservative constitutional scholar then at Chicago whom President Bush would later make a federal judge.

Professor McConnell encountered Mr. Obama during the editing of an article he wrote for The Harvard Law Review, Professor Baird said recently. "He sent a note saying this person is really brilliant, we should have him on our radar screen," Professor Baird said. Professor Baird called Mr. Obama at Harvard and asked if he was interested in teaching.

"I don't remember his exact words, but it was something to the effect that, 'Well, in fact, I want to write this book.' What he really wanted was the Virginia Woolf equivalent of a clean, well lighted room." So Professor Baird got him one, a small office near the law library, along with a law school fellowship that Professor Baird hoped might later lead to his full-time teaching.

By the time Mr. Obama landed at Times Books, he had a partial manuscript. He required minimal editing, said Henry Ferris, his editor, who is now a vice president and executive editor at William Morrow. He simply needed guidance in paring and shaping the sections already written and keeping the rest from becoming too long. The writing, Mr. Ferris said, "is very much his own."

The two worked mostly by telephone and by manuscripts sent by Federal Express between New York and Chicago. Mr. Obama, an inveterate journal writer who had published poems in a college literary magazine but had never attempted a book, struggled to finish. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, said he eventually retreated to Bali for several months with his wife, Michelle, "to find a peaceful sanctuary where there were no phones." He showed drafts to a few close relatives including his grandmother, of whom Ms. Soetoro-Ng said, "It probably made her a little nervous, having the family written about, just because you don't do that in Kansas."

In the introduction, Mr. Obama acknowledged his use of pseudonyms, composite characters, approximated dialogue and events out of chronological order. He was writing at a time well before a recent series of publishing scandals involving fabrication in memoirs. "He was trying to be careful of people's feelings," said Deborah Baker, the editor on the first paperback edition of the book. "The fact is, it all had a sort of larger truth going on that you couldn't make up."

That a literary agent would contact an unknown young law student with a book proposal struck Robert Stacy McCain as peculiar:
A 28-year-old law student gets written up in the newspapers, then gets a call from a literary agent? She calls him?

The agent then signs this 28-year-old nobody -- whose only credential as an author is student law journal stuff -- with Simon & Schuster. Hello? In what alternative universe does this happen?

He misses his deadline, but that's OK, because he then gets another big contract with a $40,000 advance. At this point, Obama's story is reminding me of another popular book, The Peter Principle.

But the real killer is how, having gotten a contract based on a proposal for a book about race relations, Obama pulls a bait-and-switch, and instead delivers ... a memoir.

How did he do it? Beats me. For whatever reason, he had help in high places, and I think it's quite possible that he had help in the neighborhood. (Ayers was then a professor, editor and author with a number of published books.)

Cashill concludes with a call for transparency:

The Obama camp could put all such speculation to rest by producing some intermediary sign of impending greatness -- a school paper, an article, a notebook, his Columbia thesis, his LSAT scores -- but Obama guards these more zealously than Saddam did his nuclear secrets. And I suspect, at the end of the day, we will pay an equally high price for Obama's concealment as Saddam's.
I believe in being fair, so once again, I say let's invoke the Sullivan standard of DNA testing.

Barack Obama could easily clear this up.

All he needs to do if provide access to the original manuscript, which can be checked for signs of Ayers DNA.

posted by Eric on 10.09.08 at 01:15 PM





TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://classicalvalues.com/cgi-bin/pings.cgi/7457






Comments

Why would he? I don't even understand what traction you expect to get from claiming he ought to. The idea is silly on its face. Not because there's no reason to believe this dopey, evidence free allegation. Why would a Presidential candidate respond to this sort of thing? Why would a bunch of minor bloggers (no offense intended, you're all doing better than I am in in that regard) think there was anything to gain by claiming he should? Tactically, pounding on the primary Ayers meme seems, at least, to have a chance of getting some traction - though the evidence seems to indicate that it won't - this silly tertiary fantasy just makes you guys look silly.

AemJeff   ·  October 10, 2008 01:11 AM

It would not surprise me if Obama used a ghostwriter, that's par for the course. It would interest me if that ghostwritter were Ayers, but nothing more than that.

It appears more and more evident that Obama and Ayers are joined at the hip and have been for over 20 years. Ayers' cessation of bombing, robbery, and murder might be signs of his rehabilitation in leftist eyes, but his continued hatred of America and avowed interest in revolution is disqualifying in my mind. He is not "just some guy" on the block. Obama knows damn well who and what that despicable creature is, and has allied himself with him for two decades.

A man who associates with the likes of Ayers and Dohrn, and who won't bother to vist wounded soldiers when overseas, is not whom I want to see as Commander in Chief.

So the minutia of Obama's day to day relationship with Ayers is not as significant as the fact of that continued relationship.

Steve Skubinna   ·  October 10, 2008 01:19 AM

The saying goes that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The proposition that Obama used a ghost writer for Dreams is not particularly unbelievable, and the claim that it was Ayers is extraordinary only in its specificity, not in its plausibility. Yet Cashill's evidence fails even this lowly barrier. I mean, come on. Running passages through MS Word's built-in "statistics" function and searching for key-words relating to nautical themes does not exactly constitute "evidence."

I read Dreams. I rather find it more extraordinary that a vulgar sociopath like Ayers, who as recently as 2001 stood on an American flag to crow that he "did not do enough," could write for hundreds of pages as an earnest, well-intentioned young activist without letting the mask slip.

This guy's got nothing.

ArtD0dger   ·  October 12, 2008 12:41 AM

Post a comment

You may use basic HTML for formatting.





Remember Me?

(you may use HTML tags for style)



October 2008
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
      1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31  

ANCIENT (AND MODERN)
WORLD-WIDE CALENDAR


Search the Site


E-mail




Classics To Go

Classical Values PDA Link



Archives




Recent Entries



Links



Site Credits