Is Ayers Barack's Ghostwriter?

[nohil-billy]

Did Bill Ayers Write Obama’s “Dreams”? (Part 1 of 3)

“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.” Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days.

“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.” Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father.

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, [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , I developed an eye for literary humbug, and Dreams serves up an eyeful.

In writing an earlier article about Dreams’ dubious authorship, I had questioned whether the influential Muslim crackpot who paved Obama’s way into Harvard, Khalid al Mansour, might have greased his way into the world of publishing as well. If so, he remains well behind the scenes.

On closer examination, the path to publication appears more straightforward than I anticipated. There are two sources here to consider.

One, a surprising 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos for the American Century Foundation, offers some hard evidence on what Osnos describes as the “ruthlessness” of Obama’s literary ascent.

The second, more speculative source--Bill Ayers’ 2001 memoir Fugitive Days—may very well answer the questions that Osnos cannot.

As Osnos relates, a 1990 New York Times profile on Harvard’s first black editor caught the eye of a hustling young literary agent named Jane Dystel.

Dystel persuaded Obama to put a book proposal together, and she submitted it. Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, signed on and authorized a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama’s proposed memoir.

With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where the University of Chicago offered him an office and stipend to help him write. Obama dithered.

At one point, in order to finish 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. He was surely in way over his head.

According to Osnos, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract and likely asked that Obama return at least some of the advance.

Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Book, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.

Then suddenly, somehow, the muse descended on Obama and transformed him from a struggling, unschooled wannabe into a literary superstar.

As the New York Times gushed, again with a straight face,Obama was “that rare politician who can write . . . and write movingly and genuinely about himself.”

Osnos offhandedly notes that the writing of Dreams was “all Obama’s,” which means only that someone had fixed the book before he had seen it. Two questions demand answers: who and why.

I have attempted to contact Dystel without success, but it is highly unlikely she re-wrote the book. Whoever did almost assuredly shared many of Obama’s sentiments, spoke his language and spent considerable time reworking the text.

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. 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.

[nohil-billy]

Did Bill Ayers Write Obama’s “Dreams”? (Part II: Deconstructing the Text)


Note: This is Part 2 of Cashill's 3-part series. Click [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. .

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.

All the cited quotes that follow come from these two books. On the subject of content I will refer to the author of Dreams as “Obama.” On the subject of style, I will refer to him as the “Dreams’ author.”

Dreams melds two styles: one, a long-winded accounting of conversations and events, polished just well enough to pass muster; the second, a fierce, succinct and tightly coiled analysis of the events that have been related.

Fugitive Days is fierce, succinct and tightly coiled throughout. It lacks the sometimes tedious fluff of Dreams and is the better book.

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.
J
ust 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.

As proof of his righteousness, Ayers named his first son “Malik” after the newly Islamic Malcolm X and the second son “Zayd” after Zayd Shakur, a Black Panther killed in a shootout that claimed the life of a New Jersey State Trooper.

Tellingly, Ayers, like Obama, began his careers as a self-described “community organizer,” Ayers in inner-city Cleveland, Obama in inner-city Chicago.

“They talked into the night about children, welfare, schools, crime, rent, gangs, the problems and the life of a neighborhood,” Ayers tells us of the poor black folks he tried to organize. Dreams is filled with such encounters.

In short, 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.

This presumed poetic license leads to the frequent manipulation of dates to make a political point.

“I saw a dead body once, as I said, when I was ten, during the Korean War,” writes Ayers. This correlation is important enough that Ayers mentions it twice. The only problem is that Ayers was eight when the Korean War ended.

Obama tells us that when he was ten, he and his family visited the mainland. On the trip, back in their motel room, they watched the Watergate Hearings on TV. The problem, of course, is that those hearing started just before Obama turned twelve.

One could forgive a single missed date, but inconsistent dates and numbers appear frequently in both books and often reinforce some moment of lost innocence.

In the same spirit, both books abound in detail too closely remembered and conversations too well recorded. These moments in both books occasionally lead to an awareness of ugly and unrelenting racism.

In 1970, for instance, the 9-year-old Obama alleges to be visiting the American embassy Indonesia. While waiting, he chances upon "a collection of Life magazines neatly displayed in clear plastic binders."

In one magazine, he reads a story about a black man with an "uneven, ghostly hue," who has been rendered grotesque by a chemical treatment.

"There were thousands of people like him," Obama learned, "black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person."

Obama's attention to detail is a ruse. Life never ran such an article. When challenged, Obama claimed it was Ebony.Ebony ran no such article either. Besides, black was beautiful in 1970.

In a similar vein, Ayers tells of hitching a ride in Missouri with “Bud,” the driver of a “brand-new Peterbilt truck.” The man proceeds to regale Ayers with a string of dirty jokes—at least two of them retold word for word—before reaching under his seat and pulling out a large pistol, his “Nigger neutralizer.”

“White people can never quite remember the scope and scale of the slavocracy,” Ayers reminds the reader again and again. He writes as though he were not one of them.

In Obama, alas, Ayers may have found a much more a lethal weapon to use against the “marauding monster” called America than any pipe bomb he could have ever built.

[nohil-billy]

Did Bill Ayers Write Obama’s “Dreams”? (Part III: Why it Matters )

Note: This is Part 3 of Cashill's 3-part series. Click [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , and [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. .

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.
This is troubling for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the character of Bill Ayers, the radical leftist who has made “[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. ” a household word.

For Ayers, like so many on the left, hard and soft, facts are whatever he can get away with. “He was not interested in finding the truth but in proclaiming it,” British historian Paul Johnson says of Karl Marx, but he might as well have been talking about Ayers.

In perfectly pitched post-modern patois, Ayers admits as much. “The truth we know now,” he tells the reader, “is always complicated, layered, evasive, perspectival.”

“The old gods failed and the old truths left the world,” Ayers insists. “Clear conclusions,” he elaborates, “were mainly delusional, a luxury of religious fanatics and fools.”

Having declared truth obsolete, Ayers permits himself to lie, often and outrageously. To justify his bombing of the Pentagon, for instance, Ayers tells the reader that a century earlier abolitionist John Brown had “shot all the members of the grand jury,” which is easily disproved nonsense.

Ayers is particularly reckless with numbers. In the “rotten and unjustifiable” Vietnam War, he tells us, America was responsible for the “indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese.”

Our sanctions against Iraq killed “500,000 Iraqi children.” The Clinton-era missile strike on a Sudanese chemical factory “caused tens of thousands of deaths.”

Demographics don’t stand in the way of a good story. During the American bombing along the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, he insists, “perhaps three-quarters of a million peasants were murdered cleanly from the air.”

This figure represents many more people than lived in the area that was bombed and more than 10 percent of the Cambodian population. In reality, fewer than 750,000 Cambodians died violently during that whole era from all causes, most in the civil war raging throughout the country.

The killing began in earnest only in 1975 after the bombing had stopped and the communists took over. In fact, Pol Pot is the only communist Ayers criticizes, but, of course, he blames his rise on America.

Not an ill word is said about the demonstrably murderous thugs Ayers holds up as heroes: Castro, Che, Ho Chi Minh, or even Mao, the greatest monster of the 20 th century.

As to the three clowns who blew themselves up in 1970 in their Greenwich Village townhouse, Ayers wonders out loud how it will take before America “imagines their actions as heroic.”
For the record, the three Weathermen, including Ayers’ then girlfriend Diana Oughton, were finishing up an anti-personnel bomb designed to kills non-coms and their dates at a dance that night at Fort Dix.

Ayers, by the way, is a “Distinguished Professor” in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He teaches our teachers how to teach our children.

That Obama had anything to do with this man should disqualify him for the presidency. At the end of the day, the only difference between Bill Ayers and Tim McVeigh is competence.

Obama dissembles lethally when he describes Ayers as “just some guy in my neighborhood.” He is much more than that and quite possibly, as I have argued, the real author of Dreams From My Father.

The publisher of Dreams, the openly liberal Peter Osnos, tells how Obama dumped his devoted long time agent after Dreams took off and then signed a seven-figure deal with Crown, using only a by-the-hour attorney.

Obama pulled off the deal after his election but before being sworn in as Senator, this way to avoid the disclosure and reporting requirements applicable to members of Congress.

To his credit, Osnos publicly scolds Obama for his “ruthlessness” and “his questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday.”

Our best hope, if Obama is elected, is that he will throw Ayers under the proverbial bus as he threw his agents and numerous others.

Our worst fear, however, is that a President Obama will prove to be the “[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. ” and that he will continue to play the useful dummy to evil ventriloquists like Bill Ayers and Khalid Al-Mansour.

Fasten your seatbelts.

[nohil-billy]

More Proof Ayers Ghosted
Obama's "Dreams"


“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.”
Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father

Shortly before launching his career, first as a community organizer and then as a radical bomber, Bill Ayers took a job as a merchant seaman.

“I’d thought that when I signed on that I might write an American novel about a young man at sea,” says Ayers in his memoir, Fugitive Days, “but I didn’t have it in me.”

Although Ayers has tried to put his unhappy ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go. Indeed, it infuses much of what he writes. This is only natural and often distinctive, as in an appealing Ayers’ metaphor like “the easy inlet of her eyes.”

Less natural is that much of this same nautical language flows through Obama’s earth-bound memoir, Dreams From My Father. For simplicity sake, I will refer to the memoir’s author as “Obama.”

Ayers is particularly eloquent when writing about the “fury” of the elements as, curiously, is Obama. Consider the following two passages, 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 poetry, 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 12 th grade reading level. The

“Dreams’” excerpt scores a 54.8 on reading ease and a 12 th grade reading level. Scores can range from 0 to 121, so hitting a nearly exact score matters.

A comparable nature passage from my novel, “2006: The Chautauqua Rising,” scores a 61.6 with an 11 th grade reading level. The samples I submitted from my own semi-memoir on race, “Sucker Punch,” score in the 63-76 range.

In reading Ayers, one senses that he is unaware how deeply his seagoing affects his language.

“Memory sails out upon a murky sea,” he 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. He 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.”

In “Dreams,” we read of the “whole panorama of life out there” and in “Fugitive Days,” “the whole weird panorama.”

Ayers writes poetically of an “unbounded horizon,” and Obama writes of “boundless prairie storms” and poetic horizons—“violet horizon,” “eastern horizon,” “western horizon.”

“I can imagine him standing at the edge of the Pacific,” says Obama referring to his grandfather, “his hair prematurely gray, his tall, lanky frame bulkier now, looking out at the horizon until he could see it curve.”

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.”

As a point of contrast, the author of Obama’s “Audacity of Hope” never uses “calm” as a noun and uses “current” almost always as an adjective to mean “contemporaneous.”

The difference between the two Obama books on the word “current” is striking. In “Dreams,” there are four uses of “current” as noun and two as adjective. In “Audacity,” there is one of use of “current” as noun and twenty as adjective.

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.” The word “tangled” does not appear in “Audacity.”

Am I suggesting that Obama used different ghostwriters for the two books? Yes, at least in part.
There is no doubt that Obama contributed to both, and for “Audacity” Obama could have afforded more than one writer or editor, but there is something about the sea imagery that distinguishes “Dreams.”

Although not necessarily related to the sea, but perhaps inspired by it, are the emotionally charged words that appear frequently in both “Fugitive Days” and “Dreams”: fierceness, fury, rage, despair, and cruelty.

(Both books, by the way, make frequent use of the colon.)

Ayers writes of 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,” twice as many times as in “Audacity.”

On at least twelve occasions, Obama speaks of “despair,” as in the “ocean of despair” cited above. Ayers speaks of a “deepening despair,” a constant theme for him as well.

Then, of course, there is what Obama calls a “rage at the white world [that] needed no object.” On this subject too one sees in “Dreams” a hint of the nautical in phrases like "knotted, howling assertion of self" and "withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage."

In Fugitive Days, Ayers talks of an “uncontrollable rage” as though it were a storm. One wonders whether the Weathermen’s inaugural act of mass violence, the “Days of Rage,” has its roots in Ayers’ maritime experience.

There are any number of intriguing non-nautical word connections between “Dreams” and “Fugitive Days,” but one that deserves mention is the repeated reference to lies, lying and what Ayers calls “our constructed reality.”

“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.”

“That whole first year seemed like one long lie,” Obama writes of his first year in college in Los Angeles, one of at least a dozen references to lies and lying in “Dreams,” a figure nearly matched in “Fugitive Days.”

As intriguing as these word connections are, there are some objective, data-driven ways to prove authorship, one of which goes by the name “cusum analysis” or QSUM.

This analysis begins with the measurement of sentence length, a highly 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.

More to the point, the 30-sentence sequence that I pulled from “Audacity” 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.”

To do a complete QSUM analysis requires skill and software beyond my proverbial pay grade. My thanks to those who have gotten me this far. The intro to QSUM and the Flesch analysis, as well as the pdfs of “Audacity” and “Dreams,” have all come courtesy of WND readers.

If anyone knows someone capable of taking the analysis the next step, please contact me through my website, [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. . Most such scholars reside within the universities, and that scares me.

One final subjective note about the introductory quote. 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 obviously did.

[nohil-billy]

"...NOBODY I EXCHANGED IDEAS WITH" My #####!!!

[Herb Schaffler]

Posted on October 6, 2008, 8:27am | [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link.
Look, I can understand why the McCain campaign thinks it's worth its time—its precious, 30-days-to-the-election time—to [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. that Obama befriended Weather Underground worthy Bill Ayers. Here's a candidate with a Muslim name! Who knows a terrorist! Guys, this writes itself!

What I don't get is why Team McCain ignores evidence that the Ayers association leaves voters sort of confused and bored. On August 21, a 501(c)4 group[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. a one-minute ad about Ayers. The American Issues Project [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. that it would spend [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. in two swing states: Ohio and Michigan.

Michigan, Michigan... hasn't that been in the news? [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link.

John McCain is pulling out of Michigan, according to two Republicans, a stunning move a month away from Election Day that indicates the difficulty Republicans are having in finding blue states to put in play.

It's not like the Ayers attack fell totally flat. Obama's campaign had to [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. on an ad rolling back the attack. But it didn't spend much, and it didn't spend money in Michigan. If the Ayers story was having an impact, you'd expect it to move some number of voters away from Obama. It didn't. It's probably just too tenuous and complicated. (Obama's relationship with the man is neither, but as the AIP ad demonstrated, it takes a lot of time in the editing booth to go from "60s radical is friends with Obama" to "Muslim terrorists blew up the WTC.")

This is all a long-winded way of saying [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link.

One has to suspect that Obama's ties to Wright, Rezko and Ayers — sounds like a law firm of evil — have persuaded just about all the voters that they're going to persuade. But Americans are furious over the financial mess, and eager to blame somebody. The McCain campaign would be doing the nation a service by spelling out exactly whose bad decisions helped get us into this mess and how.

You get the sense that McCain's camp is just too surprised that Obama is surviving the WrightRezkoAyers attacks to shake it off and adapt to the economic scene.

[nohil-billy]

I guess you missed the point of the post Herb. Barack Obama, who throughout his career as a student, lawyer, Professor of Constitutional Law, and politician, has never written anything verifiable except for some real lousy poetry.

What Cashill is trying to point out is that Obama is taking all of the credit and accepting all of the accolades for writing what was called "The greatest memoir ever penned by a politician." We are told to accept the fact that he wrote it and therefore accept his literary genius when neither is true.

Personally Herb, I feel that Obama's an intellectual phony. Like those kids in the High School yearbook that pose with their chins in their hands or with phony glasses on to make them look intelligent, Obama's cocked head and ponderous look is for appearance sake only.

And you have the nerve to pick on Palin.

[Herb Schaffler]

Obama does come across as more intelligent than Palin, but I do have to wonder why he won't release his transcripts.