If there’s one thing that mirrors the decline of America’s image under Barack Obama, it’s the decline of Obama’s own image. The man who once hailed himself and his fellow travelers as the “ones we’ve been waiting for,” and who was hailed by others as a transformational figure, is now the incredible shrinking president. But that’s image, too: As many of us knew all along, he was always small.
Once fancied a paragon of competence, Obama has now spawned perhaps the most poorly crafted bill in American history, ObamaCare. Once considered an honest, outside-the-beltway figure who transcends politics, we now know he employed one of the biggest lies in American history to push that death-care mistake through. Why, even the mainstream media — which has long bowed before the ‘Bama the way he bowed before the Saudi king — has now soured, complaining that the administration meant to be the most “transparent” in history is history’s most insular and “hostile.” And now a little more history may be made or, should I say, revealed — because the long-standing suspicion that “Obama’s” Magnum opus, Dreams From My Father, was actually ghostwritten by another, may soon be confirmed.
That ghost would be ex-Weathermen terrorist, Marxist, and erstwhile Obama ally Bill Ayers.
Ayers himself recently admitted, while speaking at Montclair State University, that he wrote Dreams. But that’s not the biggest news here; after all, Ayers has made this claim before, only to later say he was joking. What’s different now is that with Obama in the twilight of his political career and Ayers in the twilight of his life — and having written a new book, Public Enemy, that’s selling about as well as ObamaCare — he may be less interested in protecting the president’s waning popularity than in seeking a bit more for himself. R. Emmett Tyrrell at American Spectator advances this thesis:
At the end of a misspent life, Ayers suddenly anticipates yet another act. He will serve as a Saul Alinsky for the Millennials. He will write an updated Rules for Radicals with diagrams on how to disable mother’s smart phone or how to hack into her bank account.
First, however, he needs to attract attention. My guess is that he will admit to having written Obama’s bestselling Dreams From My Father. He has suggested as much to the curious public.
… Time is running out for Bill Ayers. He is showing himself to be desperate for his last act. If he is going to identify himself as the real writer of Dreams From My Father it is going to have to come pretty soon.
American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson weighs in, pointing out that Ayers’s pride may goeth before Obama’s next fall, writing:
Ayers is obviously an ego-driven man. Only someone [with] a pathological ego could embrace murderous violence in the certitude that he would inspire the masses to overthrow and restructure society. Having sponsored Obama’s political career, ghostwritten he [sic] book that more than anything else certified Obama’s intellectual status to a gullible commentariat, and seen Obama take office and fail to follow through on Ayers’s radical goals, Ayers must feel betrayed. Terrell’s insight that there is not much time left, and that the failure of his book must rankle, makes sense.
Lifson’s reference to certifying “Obama’s intellectual status” gets at why this matters. Time magazine called Dreams “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician,” while the New York Times praised Obama as “that rare politician who can write … and write movingly and genuinely about himself.” So debunking the Dreams myth would perhaps officially decertify Obama, constituting the last nail in the coffin of the narrative of Obama as honest intellectual. Why, he not only didn’t write his claim to scholar fame, but as with ObamaCare, he lied to make people buy what he was selling.
Of course, though, unrepentant terrorist Ayers isn’t exactly an unimpeachable source. Yet we don’t have to take his word on Dreams’ authorship. You see, literary style isn’t exactly a fingerprint, but it does approximate one. It isn’t the easiest thing to completely disguise your distinctive writing style, and a poor writer cannot fake Shakespearian sublimity any more than a weekend duffer could suddenly channel Tiger Woods to win a $500 Nassau bet. And while Dreams is professionally written, Obama’s writing prior to “his” pair of books ranged, frankly, from average to awful. Ayers, on the other hand, is reputed to be an excellent writer — Dreams level, in fact.
Author Jack Cashill has long analyzed these two men’s literary fingerprints. He wrote in 2008, “In my career in advertising and publishing, I have reviewed the portfolios of a thousand professional writers, all of them crowded with writing samples, but only a handful of these writers would have been capable of having a written a book as stylish as Dreams.” Cashill then illustrates how relatively poor Obama’s few confirmed pieces of writing are and mentions how — despite receiving a $125,000 advance for his memoir and a $40,000 second advance — Obama simply could not finish the work within the allotted time (one year).
Then, magically, Dreams appeared.
As Cashill put it, “Suddenly, somehow, the muse descended on Obama and transformed him from a struggling, unschooled amateur, with no paper trail beyond an unremarkable legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes, into a literary superstar.”
But this just accords with truths that were hiding in plain sight. Obama is a great orator who can’t speak without a teleprompter. He’s an intellectual who pronounced “corpsman” “corpse-man” and supposed that “Austrian” was spoken in Austria. He’s a racial healer who fomented racial hatred by falsely claiming before a black audience that white politicians denied black Hurricane Katrina victims federal aid. He’s a natural-born American who, apparently, claimed in a publishing-company bio that he was born in Kenya. He’s a humanitarian who, a former aide tells us, “doesn’t like people.” He’s a Millennial-awing, cool guy with basketball skills who, when the camera was on, made 2 of 22 baskets. The man whose presidential success was supposed to be a slam dunk has turned out to be a walking, talking air ball.
But this is because of another way in which Obama made history: as the first affirmative-action president. Really, though, the American people made that history. They wrote, with hopes and the vote, the book that is Obama. And it has turned out to be pure fiction.
