…sitting in a tree. K I S S I N G:
Obama’s playing dumb about ACORN is disingenuous in the extreme. His longstanding activist, political, and financial connections to the group, as Stanley Kurtz showed prior to the presidential election, are wide and deep. Indeed, they constitute his most significant and enduring tie to the anti-capitalist and revolutionary “New Left” movement of the 1960s.
Sol Stern writes that ACORN sprang from “one of this movement’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization.” The NWRO’s strategy was to eliminate welfare requirements and overwhelm welfare offices with clients, simultaneously staging disruptions and sit-ins, in order to bring about “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.”
Obama could have only been buying into this vision by intimately allying himself with ACORN and its ilk over the years.
And speaking of mendacity about his past, was Jack Cashill right?
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.”
Makes sense to me. There is no extant evidence of Obama’s writing ability other than the books (particularly since he continues to hide his academic records). We have no particular reason to think that he was some kind of savant genius who suddenly became an eloquent writer (particularly when listening to him off the prompter). So he did go to “just the guy in his neighborhood” for “help” in writing the book.
[Update a few minutes later]
There’s a good comment at Radosh’s piece:
Writers of the caliber of the prose in Dreams tend to be compulsive about expressing themselves. Thus one would expect to see both examples of earlier, less polished works and a multitude of articles and essays, etc., flowing from Obama’s pen after the critical success of Dreams. Instead the entire Obama oeuvre outside of Dreams consists of one embarrassingly sophomoric article in the student newspaper from Obama’s days at Columbia, a very short law review note, the pedestrian campaign kick off book The Audacity of Hope and a couple of mediocre op eds.
A quality writer pressed for time may hire an assistant to do the research and knock out a rough draft, but he or she makes time to polish the final product. Those op eds suggest that not only can’t Obama write very well, he can’t even distinguish between good writing and the work of hacks well enough to hire a top notch ghoster.
I’m pretty sure that if I wrote a book on space policy, no one would accuse me of having a ghost, because I have an extensive public record on that topic, and of writing in general. This doesn’t exist for Barack Obama. But his defenders will continue to live the liedream.