Part of the Kennedy myth that propelled him into the White House was that he wrote a Pulitzer-winning book. Only many years later was it revealed that the actual author, or at least ghost writer, was Ted Sorenson.
Well, now we have an interesting question.
Who wrote Dreams of My Father?
A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama’s election as Harvard’s first black president 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.
With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where he 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 a surprisingly harsh 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos, which detailed the “ruthlessness” of Obama’s literary ascent, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. 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 amateur, with no paper trail beyond an unremarkable legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes, into a literary superstar.
…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.
None of this, of course, proves Ayers’ authorship conclusively, but the evidence makes him a much more likely candidate than Obama to have written the best parts of Dreams.
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.
An interesting, and very plausible thesis. Much more so, in fact, than the official story. And if true, one more bit of evidence that Bill Ayers was more, much more, than “a guy in his neighborhood.” It is also one more bit of continually accumulating evidence that Barack Obama is a fraud.
And as Andy McCarthy notes, given that Chris Buckley’s insouciance about an Obama presidency is predicated on the intellectual brilliance evidenced by his books, he might want to reconsider, if his books are in fact those of someone else.
And no, don’t expect the press to cover this.