Ayers Likely Ghost Wrote Obama's Memoir

Read this exhaustive analysis and tell me if you disagree.

I noted this briefly in the festival of speculation about McCain's big announcement new web ad, but it warrants its own post.

The case, in brief:

• Prior to the publication of Dreams From My Father, Obama showed no discernible literary ability.  Indeed, for a double Ivy, he displays an unusual literary ineptitude.
• As president of the Harvard Law Review, he contributed not a single word.
• A decade earlier, his contributions to Occidental College's literary magazine consisted of two poems (to date, Obama's only pre-Dreams writing samples publicly available).  One was entitled "Underground" and went like this:
• Under water grottos, caverns
  Filled with apes
  That eat figs.
  Stepping on the figs
  That the apes
  Eat, they crunch.
  The apes howl, bare
  Their fangs, dance...
• To this day, Obama will not allow the public to view his undergraduate thesis.
• A year after accepting a $125,000 advance for his memoir, his publisher canceled the contract, as he was unable to write it.
• A second publisher later issued him a smaller advance and Dreams was eventually published in 1995 (the same year Ayers helped Obama get appointed chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the same year Ayers and Dohrn hosted Obama's political coming out party in their living room).
• Bill Ayers' 2001 book Fugitive Days is strikingly similar to Obama's memoir, sharing many of the same themes ("rage" against white "privilege", losing one's innocence at the age of 10 while witnessing a historic event (which is similarly chronologically inaccurate in both books)), and metaphors (mainly nautical - murky horizons, tranquil seas, oceans of despair, pockets of calm,  boundless storms, currents, ships, ballast, etc.).  No metaphors involving dancing apes or fig-stomping.
• Ayers apparently has a mildly paranoid fixation with the sea, having once served as a merchant seaman and recounting a mid-Atlantic nightmare about "falling overboard in the middle of the ocean and swimming as fast as I could as the ship steamed off and disappeared over the horizon."  He recalls trying and failing to write a novel about "a young man at sea."
• There are strikingly similar "QSUM" scores between the two books, including sentence length, reading ease, and grade reading level.
• Based on the QSUM analysis, Dreams compares much more closely (nearly identically) to Ayers' Fugitive Days than it does to Obama's own follow-up book, The Audacity of Hope.
• "Systems designer Ed Gold--with twenty years of high-level experience in image and signal processing, pattern recognition, and classifier design and implementation--volunteered to run a QSUM scan on multiple excerpts from both memoirs. ... In assessing the signature of sample passages from Dreams, he found 'a very strong match to all of the Ayers samples that I processed.'"

Yes, that's the brief version.  Read Jack Cashill's full analysis and then let me know if you disagree that Bill Ayers is, more likely than not, the ghost writer or co-author of Obama's first book.

Sadly, this is likely unprovable either way, as the only two people in a position to know definitively have a strong incentive to deny it.  Still, if this is a crazy theory, Obama could go a long way toward refuting it by authorizing a disclosure he ought to authorized as a matter of course as a Presidential candidate - the release of his Columbia thesis.

It's an academic paper on Russian nuclear disarmament, so it would have been quite a different writing exercise (and one that shouldn't compare closely with a semi-fictionalized memoir on a technical basis).  But (unless it's as atrociously written as the fig poem) it would - for the first time - offer some indication that Obama had at least a minimal facility with the written word.

And if it does turn out to be of "fig ape" quality, it would strongly suggest that someone ghost wrote Dreams, which in and of itself would snare Obama in an explicit lie.  Which of course might be why he won't let us see it.  They did after all finally authorize the release of Michelle's race-angry Princeton thesis, so it's not some hazy principle of academic privacy that's preventing us from getting a peak at his writing.

In any event, like I said, Cashill's analysis is today's required reading.  And if you're schooled in the arts of literary forensics and want to run with this ball, you might want to have a look at Ayers' Teaching the Personal and the Political: Essays on Hope and Justice too.