There has been speculation about this which I've ignored, no doubt because there are enough policy reasons to oppose Barack Obama and I don't want to feed into what sounds, at first blush, like Vince Fosteresque paranoia. But I've finally read Jack Cashill's lengthy analysis in The American Thinker. It is thorough, thoughtful, and alarming -- particularly his deconstruction of the text in Obama's memoir and comparison to the themes, sophistication and signature phraseology of Bill Ayers' memoir.
There is nothing in Obama's scant paper trail prior to 1995 that would suggest something as stylish and penetrating as, at times, Dreams from My Father is. And when Obama speaks extemporaneously, one doesn't hear the same voice one encounters in the book. Now maybe Obama has a backlog of writing fom Columbia or Harvard that signal great literary promise, but he not only hasn't shared it, he's assiduously hidden traces of it. And, to be sure, writing is different from speaking -- in fairness, some of Obama's off-the-cuff bumbling when he speaks is certainly due to the rigors of the campaign which would cause even the most gifted communicator to faulter from time to time. But it's not unreasonable to expect more similarity between Obama the writer and Obama the orator.
GG conservatives.
UPDATE: More on literary criticism for the low-info voters from Edge of The West:
At The Corner, Andy McCarthy evaluates Cashill's argument and proves himself to be an idiot by finding Cashill's "lengthy analysis . . . thorough, thoughtful, and alarming--particularly his deconstruction of the text in Obama's memoir and comparison to the themes, sophistication and signature phraseology of Bill Ayers' memoir." To be blunt: if you find Cashill's identification of "sea imagery" and his lists of words both Obama and Ayers use to be particularly anything other than laughable pablum, you're an eighth-wit.
If, however, you only use Cashill's juvenile musings as a hypothetical which, if true, suggests all the unsavory things you already believe about Obama, then you've fully embraced the Cashill Doctrine. What do I mean by that? If you deconstruct Cashill's name, you'll find that it contains the words "cash" and shill." "Cash" refers to paper bank notes which, in more robust times, could be exchanged for goods or services. A "shill," according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is "one who poses as a disinterested advocate of another but is actually of the latter's party; a mouthpiece, a stooge." It goes without saying that shills often shill for cash, but in this case, I think we can say the shill's shilling for cash and attention.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Really? This stuff will no longer be for the tinfoil-hatted in the backwaters of the internet, but they're going to make a serious stab at Obama as Ayers in blackface?
I love the opening.
He just hated to bring it up, he really did. It pained him to have to delve into this septic tank. But he'll do it anyway, FOR US. And it hurts him a lot more than it will hurt us.
It would be funny if it weren't so sad. (And note that a young black man couldn't have written the book-- only an old white professor could.)
This is being pushed in a column in this weekend's Pittsburgh PG as well.
"Scant paper trail?" We already know, as brought into the public spotlight by Ms. Clinton, that Barack Obama was writing essays in kindergarten.
(I was writing stories in kindergarten, but they weren't getting read, not even by me. I didn't get the difference between "b" and "d" straight until first grade.)
OMG!!!11! Obama never a wrote before his first one! Therefore, he couldn't have written his first book, because there is no evidence that Obama knew how to write a book before writing his first book. You know who did know how to write a book? Bill Ayers, and only Bill Ayers - that's who!
The stupid, it hurts.
Why don't right-wing bloggers just content themselves with saying "I oppose Obama because he plans to raise taxes on the most productive / supports abortion rights / wants a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq / whatever"? Why can they only conceive of defeating him by delving into the shadows of his imaginary personal history to find the single big scandal that will bring him down once and for all? (See also the birth certificate "story"). Is it because they all want the glory of being the one to break the Big Scoop?
K: Welcome to the "Unmoved Mover" theory of William Ayers. If William Ayers didn't exist, conservatives would have to invent him.
Gee whiz, what an oustanding finding: stuff Obama has written in the past doesn't employ the same voice and prose as his memoir.
And Oh Boy!: "Obama doesn't talk like he writes."
It's a conspiracy! Alert the masses!
Why does everyone say "low-information voters" when they really mean low-IQ voters?
This isn't a culture war....it is a bellcurve war.
The not-so-subtle racism underlying this bullshit claim - Obama couldn't possibly have written has own books- is the most appalling aspect of it.
What the hell is wrong with these people?
Ploeg,
You're conflating Voltaire and Aristotle. The prime mover unmoved is that to which everything in the universe looks. Voltaire's quote is "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."
Probably the first time I've seen Bill Ayers accused of being a good writer.
Peter:
Well, the first sentence was a reference to K's post (the theory that Obama could not have written his first book, because he had not written anything like it before, but even if he had written something like it before, he couldn't have written that, because he would not have written anything like that before, and so on and so on; so there must have been somebody else who wrote it). The second sentence was a separate thought that, if Ayers did not exist, conservatives would have had to invent him.
But the rule is, if you have to explain it, it's not funny. Oh, well.
Next thing they'll be telling you is that Ayers took all of Obama's classes at Harvard Law, cause no way could a Black man graduate Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law.
As a ninth grader in the late 6o's at NYC's High School of Music and Art, I wrote an essay for my world geography class. Several days later our teacher read my essay to the class (as it happened I was cutting school that day. My kids still think it was really weird that when I cut school I would head to the Donnell branch of the public library to read, among other things, every book Jane Austin ever wrote.) The next day, when I returned to class, some of my white school "mates" more than intimated that I (I am AA/Hispanic)couldn't possibly have actually written that essay all by myself. Plus ca change, plus ca le meme chose.
You knew it was only a matter of time before the overt racists started coming out of the woodwork. Of course, they will couch it in different terms and act indignant if they are called on it but that is par for the course. I do remember that they had a long, ongoing campaign against Bill Clinton the moment he took office, but that was before the internet became the ubiquitous force that it has become.
Timothy Mcveigh was the last domestic terrorist and he was definitely a right-wing nut job. I never thought my generation would have to fear like this, but I am beginning to get a sense of dread. Maybe he will be much safer following the election when he doesn't need to do the direct campaigning any longer.
Next, Andy McCarthy looks into whether John Brown wrote The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Because, you know, there wasn't anything in Douglass's background to suggest he could have written such a stylish and penetrating book.
Didn't Obama's memoir come out six years before Ayers's memoir? Wouldn't it have made more sense to ask if Obama ghostwrote (or inspired) Ayers, rather than the other way around?
it's not unreasonable to expect more similarity between Obama the writer and Obama the orator
Ummm... Orators don't just speak "off the cuff." Indeed, great orators are noted for their great speeches.
Hmm.... Imagine that.
One can't even have a good fanfic contest, because whatever nutty thing we could dream up is already circulating out there in an e-mail, and being solemnly discussed at NRO.
I would think that someone who is so interested in literary criticism would know how to spell the word "falter".
TNC, the people at Protein Wisdom think you're a girl.
They think you're a girl too, matoko. Suckas!
"TNC, the people at Protein Wisdom think you're a girl."
Awesome.
This is all a bunch of tired old stereotypes, people unwilling to believe that a black man could speak for himself (why I referred back to Frederick Douglass). Okay, we all know that - the only really unpredictable aspect, I just realized, is that Andy McCarthy uses the word "deconstruction" to describe a textual analysis without blinking. It seems like only a few years ago that "deconstruction" was Exhibit A in the academic culture wars, and a conservative couldn't say the word without also saying "Marxist," "French," "moral relativism," and metaphorically spitting on Derrida's grave. What's happened to their standards?
Ben, that Frederick Douglas comparison is killer, but it does require that people actually know something about Douglas, and white people here in NY (and especially in western NY, where he lived for the last part of his life) have been studiously trying to forget him for well over a hundred years. It's a twisted and kind of sordid story (did you know there was a helluva Klan presence here in western / southern-tier NY for a long time?) that involves NY politicians feeling humiliated for having to look for Douglas's endorsement.
One night a bunch of people burned down his home. He couldn't find an inn that would take his family. And the last time I was aware, there was no marker on the site of the house.
So, yeah, Douglas: Brilliant, inspirational, powerful writer, but largely without honor in his own land.
Golly, maybe somebody should review McCarthy's writings and make sure he doesn't share any "metaphoric thread" that might tie his writings to Ayers' writings.
"TNC, the people at Protein Wisdom think you're a girl."
My brain is weird. I saw you on bloggingheads a few weeks ago and thought "who the hell is that." After a few minutes staring at bloggingheads, wondering why I thought you looked entirely different, I realized that I had done something totally bizarre.
Somehow, based on a post where you said you wore a fedora to work, I had internalized the idea that you looked exactly like Andre 3000, the only other black man in America that wears a fedora to work every day.
-- ACS
Deleted. Conspiracy-monger and overcompensate on your own blog.
Wait—aren't there, like, actual empirical statistical analytical methods by which you can tell with a pretty high degree of confidence whether two longish works were written by the same person? Isn't that how they figured out Joe Klein was Anonymous? Shouldn't the National Review be out grabbing a bunch of freelance statisticians or something, given what a game-changer this obviously would be if confirmed?
My favorite part is when Cashill notes that his own memoir doesn't include any references to the ocean, which clearly means Bill Ayers is the only person who could possibly use water imagery in a book.
Truly, this man has a dizzying intellect.
I used to think the people at Protein Wisdom couldn't get any less critical in their thinking.
Um... nice response coates to cahill's argument-except you don't offer a response. Instead of dismissing the charge off-hand, shouldn't you give a thorough debunking of cahill's argument?
Or, would that be asking too much from a silly little liberal like you?
Did you see that awful awful awful "poetry" that one wrote? This is part of what makes it really hard to believe he could write anything decent.