- Update 10/13/08 - Jack Cashill has unearthed a chapter Obama contributed to a book in 1990. It's writing style is B minus. This furthers the thesis that Ayers is the author of Obama's Dreams From My Father. Click here.
- That's the question Andy McCarthy asks, after reading Jack Cashill's lengthy analysis in The American Thinker. McCarthy says of Cashill's article:
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 from 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.
Me: After reading McCarthy's comment, I went and read Cashill's article for myself and agree with McCarthy. There are real questions to be raised here. Cashill doesn't claim Obama wrote absolutely nothing of his memoir, only that the lofty sections most probably are Ayers, and not his. Makes sense. Cashill writes:
Without question, he [Obama] contributed much of the book's raw material, especially the long-winded accounting of events and conversations, polished just well enough to pass muster. The book's fierce, succinct and tightly coiled social analysis more closely matches the style of Fugitive Days, a much tighter book.
Here is Cashill's concluding paragraph:
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.