Posted on 01/18/2009 6:31:42 PM PST by STARWISE
Evidence continues to mount that Barack Obama had substantial help from Bill Ayers in the creation of his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, a book that Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." The evidence falls into five general categories, here summarized.
* The discovery of new matching nautical metaphors from both Ayers and Obama that almost assuredly came from the same source: Ayers, a former merchant seaman.
* The discovery of a Bill Ayers' essay on memoir writing, whose postmodern themes and phrases are echoed throughout Dreams.
* A newly discovered book chapter from 1990 that shows clearly and painfully the limits of Obama's prose style the year he received a contract to write Dreams.
* The revelation by radical Islamicist Rashid Khalidi that Ayers made his "dining room table" available for neighborhood writers who needed help.
* A refined timeline that shows Ayers had the means, the motive and the time to help Obama when he needed it most.
The timeline
A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama's election as the Harvard Law Review's first black president in 1990 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.
Obama repaired to Chicago with advance in hand and dithered. At one point, in order to finish the book 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. Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. His agent hustled him a new, smaller contract.
Ayers published his book To Teach in 1993. Between 1993 and 1996, he had no other formal authorial assignment than to co-edit a collection of essays. This was an unusual hole in his very busy publishing career.
Obama's memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama's path to political power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.
In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama's career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama's belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.
Neighborhood assistance
Allow me to reconstruct how Obama transformed himself into what the New York Times has called "that rare politician who can write . . . and write movingly and genuinely about himself." There is an element of speculation in this, but new evidence continues to narrow the gap between the speculative and the conclusive. One clue comes from an unexpected source, Rashid Khalidi, the radical Arab-American friend of Obama's and reputed ally of the PLO.
In the acknowledgment section of his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire, Khalidi writes of Ayers, "Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family's dining room table to do some writing for the project." Khalidi did not need the table. He had one of his own. He needed the help.
Khalidi had spent several years at Chicago University's Center for International Studies. At a 2003 farewell dinner on the occasion of his departure from Chicago, Obama toasted him, thanking him and his wife for the many dinners that they had shared as well as for his "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases."
Chicago's Hyde Park was home to a tight, influential radical community at whose center were Ayers and Dohrn. In this world, the Ayers' terrorist rap sheet only heightened their reputation. Obama had to know. The couple had given up revolution in 1980 for the long slow march through the institutions. By 1994, if not earlier, Ayers saw a way to quicken that march.
I believe that after failing to finish his book on time, and after forfeiting his advance from Simon & Schuster, Obama brought a sprawling, messy, sophomoric manuscript to the famed dining room table of Bill Ayers and said, "Help."
Obama's limited skills
Obama needed all the help he could get. Prior to 1990, he had written very close to nothing. In 1981 Occidental College published two of Obama's poems-"Pop" and "Underground. Obama calls it some "very bad poetry," and he does not sell himself short. From "Underground":
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 . . .
It would be another decade before Obama had anything in print, and this only an edited, unsigned student case comment in the Harvard Law Review unearthed by Politico. Attorneys who reviewed the piece for Politico described it as "a fairly standard example of the genre."
Once elected president of the Harvard Law Review -- more of a popularity than a literary contest -- Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal.
In 1990 Obama also contributed an essay to a book published by the University of Illinois at Springfield, an anthology called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois.
Although the essay covers many of the issues raised in Dreams and uses some of the memoir's techniques, it does so without a hint of style, sophistication, or promise. The following two excerpts capture Obama's range or lack thereof:
"Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda."
"But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well . . . and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts."
These cliché-choked sentences go beyond the merely unpromising to the fully ungrammatical. "Organizing" does not "face." "Efforts" do not leave "skeletons." "Agendas" do not have "anathemas." Indeed, the essay is clunky, pedestrian, and wonkish, a B- paper in a freshman comp class.
In "Why Organize" Obama makes use of the fully re-created conversation, a technique used to somewhat better effect in Dreams. Here, his ungainly conjuring of black speech makes one cringe:
"I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer."
"Why's that?"
" 'Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don't nobody appreciate you."
To read "Why Organize" in its entirety is to understand the profound limits of Obama's literary talent. I am sure he sensed those limits if no one else did.
Postmodern themes
Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir Fugitive Days and Obama's Dreams From My Father follow oddly similar rules. Ayers describes his as "a memory book," one that deliberately blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history. Obama says much the same. In Dreams, some characters are composites. Some appear out of precise chronology. Names have been changed.
Dreams and Fugitive Days are both suffused with repeated reference to lies, lying and what Ayers calls "our constructed reality." A serious student of literature, Ayers has written thoughtfully on the role of the first person narrator in the construction of a memoir.
In true postmodernist fashion, he rejects the possibility of an objective, universal truth. He argues instead that our lives are journeys, whose "narratives" we "construct" and, if we have the will and the power, impose on others.
Curiously, Obama says much the same in Dreams and in much the same language. "But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie," writes Obama, "something I'd constructed from the scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother."
The evidence strongly suggests that Ayers transformed the stumbling literalist of "Why Organize" into the sophisticated postmodernist of Dreams, and he did not so not by tutoring Obama, but by rewriting his text.
The Ayers' quotes that follow come from an essay of his, "Narrative Push/Narrative Pull." The Obama quotes come from Dreams:
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Rest at link
A Freeper, Jack Cashill did a lot of work on this issue, and I have to say that his essay on Obama’s writing is more accomplished than Obama’s own writing samples.
http://www.cashill.com/natl_general/obama_did_not_write.htm
Hi, Eva. Good to hear from someone who’s been around FreeRepublic even longer than I have.
Much of Noonan's issues with Bush are aspects of Bush's personality which are similar to Reagan. If Noonan truly thinks this way about Bush and these traits, she would have to have changed her opinion on Reagan.
Noonan wants to be in with the in crowd, nothing more. She would rather be popular than be remembered as a woman with character. She is a summer soldier and sunshine patriot.
Are we going to be subjected to Hillary like memories?
Toxic Chinese import? Have they tested him for melamine & lead?
I already know they haven't paid any attention to the false labeling: Contents: Devout Christian; Articulate; Profound Thinker; Brialliant Orator....
Is there any chance that when bo went to Fiji to write, that Ayers visited there also?
Nothing would surprise me about this gang ........
per our gal Peggy Noonan....
Mr. Obama is a writer, and he sees himself as a writer. It is an important part of his self-perception. He is the author of two books, the first of considerable literary merit. He loves words. It is in writing that he absorbs, organizes data, thinks his way through to views and decisions, all of which adds to the expectations for his speech.
EVERYBODY NEEDS TO UNDERSTAND THAT AYERS AND 0BAMA HAVE BEEN BUDDIES SINCE 1982..
.. LONG BEFORE HE “WROTE” HIS BOOKS.
I have little doubt that’s true.
I know. I’ve read all of jack’s articles and I think they make a lot of sense.
Thanks Peggy. Just another way of saying that he is a good BS’er. The world's full of them.
This military family deeply cares about the mockery NObama is making of our Constitution and our nation.
Keep me in your ping list, please. Someone needs to care.
Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again.
—Ronald Reagan
Now, if they’ll just get ahold of paperwork from Occidental or Columbia or Harvard that lists Barry Obama as a foreign student, we can all heave a sigh of relief as we lock and load.
I just wish SCOTUS Roberts would hesitate before giving the oath of office and say “but first, PE Obama has something to say to the public about his birth certificate.”
It won’t happen so I won’t be watching. Wasn’t going to watch anyway.
Happy Robert E Lee Birthday (Monday) y’all.
16 posted on Sun 18 Jan 2009 09:42:56 PM EST by HighlyOpinionated (The American Form of Government . . . http://www.flixxy.com/political-systems.htm)
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Could you please help me to understand how Chief Justice Roberts will administer the oath of office to Obama?
My confusion is about the following step in the swearing- in ceremony: At what point does Chief Justice Roberts hold up a copy of the U.S. Constitution while Obama sets a small corner of the Constitution on fire with a match for all the world to see? Thanks.
Ayers as the mentor, pushing his protegé up the ladder makes sense.
Thanks for the pings. I remember reading this at the time it came out. Love American Thinker!
Wonder if Ayers helped with his inauguration speech?
I know what you mean.....since the election I haven’t been able to read the news (except for the sports) and can’t even watch any of the news including FoxNews.
I realize that may be psychiatric, but there are no pills for that.
“We have a righteous wind at our backs”. - Obambi speeches.
“The righteous wind of socialism” - Mao Zedong.
A quote likely recycled by Ayers.
obama 2008 is a manufactured product.”
He needs to be the subject of a complete recall.......
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