In a Sunday New York Times article, oddly insensitive to the would-be socialists who comprise the Times readership, reporter Gardiner Harris fantasized about how much money Barack and Michelle might pocket from their post-White House memoirs.
“Publishers hope that Mr. Obama’s writing ability could make his memoir not only profitable in its first years but perhaps for decades to come,” gushed Harris, who compared Obama’s literary talents to those of Theodore Roosevelt and Ulysses Grant.
Unlike John F. Kennedy, whose authorship of Profiles in Courage “has been questioned,” Obama’s literary skills, according to Harris, are “widely” accepted. To confirm that point, Harris cites a May 2008 article by the Times’s Janny Scott headlined, “The Story of Obama, Written by Obama.”
For years, Obama has encouraged this fiction. “I’ve written two books,” he told a crowd of teachers in Virginia in July of 2008. The crowd applauded. “I actually wrote them myself,” he added with a wink and a nod, and now the teachers exploded in laughter. They got the joke: Republicans were too stupid to write their books.
No one much cared about Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, a policy brief written by committee and published in 2006. It was his 1995 memoir,Dreams from My Father, that emerged as the sacred text in the cult of Obama. “There is no underestimating the importance of Dreams from My Father in the political rise of Barack Obama,” New Yorker editor David Remnick would later write in his exhaustive look at Obama’s life and career, The Bridge.
Myths, Misunderstandings and Outright lies about owning Gold. Are you at risk?
The problem, of course, is that Obama did not write either of his books in any meaningful way. On October 9, 2008, American Thinker gave me my first extended opportunity to make the case that either Obama experienced a miraculous turnaround in his literary abilities — his pre-Dreams work was sophomoric tripe — or that he had major editorial help, up to and including a ghostwriter, specifically Bill Ayers.
David Remnick could not control his elitist imp in discussing what happened next. “Cashill’s assertions might well have remained a mere twinkling in the Web’s farthest lunatic orbit had it not been for the fact that more powerful voices hoped to give his theory wider currency.” None would be more powerful than that of Rush Limbaugh, a man who haunts the liberal imagination the way Kong did Skull Island’s.
On October 10 of 2008, Limbaugh played audio excerpts from Dreams and commented on them. The one that triggered my name was this, “A steady attack on the White race, the constant recitation of black people’s brutal experience in this country served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal responsibility….”
“Stop the tape,” said Rush “What is this? Ballast? He doesn’t talk this way. You know, there are stories out there, he may not have written this book.”
Ballast was something of a give-away. Ayers, a former merchant seaman, liked nautical metaphors. So too, curiously, did Obama. I found in both Dreams and in Ayers’s several works the following shared words: fog, mist, ships, sinking ships, seas, sails, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first mates, floods, shores, storms, streams, wind, waves, waters, anchors, barges, horizons, harbor, bays, ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, voyages (TP), narrower courses, uncertain courses, and things howling, wobbling, fluttering, sinking, leaking, cascading, swimming, knotted, ragged, tangled, boundless, uncharted, turbulent, and murky.
Remnick had no use for evidence, and there was much more than the nautical. “This may not have been Limbaugh’s most racist insinuation of the campaign.” He cited others he liked less, but he concluded that our collective “libel about Obama’s memoir — the denial of literacy, the denial of authorship — had a particularly ugly pedigree.”
