Evidence Mounts: Ayers Co-Wrote Obama's Dreams

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 . . .

Linda Sue Grimes, Ph.D, critiqued the above poem on Feb 6,2009, saying

This versification fails on three important levels: misuse of grammar/diction, awkward enjambment, lack of meaning. While the apes are charming and endearing with their figs and their musty pelts, the reader leaves them sadly wondering what they might have conveyed through the hand of a genuine poet.

You may be wondering, why would a Ph.D comment on something so laughably amateurish? Why would a respected professor waste time assessing the literary equivalent of a train wreck? Because the poem above is one of only four writings in print by Barack Obama before he penned Dreams From My Father, a book that Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."

According to Jack Cashill at American Thinker

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...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."

Cashill pointed out in a column last year that in contrast to "Dreams," the Obama writing samples unearthed before 1995 "are pedestrian and uninspired."

"There is no precedent for this kind of literary transformation," Cashill wrote. "It is as if a high 90s golfer suddenly showed up with his PGA card – with no known practice rounds in between."

And now this. Christopher Andersen in Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage lays it out just as Cashill envisioned it;

Obama was faced with a deadline with the Times Books division of Random House to submit his manuscript after already having canceled a contract with Simon & Schuster. Confronted with the threat of a second failure, his wife, Michelle, suggested he seek the help of "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.

Go out and buy (or better yet, check it out from your library) Fugitive Days: A Memoir by Bill Ayers. Read it. Pay attention to the vocubulary, syntax, metaphors, etc. Then, uncomfortable as it may be, listen to Bill Ayers speak and you'll find that it's obvious that you're listening to a talented and gifted individual, someone who "sounds" like his book.

Go out and find other examples. From the left, read something by James Carville, or Chris Matthews. On the right, perhaps Fred Barnes or Charles Krauthammer. You'll find that even when speaking casually, they use a cadence and vocabulary consistent with their writings.

Now go out and buy Dreams from My Father. Read it. Then listen to his interviews. Listen to his unprepared remarks, away from the teleprompter. You may be surprised.

The mythology of Barack Obama is becoming increasingly unraveled, giving way to the amateurish, bungling reality underneath.

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