More Evidence that President Obama Did Not Write "Dreams from My Father"

“These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers...Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Book.”--Christopher Anderson in Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage

Dr. Jack Cashill has written a series of articles that make the case that the real author of President Obama's 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father is the Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers. [Search Cashill on this blog.]

An Ohio State University professor named Dr. Bruce Heiden has also questioned Obama's authorship.

In his just-released biography Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, celebrity biographer Christopher Andersen has also written that the terrorist Ayers helped Barack Obama write his memoir. Cashill speculates that Anderson's two unnamed Hyde Park sources may be the infamous Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

Dr. Cashill explains (10-1-09):

In a lengthy and detailed section on the Obama’s financial struggles in the early 1990s, Andersen relates how at the urging of Michelle, a “hopelessly blocked” Obama turned to “friend and neighbor” Bill Ayers to help him with his much acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.

Andersen’s details are specific. The Obamas were convinced of “Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer.” Barack particularly liked the novelistic style of To Teach, a 1993 book by Ayers.

Obama hoped to use a comparable style for his own family history. The problem was that although he had taped interviews with many of his relatives, he could not find it in himself to write the book.

Andersen details Obama’s blown advances, his futile escape to Bali, the growing financial and emotional pressure to finish a memoir he had started four years earlier.
The key sentence in Andersen’s account is the one that follows: “These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers.”
Adds Andersen, “Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Book...”

Ayers has every right to be peeved. To protect Obama’s reputation, critics have had to attack him. Consider the following, and this from Republican bigwig Ken Blackwell:

"Bill Ayers' thoughts have all the leaden quality of most deadening Marxist screeds. Ayers' writing you can't pick up; Obama's you can't put down."

In fact, Ayers writes very well indeed. His 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, is a better book than Dreams. And he gets no credit for it. [Full text]