Did Obama write it?

Most of the responsible Hillary-friendly bloggers hesitate to address the question of Obama's relationship with former Weathermen Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. I, on the other hand, feel that this is an issue worthy of study. I would not relegate such discussion to those eldritch blog-realms where geeks meditate upon green birth certificates and trade theories about Obi's secret jihadi agenda.

Please understand: I do not buy into the ridiculous canard that Obama is a covert Bolshie, which is the underlying message of the right-wing bloggers who have focused on Ayers. To the contrary: I've argued that Ayers may not be the "leftist" he claims.

Liberals who dismiss the Ayers connection have relied upon a piece of vetting offered by FactCheck.org. Our correspondent G -- whose liberal credentials are in excellent working order -- has offered a rejoinder: The ultimate guide to the Ayers controversy. I followed up G's fine work with a post about the key Obama/Ayers partnership -- a school reform program conducted under the aegis of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. By any rational measure, this initiative failed miserably.

Now, Jack Cashill of the American Thinker (a right-wing publication) offers what he considers breakthrough evidence for a thesis which has obsessed him for a while -- the proposition that Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father. We've made glancing reference to this idea previously.

What does Cashill's new evidence come to?

In short and in sum, he has made the acquaintance of two literary detectives -- both pseudonymous, alas -- who claim to have found strong stylistic similarities between passages in Obama's writings and passages in works published under the name of Bill Ayers.

For example, both Dreams from My Father and Ayers' A Kind and Just Parent reference poet Carl Sandburg -- hardly surprising, in and of itself. Both mis-quote Sandburg's famous description of Chicago as "Hog butcher to the world." The original has "for the world." (Of course, mis-quotes often fall into common parlance. To cite a classic example, Bogie did not say "Play it again, Sam.")

Cashill's correspondent, "Mr. West," claims to have found over 700 Ayers/Obama correlations.

Rather astonishingly, as Mr. West points out, at least six of the characters in Dreams have the same names as characters in Ayers' books: Malik, Freddy, Tim, Coretta, Marcus, and "the old man." Many of the stories involving these characters in Dreams seem as contrived as their names.

As Mr. Midwest pointed out in a recent missive, Ayers' interest in education bleeds into Dreams. The tip-off once again is the contrived name, in this case "Asante Moran," likely an homage to the Afro-centric educator, Molefi Kete Asante. Moran lectures Obama and his pal "Johnny" on the nature of public education.

"The first thing you have to realize," he said, looking at Johnnie and me in turn, "is that the public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period."

"Social control" is an Ayers' bugaboo.

In Dreams, "Moran" elaborates on the fate of the black student, "From day one, what's he learning about? Someone else's history. Someone else's culture. Not only that, this culture he's supposed to learn is the same culture that's systematically rejected him, denied his humanity."

If this character were real, and Obama had actually met him, there would be no reason to phony up his name. In fact, however, Moran is spouting exactly the same educational philosophy that Ayers does in To Teach.

"Underneath it all," Ayers says of standard school textbooks, "the social studies and literature texts reflected and promoted white supremacy. There were no pictures or photographs of African Americans . . . there was throughout an assumed superiority and smug celebration of the status quo."

Both authors, by the way, use the phrase "beneath the surface" repeatedly.

Well, I can't pretend to be persuaded by this. But the following bit is rather more interesting:

Ayers and his radical friends were obsessed with Vietnam. It defined them and still does. To reflect their superior insight into that country, they have shown a tendency to use "Mekong Delta" as synecdoche, the part that indicates the whole.

In Fugitive Days, for instance, Ayers envisions "a patrol in the Mekong Delta" when he conjures up an image of Vietnam. Ayers' wife, Bernadine Dohrn, pontificated about "a hamlet called My Lai" in a 1998 interview, but to flash her radical chops, she located it "in the middle of the Mekong Delta," which is in reality several hundred miles from My Lai.

Given Obama's age, "Mekong Delta" was not likely a part of his vocabulary, but that does not stop him from writing about "the angry young men in Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta." Ayers, of course, would also have had a much deeper connection than Obama to "Detroit," whose historic riot took place shortly before Obama's sixth birthday. Ayers worked in Detroit the year after those same riots.

I must confess that Obama's passage really does sound more like something that might have been written by someone with Ayers' history.

There are six references to "eyebrows" in Fugitive Days -- bushy ones, flaring ones, arched ones, black ones and, stunningly, seven references in Dreams -- heavy ones, bushy ones, wispy ones. It is the rare memoirist who talks about eyebrows at all.

I could go on, but I've already quoted rather too much. Bottom line: Despite the "Mekong Delta" business, I remain unimpressed. Most of these correlations strike me as a very weak brew.

Despite what Cashill would have you believe, lots of writers use the phase "bill of particulars." Many writers have used the words "perpetual grin" -- in fact, the phrase is something of a literary cliche, employed by lazy writers who want to conjure up the image of a certain type of person.

PhiloComp.net has already offered this rebuttal to Cashill's earlier work. Cashill had attempted to use a piece of software called the Signature Stylometric System, designed to inquire into long-running authorship controversies, such as the ones involving William Shakespeare. The author of that program countered by noting that the same tool, used in the same way, found an even closer "match" between a text by Ayers and a text by Bill Clinton.

Our correspondent G added his own bill of particulars (you should pardon the expression) to the PhiloComp article:

Secondly, I've run my own analyses. Predominantly I used Jgaap, since I'd previously found this to be the best single tool currently available. I also tried punctuation analysis using the software Signature (the latter is a relatively simple approach with less discriminatory power).

Punctuation results - the punctuation pattern in Dreams matches the pattern in Audacity, and not the pattern in a large sample of Ayers writing.

Far more importantly - the Jgaap analysis consistently matched the author of Dreams to the author of Audacity (i.e. they were apparently written by the same person, which would equal Obama) and did not match the author of Dreams to Ayers, or to a large set of other random authors...

I remain open to the proposition that Obama had the aid of a ghost writer -- or at least a heavy editor -- in the production of his first book. My open attitude stems from the simple fact that the literary offerings of politicians often require the kind of attention that straddles the concepts of editing and re-writing. Better men than Barack Obama have ventured into ghost world.

But...Ayers? I still don't think he's the guy.