The other day I complained that Obama's election-night speech didn't show any of the personal authenticity of his first book, Dreams From My Father, and a friend sent me this link to Kansas City writer Jack Cashill's theory, now wild on the rightwing blogosphere, that Obama didn't write the book, William Ayers did–Ayers being an accomplished author in his own right. I read Cashill's claim and find it plausible.
In fact, of all the dogs that have been unleashed on Obama in the last six months, from Rev. Wright to being Muslim to palling with terrorists, this literary issue is the only dog I've seen that can hunt. I think it might end up as an ongoing shadow narrative about Obama for a long time for several reasons: it won't be proved one way or the other; it serves the Obama-haters, who are legion; and it has some real meaning.
I remember watching this sort of process with Bill Clinton, back when the Arkansas stories bubbled up. In fact, I threw myself into them as a journalist, going out to Arkansas a number of times. They became one of the leading storylines in Clinton's career because they revealed something important about him: his political machine threatened people who were going to go public about his women, including some of the women themselves, and that's what propelled the impeachment saga, as far as I'm concerned.
But I'm not going to throw myself into this one. I don't think it's important. Obama has great things to do and I believe he has the capacity. This story is a rattling tin can, sort of like the theory that Ted Sorensen wrote JFK's Profiles in Courage–of course with the Ayers twist. Though I must say I find this theory thrilling.
Cashill's theory is plausible to me because it so reflects my own experience as an Obama reader.
A few months back I read Dreams From My Father and was blown away. It is often beautifully written and is propelled by a wrenching Huck-Finn-like drama of fatherlessness. I love the themes, progressive ones about race in America and a fluid global identity in the age of self-invention.
Even as I read it, though, I had an undercurrent of disturbance. The book is too good. Myself, I've written 7 or 8 books all told, and published two. It's hard to write a book. This book was superbly, effortlessly crafted. The way the action jumped forward from one chapter to the next, skipping three and four years at a time, was highly sophisticated. The tripartite structure–Origins, Chicago, Kenya–was elegant and powerful. And though Obama had done very little other writing in life, the prose was lovely and supple, and the emotional self-awareness was very high. I found this most surprising of all. Any writer will tell you it's hard to write about yourself. You have to have a lot of self-awareness to shape yourself into a character, to figure out how much to make fun of yourself or take yourself seriously. Your ego and vanity and self-deception get in the way all the time. That's why most writers write about other people.
Obama didn't have that problem. He seemed to understand himself and his journey from a distance. And he had no trouble talking about it. In Jane Austen's dichotomy of sense and sensibility, the book was all sensibility. And the man on the campaign trail has been all sense.
The combination of literary achievement and self-awareness raised another puzzle for me: Anyone who writes this well has gotta be a writer. I didn't understand how Obama could have thrown himself into scratch-and-bite Chicago politics if he had such literary gifts: the path of literary glory would have beckoned. I tried to tell myself that he just had other gifts, other values. Though it also didn't make sense to me that his next book, The Audacity of Hope, was so wooden that I couldn't get more than a few pages in. Like Obama in his press conference today, using the phrase, "with he and I." Politicians talk like that. Writers don't.
One other thing worked at me: the lack of acknowledgement. Any book that required so much from someone's spirit would have had a few helpers. I will never be convinced that he did not get at least some help of a story-doctoring/taperecording/crafting character, but while he acknowledged "friends" for their "generous readings," he named only one. Way too opaque for me. (When I saw that he quoted 18 lines from the play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf,
by the poet Ntozake Shange, and did not give her any credit in the book, not even naming her, I found it similarly unsettling. A real writer loves writing, wants to give the writers he admires credit.)
Last winter, I told my wife that I didn't believe Obama had written the book by himself. She said she would divorce me/cut off my nuts if I tried to write that up. I cheated. I decided to look into a piece on Obama's literary achievement, which after all was his rocket ship to the top–the keynote speech in '04. My old friend Peter Kaplan at the Observer said I could make calls using the Observer's name. The piece never ran because the Times did something like it right after I got going, but I spoke to both Peter Osnos, Obama's erstwhile publisher (who has been critical of the "steely" way Obama conducted his book deals), and Henry Ferris, who was his editor. I'm not going to dig out the notes now, but Ferris said that Obama was a true writer, Ferris didn't have to do very much at all with the prose, it came in remarkably clean. When I asked about the great pacing and structure of the book, Ferris said: That was Obama's achievement. Ferris told me he'd already gotten some of these questions from reporters: after Obama borrowed lines from a Gov. Deval Patrick speech in Massachusetts last year, sans credit, reporters wondered about the book.
I relate my narrative because it intrigues me that Cashill independently had a very similar response. He's a writer too, and evidently a right wing nut, but he knows how books are made, and his investigation began with similar misgivings. One of the more inculpatory facts he's come up with is his assertion that something like 3 percent of the sentences in Dreams From My Father are passive voice, but 8 percent of the sentences in Obama's next book, The Audacity of Hope, are passive. Cashill and I agree that the more you write the less you use passive voice. You get better, you notice that kind of thing and overcome it. Obama took a big step backwards to his second book.
I'm not going to go into Cashill's evidence and computer modeling. Frankly, I don't care that much. For what it's worth, I find the Hudson River flowing north anecdote, which appears in both an Ayers book and Obama's book, mildly suspicious, as I do a lefty lesson both books offer about education versus training. Some of the lush reflective passages in the two books have faint echoes. Judge for yourself. I'm just saying it's plausible, and unprovable. Ayers is a smart guy who's been thru the wars. Here's his blog. I don't think he's going to get involved in this.
The reason I don't think it matters politically one way or the other is that politicians use others' words all the time, and professional writers help them write books. Hillary Clinton hit this buzzsaw a long time ago. So did JFK. And anyone who's worked in media as long as I have knows that "authorship" is often the product of a lot of rewriting by a nameless editor.
Though the controversy speaks to a real issue with Obama, which I wrote about many months ago, he's not much for giving credit. He grew up on his own, with parents half way around the world from him, and seems determined to prove to everyone that he can do things on his own. Real impressive; I never saw him crack once in 18 months. I do hope he opens up a little more, lets us in.
And why am I thrilled by this theory? One of Cashill's plausible scenarios is that a bunch of lefties in Hyde Park, Chicago, used to help each other with their books. He says Rashid Khalidi got help from Bill Ayers on one of his books, and thanked him lavishly. If I had been in that neighborhood, I would have been in that group myself, or wanted to be. They're my people, smart lefties on the outside in urban academic/bohemian/diverse communities. People who've led interesting independent lives. Before I moved to the woods, I lived in communities like that for years, in Minnesota, Philly, and New York. I love those places. I've never been a revolutionary, but I've often had radical sentiments and hung out discussing them, sometimes with herb, mostly with beer or hard liquor. My best friends have always been on the left. I'm gratified to think that Obama comes out of a progressive world and that it stamped him as it stamped me.
And I say it's about time the culture turned with rampant curiosity to lefty intellectual milieus–as opposed to Orange County, Halliburton, carbon-pig ranches, Georgetown dinner parties, or airconditioned Martha's Vineyard vacation houses, as the backstory backdrops for our leaders. We're an important, even romantic, part of the culture.
The Bill Ayers stuff of course makes the rightwing nuts–and yes, potentially makes Obama a liar; though I wonder how careful he's been on this score. If Cashill's theory is true, this story has the dark redemptive drama of Dickens's best narrative, Great Expectations, in which respectable, achievement-oriented Pip owes his
elevation to a criminal, Abel Magwitch. Oh what a shadow! This would be the American version. Magwitch did terrible things, and struggled to undo them, and earned Pip's love.
Bill Ayers was given a path to the ruling class by birth; he was the son of the CEO of Commonwealth Edison. But the Vietnam War was evil; and he went to teach-ins and demos. He had an epiphany at age 21 when someone challenged him, "How will you live your life so that it doesn't make a mockery of your values?" Unquestionably he went about this in the wrong way. I don't approve of what he did. But I approve of commitment and political seriousness, and opposition to human-rights abuses and hateful wars that destroy hundreds of thousands of darkskinned peoples' lives. Ayers has since become a professor of education and served the community in honorable ways. And I gather he's a hell of a writer.
