Articles: Who Wrote Audacity of Hope? Who Wrote Audacity of Hope? By Jack Cashill In previous articles on the subject of President Obama's writing skills, I have focused on his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, not his 2006 book, Audacity of Hope for one reason: Dreams, according to esteemed British author Jonathan Raban and others, captures Obama's "authentic voice." On the strength of Dreams, Raban called Obama "the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln." Raban is in good company. "I was astonished by his ability to write, to think, to reflect, to learn and turn a good phrase," said Nobel prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison of Dreams. "I was very impressed. This was not a normal political biography.'' Although Audacity has received respectful reviews, it has not gotten the raves Dreams has. The New York Times describes Audacity "as much more of a political document.

Portions of the volume read like outtakes from a stump speech." Still, despite the book's "flabby platitudes," the Times assures its readers that "enough of the narrative voice in this volume is recognizably similar to the one in Dreams From My Father." Without intending to, the Times likely captured the thinking behind the creation of Audacity. If portions of Audacity sound like outtakes from stump speeches, it is because they are outtakes from stump speeches. This can be proved. What cannot be proved, but what seems likely, is that Obama included just "enough of the narrative voice" from Dreams to maintain continuity between the two books. The question remains -- who provided that narrative voice? In the criticism of my last two American Thinker articles, only the Washington Post addressed the central issue, and it did so facetiously: "The book [Dreams] is beautifully written and yet, in Cashill's opinion, Obama is - and always was - a crappy (his word, not mine) writer." Critics, please forget for a minute the parallel styles, words, phrases, images, and anecdotes shared by Dreams and Bill Ayers' books. Forget for a minute Bill Ayers.

The three existing samples of Obama's prose before Dreams -- the 1983 article "Breaking the War Mentality," the 1988 article "Why Organize," and his unsigned 1990 Harvard Law Review case note -- are proof enough that Barack Obama is, in fact, a crappy writer. Consider the following sentence from "Breaking The War Mentality," an article the 21 year-old Obama wrote for Columbia's weekly news magazine, Sundial, in March 1983: The belief that moribund institutions, rather than individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAM's energies alive. The noun, "belief," and the verb, "keep," don't agree -- one of an appalling five such noun-verb mismatches in the essay -- and the punctuation is fully random. More problematically, the word choice sucks all logic out of the sentence.

In the previous paragraph, Obama had warned his readers about the "the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country." In this paragraph, the reader is told that these same military institutions are "moribund" -- that is "nearly dead." How their debilitated state keeps the "energies" of the Students Against Militarism (SAM) "alive" is apparently left to the reader's imagination. Obama is no untutored ghetto kid. He wrote this after eight years at Hawaii's best prep school and after four years at two good universities. In my 25-year career in advertising and publishing I have had to review the portfolios of at least a thousand professional writers. I can tell within three paragraphs whether a writer deserves a second look. Based on any of his pre-Dreams samples, Obama would not have made the first cut. I never would have hired him. No one would have. He is simply a crappy writer. I have also taught writing at enough levels and under enough different circumstances to know that even the best teacher cannot transform a crappy writer into a great writer. The best that the teacher can hope for is a semi-crappy writer who does not make too many grammatical errors.

Between Harvard and Dreams, Obama had no extra training. In a 2006 article, written while he was still seething, liberal publisher Peter Osnos tells the story of what did happen during those lost years. According to Osnos, the New York Times did a profile of Obama when elected the first black leader of the Harvard Law Review. The article prompted literary agent Jane Dystel to have Obama submit a book proposal to an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The publisher liked the proposal and advanced him about $125,000. "Several years passed," Osnos writes, "and Obama was too busy finishing law school and embarking on his career to get the book done." Simon & Schuster then canceled the contract, and Obama likely had to pay at least some of it back. Dystel then approached Times Book at Random House where Osnos was publisher, and he advanced Obama $40,000 more. The newly inspired Obama promptly turned in what Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." Osnos believes Obama wrote the book himself, but he was in no position to know that.

My publisher has to accept on faith that I am writing my own books. Even my agent does. Obama's memoir was published in June 1995. In January of that same magical year, Ayers had chosen Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, to chair the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grants. In the fall of 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, launched Obama's ascent to political stardom with a fundraiser in their Chicago home. Dreams sold modestly in 1995, and the rights to it eventually reverted to Random House's Crown Books Division, which made a killing on the book after Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. After being elected senator in November 2004, Obama replaced the now "furious" Dystel and her 15 percent cut with a powerful D.C. attorney who charged only by the hour. Some time before his swearing in as senator, Obama signed a two-book deal with Crown for somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million.

Although an Obama fan, Osnos was dismayed by Obama's "ruthlessness" and his "questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday." In October 2006, Audacity debuted to kind reviews and huge sales. Despite Obama's "unforgiving Senate schedule and periodic bouts of writer's block," he had been able to write a 216-page book without any acknowledged writing help in what was likely an 18-month window. This was the same writer who blew a $125,000 advance because he was unable to produce a book during "several" much less hectic years, the same writer who between his 1995 masterpiece and Audacity had written nothing deeper than a column for a community newsletter. How did Obama do it? "I usually wrote at night after my Senate day was over, and after my family was asleep -- from 9:30 p.m. or so until 1 a.m," he told interviewer Daphne Durham of Amazon. "I would work off an outline -- certain themes or stories that I wanted to tell -- and get them down in longhand on a yellow pad.

Then I'd edit while typing in what I'd written." In fact, the legitimacy of this interview is as dubious as the legitimacy of the book. Obama's answer to Durham's question. "What inspires you", shows up word-for-word (70 words) in the promotional blurb for Audacity. The explanation was legitimate enough, however, for Time Magazine. "His best writing time comes late at night when he's all alone, scribbling on yellow legal pads," wrote Jay Newton-Small two months before the November 2008 election. "This is how he wrote both of his two best selling books -- Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope -- staying up after Michelle and his two young daughters had long gone to bed, reveling in the late night quiet." Little of this rings true. Obama's oldest daughter was born in 1998, three years after Dreams was published. The late night story line was likely contrived to explain how he could have written Audacity despite the "unforgiving" schedule of a new senator. One of my more diligent correspondents, whom I call Mr. West, has been doing some intriguing analysis of Audacity.

He had earlier sent me an indexed compendium of "759" distinctive words and phrases that appear in both Dreams and Bill Ayers' books. Mr. West has since compared Dreams and Audacity. By a generous count, Audacity matches Dreams in only 140 of the 759 word selections. "Many of these were words were just used one time in Audacity and in a different context," writes Mr. West. He was surprised too by the words and phrases that he expected to find in Audacity but did not. His conclusion, "Ayers was absolutely not involved in Audacity." Mr. West noted also that when Dreams-like words appear in Audacity, they suddenly emerge in clusters. In the passage that follows, words and phrases that appear in both Dreams and Audacity are in bold italics: Slowly, the senior senator rose from his seat, a slender man with a still-thick snowy mane, watery blue eyes, and a sharp, prominent nose. For a moment he stood in silence, steadying himself with his cane, his head turned upward, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Then he began to speak, in somber, measured tones, a hint of the Appalachians like a knotty grain of wood beneath polished veneer. I don't recall the specifics of his speech, but I remember the broad themes, cascading out from the well of the Old Senate Chamber in a rising, Shakespearean rhythm This is the kind of stretch that the Times rightly describes as "recognizably similar" to the "narrative voice" of Dreams. To my ear, however, it sounds forced and a little stilted and reads not so much like a passage from Dreams as an imitation of such a passage. Mr. West also compared Audacity to various stump speeches made by Obama during the time Audacity was being written. The plagiarism here is inarguable. Mr. West lists 38 passages that appear virtually word for word in Obama speeches given in 2005 or 2006 and in Audacity. The first example comes from a speech Obama gave on October 25, 2005, the second from Audacity. . . . those who work in the field know what reforms really work: a more challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on math, science, and literacy skills.

Longer hours and more days to give kids the time and attention they need to learn. And in fact we already have hard evidence of reforms that work: a more challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on math, science, and literacy skills; longer hours and more days to give children the time and sustained attention they need to learn. By 2006, Obama appears to have been reading speeches that have been lifted in full from the text of Audacity. The first example comes from a June 28, 2006 speech, the second from Audacity. Indeed, the single biggest "gap" in party affiliation among white Americans today is not between men and women, or those who reside in so-called Red States and those who reside in Blue, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don't.

The single biggest gap in party affiliation among white Americans is not between men and women, or between those who reside in so-called red states and those who reside in blue states, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don't.' Of course, all that this proves is that whoever wrote Obama's speeches wrote large sections of Audacity, perhaps all of it, and this is only an issue if someone other than Obama wrote his speeches. As we are seeing, though, falsehoods have a way of compounding themselves. When Rachel Klayman of Crown pulled Dreams from the vaults and put it back in circulation, she unknowingly set in motion a series of fabrications, beginning with the foundational myth that Obama is a literary genius. To sustain that myth, Obama's enablers have to make us believe that he also wrote Audacity by himself as well as most of his speeches, staying up unto 1 A.M. each night to do so. The emergence of Jon Favreau, whom Time Magazine calls a "wunderkind wordsmith," complicates this scenario.

After a February 2009 speech to Congress, the Washington Post ran a photo of Obama holding the speech, on the first page of which was clearly printed, "Draft 2/24/09 12pm...Favreau/Rhodes." It even included Favreau's phone number. According to Wikipedia, "Favreau was hired as Obama's speechwriter shortly after Obama's election to the United States Senate. Obama and Favreau grew close, and Obama has referred to him as his ‘mind reader.'" Obama thought highly enough of Favreau to make him his chief speechwriter for the presidential campaign. The London Guardian reports that Favreau carries Dreams wherever he goes and can "conjure up his master's voice as if an accomplished impersonator." Of the thirty-eight speeches during Favreau's tenure that found their way into Audacity are we to believe that he wrote none of them? It is much more likely that he wrote all of them. Yes, Obama may have written his thoughts down in longhand, but why would he not have given those notes to his gifted young speechwriter to polish? Here is what I believe happened.

Obama knew he had a problem on his hands when Dreams was republished in 2004. He recruited Ayers to write the (post-modernist) preface to the 2004 edition, but once he was elected to the Senate they both knew that Ayers was poison. To achieve continuity, Ayers, I believe, wrote the prologue to Audacity. It is the best-written part of the book. From here, Favreau took over. An "accomplished impersonator," he labored to make extended passages of Audacity sound like Dreams. It was a good effort, but he simply does not write as well as Ayers does. Those who think Ayers cannot write either have not read him or do not have the wherewithal to judge him. In a recent critique of us "Internet zanies," Republican bigwig Ken Blackwell (why the attacks from the right?) observes , "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." No, Ken, Ayers writes very well indeed. Fugitive Days is a better book than Dreams.

To be sure, Obama does not mention Ayers in the acknowledgments section of Dreams. In a similar spirit he slights Favreau in Audacity. He merely thanks a number of his Senate staff, "including Pete Rouse, Karen Kornbluh, Mike Strautmanis, Jon Favreau, Mark Lippert, Joshua DuBois, and especially Robert Gibbs and Chris Lu" for reading the manuscript, but of course, "on their own time." I imagine that Favreau made his contribution on his own time as well. In previous articles on the subject of President Obama's writing skills, I have focused on his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, not his 2006 book, Audacity of Hope for one reason: Dreams, according to esteemed British author Jonathan Raban and others, captures Obama's "authentic voice." On the strength of Dreams, Raban called Obama "the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln." Raban is in good company. "I was astonished by his ability to write, to think, to reflect, to learn and turn a good phrase," said Nobel prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison of Dreams. "I was very impressed.

This was not a normal political biography.'' Although Audacity has received respectful reviews, it has not gotten the raves Dreams has. The New York Times describes Audacity "as much more of a political document. Portions of the volume read like outtakes from a stump speech." Still, despite the book's "flabby platitudes," the Times assures its readers that "enough of the narrative voice in this volume is recognizably similar to the one in Dreams From My Father." Without intending to, the Times likely captured the thinking behind the creation of Audacity. If portions of Audacity sound like outtakes from stump speeches, it is because they are outtakes from stump speeches. This can be proved. What cannot be proved, but what seems likely, is that Obama included just "enough of the narrative voice" from Dreams to maintain continuity between the two books. The question remains -- who provided that narrative voice?

In the criticism of my last two American Thinker articles, only the Washington Post addressed the central issue, and it did so facetiously: "The book [Dreams] is beautifully written and yet, in Cashill's opinion, Obama is - and always was - a crappy (his word, not mine) writer." Critics, please forget for a minute the parallel styles, words, phrases, images, and anecdotes shared by Dreams and Bill Ayers' books. Forget for a minute Bill Ayers. The three existing samples of Obama's prose before Dreams -- the 1983 article "Breaking the War Mentality," the 1988 article "Why Organize," and his unsigned 1990 Harvard Law Review case note -- are proof enough that Barack Obama is, in fact, a crappy writer. Consider the following sentence from "Breaking The War Mentality," an article the 21 year-old Obama wrote for Columbia's weekly news magazine, Sundial, in March 1983: The belief that moribund institutions, rather than individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAM's energies alive.

The noun, "belief," and the verb, "keep," don't agree -- one of an appalling five such noun-verb mismatches in the essay -- and the punctuation is fully random. More problematically, the word choice sucks all logic out of the sentence. In the previous paragraph, Obama had warned his readers about the "the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country." In this paragraph, the reader is told that these same military institutions are "moribund" -- that is "nearly dead." How their debilitated state keeps the "energies" of the Students Against Militarism (SAM) "alive" is apparently left to the reader's imagination. Obama is no untutored ghetto kid. He wrote this after eight years at Hawaii's best prep school and after four years at two good universities. In my 25-year career in advertising and publishing I have had to review the portfolios of at least a thousand professional writers. I can tell within three paragraphs whether a writer deserves a second look. Based on any of his pre-Dreams samples, Obama would not have made the first cut. I never would have hired him. No one would have. He is simply a crappy writer.

I have also taught writing at enough levels and under enough different circumstances to know that even the best teacher cannot transform a crappy writer into a great writer. The best that the teacher can hope for is a semi-crappy writer who does not make too many grammatical errors. Between Harvard and Dreams, Obama had no extra training. In a 2006 article, written while he was still seething, liberal publisher Peter Osnos tells the story of what did happen during those lost years. According to Osnos, the New York Times did a profile of Obama when elected the first black leader of the Harvard Law Review. The article prompted literary agent Jane Dystel to have Obama submit a book proposal to an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The publisher liked the proposal and advanced him about $125,000. "Several years passed," Osnos writes, "and Obama was too busy finishing law school and embarking on his career to get the book done." Simon & Schuster then canceled the contract, and Obama likely had to pay at least some of it back. Dystel then approached Times Book at Random House where Osnos was publisher, and he advanced Obama $40,000 more.

The newly inspired Obama promptly turned in what Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." Osnos believes Obama wrote the book himself, but he was in no position to know that. My publisher has to accept on faith that I am writing my own books. Even my agent does. Obama's memoir was published in June 1995. In January of that same magical year, Ayers had chosen Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, to chair the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grants. In the fall of 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, launched Obama's ascent to political stardom with a fundraiser in their Chicago home. Dreams sold modestly in 1995, and the rights to it eventually reverted to Random House's Crown Books Division, which made a killing on the book after Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. After being elected senator in November 2004, Obama replaced the now "furious" Dystel and her 15 percent cut with a powerful D.C. attorney who charged only by the hour.

Some time before his swearing in as senator, Obama signed a two-book deal with Crown for somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million. Although an Obama fan, Osnos was dismayed by Obama's "ruthlessness" and his "questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday." In October 2006, Audacity debuted to kind reviews and huge sales. Despite Obama's "unforgiving Senate schedule and periodic bouts of writer's block," he had been able to write a 216-page book without any acknowledged writing help in what was likely an 18-month window. This was the same writer who blew a $125,000 advance because he was unable to produce a book during "several" much less hectic years, the same writer who between his 1995 masterpiece and Audacity had written nothing deeper than a column for a community newsletter. How did Obama do it? "I usually wrote at night after my Senate day was over, and after my family was asleep -- from 9:30 p.m. or so until 1 a.m," he told interviewer Daphne Durham of Amazon.

"I would work off an outline -- certain themes or stories that I wanted to tell -- and get them down in longhand on a yellow pad. Then I'd edit while typing in what I'd written." In fact, the legitimacy of this interview is as dubious as the legitimacy of the book. Obama's answer to Durham's question. "What inspires you", shows up word-for-word (70 words) in the promotional blurb for Audacity. The explanation was legitimate enough, however, for Time Magazine. "His best writing time comes late at night when he's all alone, scribbling on yellow legal pads," wrote Jay Newton-Small two months before the November 2008 election. "This is how he wrote both of his two best selling books -- Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope -- staying up after Michelle and his two young daughters had long gone to bed, reveling in the late night quiet." Little of this rings true. Obama's oldest daughter was born in 1998, three years after Dreams was published. The late night story line was likely contrived to explain how he could have written Audacity despite the "unforgiving" schedule of a new senator.

One of my more diligent correspondents, whom I call Mr. West, has been doing some intriguing analysis of Audacity. He had earlier sent me an indexed compendium of "759" distinctive words and phrases that appear in both Dreams and Bill Ayers' books. Mr. West has since compared Dreams and Audacity. By a generous count, Audacity matches Dreams in only 140 of the 759 word selections. "Many of these were words were just used one time in Audacity and in a different context," writes Mr. West. He was surprised too by the words and phrases that he expected to find in Audacity but did not. His conclusion, "Ayers was absolutely not involved in Audacity." Mr. West noted also that when Dreams-like words appear in Audacity, they suddenly emerge in clusters. In the passage that follows, words and phrases that appear in both Dreams and Audacity are in bold italics: Slowly, the senior senator rose from his seat, a slender man with a still-thick snowy mane, watery blue eyes, and a sharp, prominent nose.

For a moment he stood in silence, steadying himself with his cane, his head turned upward, eyes fixed on the ceiling. Then he began to speak, in somber, measured tones, a hint of the Appalachians like a knotty grain of wood beneath polished veneer. I don't recall the specifics of his speech, but I remember the broad themes, cascading out from the well of the Old Senate Chamber in a rising, Shakespearean rhythm This is the kind of stretch that the Times rightly describes as "recognizably similar" to the "narrative voice" of Dreams. To my ear, however, it sounds forced and a little stilted and reads not so much like a passage from Dreams as an imitation of such a passage. Mr. West also compared Audacity to various stump speeches made by Obama during the time Audacity was being written. The plagiarism here is inarguable. Mr. West lists 38 passages that appear virtually word for word in Obama speeches given in 2005 or 2006 and in Audacity. The first example comes from a speech Obama gave on October 25, 2005, the second from Audacity. . . .

those who work in the field know what reforms really work: a more challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on math, science, and literacy skills. Longer hours and more days to give kids the time and attention they need to learn. And in fact we already have hard evidence of reforms that work: a more challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on math, science, and literacy skills; longer hours and more days to give children the time and sustained attention they need to learn. By 2006, Obama appears to have been reading speeches that have been lifted in full from the text of Audacity. The first example comes from a June 28, 2006 speech, the second from Audacity. Indeed, the single biggest "gap" in party affiliation among white Americans today is not between men and women, or those who reside in so-called Red States and those who reside in Blue, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don't.

The single biggest gap in party affiliation among white Americans is not between men and women, or between those who reside in so-called red states and those who reside in blue states, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don't.' Of course, all that this proves is that whoever wrote Obama's speeches wrote large sections of Audacity, perhaps all of it, and this is only an issue if someone other than Obama wrote his speeches. As we are seeing, though, falsehoods have a way of compounding themselves. When Rachel Klayman of Crown pulled Dreams from the vaults and put it back in circulation, she unknowingly set in motion a series of fabrications, beginning with the foundational myth that Obama is a literary genius. To sustain that myth, Obama's enablers have to make us believe that he also wrote Audacity by himself as well as most of his speeches, staying up unto 1 A.M. each night to do so. The emergence of Jon Favreau, whom Time Magazine calls a "wunderkind wordsmith," complicates this scenario.

After a February 2009 speech to Congress, the Washington Post ran a photo of Obama holding the speech, on the first page of which was clearly printed, "Draft 2/24/09 12pm...Favreau/Rhodes." It even included Favreau's phone number. According to Wikipedia, "Favreau was hired as Obama's speechwriter shortly after Obama's election to the United States Senate. Obama and Favreau grew close, and Obama has referred to him as his ‘mind reader.'" Obama thought highly enough of Favreau to make him his chief speechwriter for the presidential campaign. The London Guardian reports that Favreau carries Dreams wherever he goes and can "conjure up his master's voice as if an accomplished impersonator." Of the thirty-eight speeches during Favreau's tenure that found their way into Audacity are we to believe that he wrote none of them? It is much more likely that he wrote all of them. Yes, Obama may have written his thoughts down in longhand, but why would he not have given those notes to his gifted young speechwriter to polish? Here is what I believe happened.

Obama knew he had a problem on his hands when Dreams was republished in 2004. He recruited Ayers to write the (post-modernist) preface to the 2004 edition, but once he was elected to the Senate they both knew that Ayers was poison. To achieve continuity, Ayers, I believe, wrote the prologue to Audacity. It is the best-written part of the book. From here, Favreau took over. An "accomplished impersonator," he labored to make extended passages of Audacity sound like Dreams. It was a good effort, but he simply does not write as well as Ayers does. Those who think Ayers cannot write either have not read him or do not have the wherewithal to judge him. In a recent critique of us "Internet zanies," Republican bigwig Ken Blackwell (why the attacks from the right?) observes , "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." No, Ken, Ayers writes very well indeed. Fugitive Days is a better book than Dreams.

To be sure, Obama does not mention Ayers in the acknowledgments section of Dreams. In a similar spirit he slights Favreau in Audacity. He merely thanks a number of his Senate staff, "including Pete Rouse, Karen Kornbluh, Mike Strautmanis, Jon Favreau, Mark Lippert, Joshua DuBois, and especially Robert Gibbs and Chris Lu" for reading the manuscript, but of course, "on their own time." I imagine that Favreau made his contribution on his own time as well. The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama - Book Review - The New York Times The New York Times Books |Obama’s Foursquare Politics, With a Dab of Dijon Search Continue reading the main story Barack Obama , the junior senator from Illinois and the Democratic Party’s new rock star, is that rare politician who can actually write — and write movingly and genuinely about himself. His 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” written before Mr. Obama entered politics, provided a revealing, introspective account of his efforts to trace his family’s tangled roots and his attempts to come to terms with his absent father, who left home when he was still a toddler.

That book did an evocative job of conjuring the author’s multicultural childhood: his father was from Kenya, his mother was from Kansas, and the young Mr. Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia. And it was equally candid about his youthful struggles: pot, booze and “maybe a little blow,” he wrote, could “push questions of who I was out of my mind,” flatten “out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.” Most memorably, the book gave the reader a heartfelt sense of what it was like to grow up in the 1960’s and 70’s, straddling America’s color lines: the sense of knowing two worlds and belonging to neither, the sense of having to forge an identity of his own. Mr. Obama’s new book, “The Audacity of Hope” — the phrase comes from his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address, which made him the party’s rising young hope — is much more of a political document. Portions of the volume read like outtakes from a stump speech, and the bulk of it is devoted to laying out Mr. Obama’s policy positions on a host of issues, from education to health care to the war in Iraq.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story But while Mr. Obama occasionally slips into the flabby platitudes favored by politicians, enough of the narrative voice in this volume is recognizably similar to the one in “Dreams From My Father,” an elastic, personable voice that is capable of accommodating everything from dense discussions of foreign policy to streetwise reminiscences, incisive comments on constitutional law to New-Agey personal asides. The reader comes away with a feeling that Mr. Obama has not reinvented himself as he has moved from job to job (community organizer in Chicago, editor of The Harvard Law Review, professor of constitutional law, civil rights lawyer, state senator) but has instead internalized all those roles, embracing rather than shrugging off whatever contradictions they might have produced. Continue reading the main story Reporters and politicians continually use the word authenticity to describe Mr. Obama, pointing to his ability to come across to voters as a regular person, not a prepackaged pol. And in these pages he often speaks to the reader as if he were an old friend from back in the day, salting policy recommendations with colorful asides about the absurdities of political life.

Photo Barack Obama Credit Deborah Feingold He recalls a meet-and-greet encounter at the White House with George W. Bush, who warmly shook his hand, then “turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the president’s hand.” (“Good stuff,” he quotes the president as saying, as he offered his guest some. “Keeps you from getting colds.”) And he recounts a trip he took through Illinois with an aide, who scolded him for asking for Dijon mustard at a T.G.I. Friday’s, worried the senator would come across as an elitist; the confused waitress, he adds, simply said: “We got Dijon if you want it.” In his 2004 keynote address Mr. Obama spoke of the common ground Americans share: “There is not a Black America and White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.” And the same message — rooted in his own youthful efforts to grapple with racial stereotypes, racial loyalty and class resentments — threads its way through the pages of this book. Despite the red state-blue state divide, despite racial, religious and economic divisions, Mr.

Obama writes, “we are becoming more, not less, alike” beneath the surface: “Most Republican strongholds are 40 percent Democrat, and vice versa. The political labels of liberal and conservative rarely track people’s personal attributes.” Mr. Obama eschews the Manichean language that has come to inform political discourse, and he rejects what he sees as the either-or formulations of his elders who came of age in the 60’s: “In the back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004,” he writes, “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage. The victories that the 60’s generation brought about — the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individual liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority — have made America a far better place for all its citizens.

But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to be replaced, are those shared assumptions — that quality of trust and fellow feeling — that bring us together as Americans.” Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy His thoughts on domestic and foreign policy try to hew to this consensus-building line. Some of his recommendations devolve into little more than fuzzy statements of the obvious: i.e., that America’s “addiction to oil” is affecting the economy and undermining national security, or that the education system needs to be revamped and improved. Others echo Bill Clinton’s “third way,” methodically triangulating between traditionally conservative and traditionally liberal ideas. Mr. Obama writes that “conservatives — and Bill Clinton — were right about welfare as it was previously structured: By detaching income from work and by making no demands on welfare recipients other than a tolerance for intrusive bureaucracy and an assurance that no man lived in the same house as the mother of his children, the old A.F.D.C.

program sapped people of their initiative and eroded their self respect.” He uses the Bush administration’s tough language to talk about national security in the age of terrorism (“if we have to go it alone, the American people stand ready to pay any price and bear any burden to protect our country”) but adds, crucially, that “once we get beyond matters of self-defense,” he is “convinced that it will almost always be in our strategic interest to act multilaterally rather than unilaterally when we use force around the world.” He assails President Bush for waging an unnecessary and misguided war in Iraq and for promoting an “Ownership Society” that “magnifies the uneven risks and rewards of today’s winner-take-all economy.” Yet he also takes the Democrats to task for becoming “the party of reaction”: “In reaction to a war that is ill-conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action. In reaction to those who proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use market principles to tackle pressing problems. In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a larger meaning.

We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans. We lose the courts and wait for a White House scandal.” This volume does not possess the searching candor of the author’s first book. But Mr. Obama strives in these pages to ground his policy thinking in simple common sense — be it “growing the size of our armed forces to maintain reasonable rotation schedules” or reining in spending and rethinking tax policy to bring down the nation’s huge deficit — while articulating these ideas in level-headed, nonpartisan prose. That, in itself, is something unusual, not only in these venomous pre-election days, but also in these increasingly polarized and polarizing times. Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani A version of this review appears in print on , on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: Foursquare Politics, With a Dab Of Dijon. Today's Paper | Subscribe Did Obama Write "Dreams of My Father" or "Audacity of Hope?" - Illinois Review Illinois Review All posts, comments and statements made on IR are those of the authors only.

Any disputes must be addressed to the writers, who are solely responsible for their posts, comments and statements. We reserve the right to deny or remove comments. Content may not be used without permission of the author. Subscribe Did Obama Write "Dreams of My Father" or "Audacity of Hope?" by Mark Rhoads When I first heard the story that Rush Limbaugh implied that Sen. Barack Obama had a ghost writer for his first book, and that the writer might have been Bill Ayers, and that the Media Matters blog attacked Limbaugh, I did not think the story had enough credibility to make it into the Main Stream Media. Now I think it will and quickly because it is a topic that matters to writers everywhere and even a media crowd overwhelmingly biased in favor of Sen. Obama will have a hard time ignoring a false claim of authorship. Let me explain why I think you will see more on this story. First, I watched the delayed broadcast of the B-cast Show on Breitbart TV that did a good job of examining the issue. CLICK HERE to watch the show for Oct. 15. Second, I am old enough to personally remember that when Sen. John F.

Kennedy was running for president in 1960, a major legend about him was that he had authored a well-written book called Profiles in Courage that became a best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1957. According to the popular legend, Kennedy wrote the book from his bedside while he was absent from the Senate in 1954 and 1955 recovering from back surgery. Most historians now agree that Kennedy paid his speech writer Theodore C. Sorensen from government funds to research and write the book and also paid Sorensen more than half of the royalties for the first five years. Sorensen himself finally admitted this is true in his autobiography called Counselor that was published in May of this year. Third, Dreams of My Father is a well-written book and there are few if any examples of any kind from that period that show Obama knows how to write well, which is a different skill than oratory. In fact, Obama's paper trail of published writing apart from his two books is not just thin, it is darn near invisible. Why is this issue of a false claim of authorship important?

It is important to writers and it could be another example of Obama misleading or exaggerating the truth in a major way. If the real author was a good writer such as Bill Ayers, a man who Obama first said was just a guy in his neighborhood, then the claims made by Obama in a debate last night that he had only limited connections with Ayers are really outlandish and untruthful in a material way. Earlier this week the son of National Review founder William F. Buckley, 56-year old Christopher Buckley, endorsed Obama and one of his stated reasons for doing so was that he said he has read Dreams of My Father and the Audacity of Hope and concluded that Obama was a good writer with a good mind. But what if Obama's claim of authorship for the two books is fraudulent? What if he did not really write them and does not have the skill to write anything very well? Why are there practically no examples of Obama authorship beyond one published poem when he was 20 years old and one un-signed and very short Harvard Law Review article when Obama was the editor? If true, and I emphasize the word "if," then Obama has misrepresented himself to American voters in a very material way.

Most good writers who have authored a book have hundreds of examples of their published writing in the form of articles and essays or even letters. But Sen. Obama has nothing that is noteworthy to show outside of these two books. That is very suspicious and it should be enough I think to make many MSM reporters more than a little curious when it is combined with some other odd false statements that Obama made in the debate last night regarding bills he was only partly responsible for and votes that he cast and failed to cast in the Illinois State Senate. The simple and central question is, as a general policy, does Obama tell the truth? If not, then even if he avoids outright lies, is he so skillful in his misrepresentations and exaggerations that he skates right up to some ethical line in his head but not over it? Does Obama have an ethical line at all? Or does it move when his ego demands that it move? One week and a dozen good reporters should be more than enough time to find out if Obama really wrote the two books he claims to have authored.

If there is any truth to the idea that he used a ghost writer other than Bill Ayers, then the Obama campaign will probably strart distancing itself from the current position and admit that Obama had "research help" with the two books. If the ghost writer on either book is Bill Ayers, then it is a really big story. Thursday, October 16, 2008 at 10:59 AM | Permalink Tags: Obama Winds of Change : snopes.com Winds of Change A Coil of Rage Barack Obama did not write in 2006 that "I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction." Claim: A list collect passages about racism taken from Barack Obama's books. mixture Example: [Collected via e-mail, April 2011] A Coil of Rage The character of any man is defined by how he treats his mother as the years pass .... need I say more about this person below other than there is no character, no integrity but there is a ton of attitude and arrogance that defines his shallow past and hollow future .... I rest my case. I bought and read Audacity of Hope. It was difficult to read considering his attitude toward us and everything American.

Let me add a phrase he use to describe his attitude toward whites. He harbors a "COIL OF RAGE". His words not mine. THIS IS OUR PRESIDENT Is anyone out there awake? Everyone of voting age should read these two books: Don't buy them, just get them from the library. From Dreams of My Father: 'I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.' From Dreams of My Father: 'I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's race.' From Dreams of My Father: 'There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.' From Dreams of My Father: 'It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.' From Dreams of My Father: 'I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own.

It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.' From Audacity of Hope: 'I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.' If you have never forwarded an e-mail, now is the time to do so!!! We have someone with this mentality running our GREAT nation! Keep your eye on him and don't blink. I don't care whether you are a Democrat, a Republican, a Conservative or a liberal, be aware of the attitude and character of this sitting President. Origin:The above-quoted e-mail forward reproduces passages taken from Barack Obama's two books — Dreams It was another expression of a theme touched on in many other sections of the book — the difficulties of being expected to associate oneself with a particular racial heritage, especially for those who came from multiracial backgrounds — prompted by the example of a girl named Joyce, one of Obama's classmates: She was a good-looking woman, Joyce was with her green eyes and honey skin and pouty lips. We lived in the same dorm my freshman year, and all the brothers were after her.

One day I asked her if she was going to the Black Students' Association meeting. She looked at me funny, then started shaking her head like a baby who doesn't want what it sees on the spoon. "I'm not black," Joyce said. "I'm multiracial." Then she started telling me about her father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest man in the world; and her mother, who happened to be part African and part French and part Native American and part something else. "Why should I have to choose between them?" she asked me. Her voice cracked, and I thought she was going to cry. "It's not white people who are making me choose. Maybe it used to be that way, but now they're willing to treat me like a person. No — it's black people who always have to make everything racial. They're the ones making me choose. They're the ones who are telling me that I can't be who I am ..." They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people ... To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully.

The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling conventions. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But this strategy alone couldn't provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerant. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names. "I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own.

It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela." This statement is a rewording (further changing an intended meaning already obscured by a lack of context) of material from page 220 of Dreams from My Father. The material appeared as part of a passage in which Barack Obama described his profound disappointment in learning (from information provided by his half-sister, Auma) that the lofty image he had held all his life of his role model, his biological father (a man he barely knew), was a flawed and idealized one. All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader — my father had been all those things.

All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image, because I hadn't see what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father's body shrinking, their father's best hopes dashed, their father's face lined with grief and regret. Yes, I'd seen weakness in other men — Gramps and his disappointments, Lolo [my adoptive father] and his compromise. But these men had become object lessons for me, men I might love but never emulate, white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela. And if later I saw that the black men I knew fell short of such lofty standards; if I had learned to respect these men for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own — my father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!

Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by ... what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost! Last updated: 17 June 2016 Originally published: 21 May 2008 Tags: Thank you for writing to us! Although we receive hundreds of e-mails every day, we really and truly read them all, and your comments, suggestions, and questions are most welcome. Unfortunately, we can manage to answer only a small fraction of our incoming mail. Our site covers many of the items currently being plopped into inboxes everywhere, so if you were writing to ask us about something you just received, our search engine can probably help you find the very article you want. Choose a few key words from the item you're looking for and click here to go to the search engine.

(Searching on whole phrases will often fail to produce matches because the text of many items is quite variable, so picking out one or two key words is the best strategy.) We do reserve the right to use non-confidential material sent to us via this form on our site, but only after it has been stripped of any information that might identify the sender or any other individuals not party to this communication. Your Email Bill Ayers admits (again) he wrote Obama bio Bill Ayers admits (again) he wrote Obama bio Weather Underground terrorist speaks to new generation of SDS Published: 03/26/2011 at 11:31 PM Print NEW YORK – Bill Ayers has once again suggested he was the author of Barack Obama’s celebrated autobiography, even though the admission could be explained away as a mocking irony designed only to goad Ayers’s critics by yet another false admission he was the president’s ghostwriter.

At the conclusion of a speech sponsored by the Students for a Democratic Society at Montclair State University in New Jersey, the former Weather Underground bomber gleefully claimed credit for writing Obama’s “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.” As shown in a video clip on YouTube, Ayers, responding to a question about “Dreams,” said, “Did you know that I wrote it, incidentally?” Here is the transcript of the exchange between Ayers and a member of the audience asking about “Dreams”: Bill Ayers: One more, one more (question) Question: Thank you sir, thank you, thank you. Time magazine columnist Joe Klein wrote that President Obama’s book, “Dreams From My Father,” quote: “may be the best written memoir ever produced by an American politician.” Ayers: I agree with that. Question: What is your opinion of Barack Obama’s style as a writer and uh … Ayers: I think the book is very good, the second book ( “The Audacity of Hope” ) is more of a political hack book, but uh, the first book is quite good.

Question: Also, you just mentioned the Pentagon and Tomahawk … Ayers: Did you know that I wrote it, incidentally? Question: What’s that? Ayers: I wrote that book. Several audience members: Yeah, we know that. Question: You wrote that? Ayers: Yeah, yeah. And if you help me prove it, I’ll split the royalties with you. Thank you very much. Laughter and Applause A close reading of the transcript from the Montclair State speech on Friday shows that Ayers again volunteered he was the ghost writer of “Dreams,” even though he had not been asked that question. Ayers declared to the National Journal reporter, “Yes, I wrote ‘Dreams From My Father.'” “Here’s what I’m going to say,” Ayers said according to a report in Talking Points Memo. “This is my quote. Be sure to write it down: ‘Yes, I wrote ‘Dreams From My Father.’ I ghostwrote the whole thing.

I met with the president three or four times, and then I wrote the entire book.” TPM reported that Ayers then released the National Journal reporter’s arm, beamed “in Marxist triumph,” and said, “And now I would like the royalties.” Then, in a second encounter with conservative blogger Anne Leary at Reagan National Airport who did not even ask the question, Ayers declared, “Yes, I wrote ‘Dreams From My Father’ … Michelle [Obama] asked me to.” Describing the encounter, Leary wrote that she was sitting in Reagan National, sipping a coffee by the United counter before going through security, when she saw Bill Ayers. Leary described her conversation with Ayers as follows: “Then, unprompted he [Ayers] said – I wrote ‘Dreams From My Father.’ I said, oh, so you admit it. He said – Michelle asked me to. I looked at him. He seemed eager. He’s about my height, short. He went on to say – and if you can prove it, we can split the royalties. So I said, stop pulling my leg. Horrible thought. But he came again – I really wrote it, the wording was similar.

I said I believe you probably heavily edited it. He said – I wrote it. I said – why would I believe you, you’re a liar. “He had no answer to that. Just looked at me and walked off, and said again his bit about my proving it and splitting the proceeds.” That Ayers is the author of Obama’s autobiography is a major theme of WND columnist Jack Cashill’s work and his new bestselling book “Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves and Letters of America’s First Postmodern President.” In an email to WND, Cashill said that Ayers’s face looked relaxed at first when he answered the question. “This time, I think Ayers was making a serious admission,” Cashill told WND. “I think it took a split second for him to realize where this was going. Then, as he pulls away, his face assumes a smile rictus. It’s not a full-face smile, but a false smile – only the mouth, not the eyes.” Cashill noted that Ayers was answering a question not about ghostwriting Obama’s autobiography, but about the current U.S. military involvement in the war in Libya.

“The subject of the Libyan war came up earlier in Ayers’ speech,” Cashill noted, “and Ayers said he thought the expenditure of money for Tomahawk missiles would be better spent for education.” Cashill said he believes Ayers is sending a message to the White House. “Ayers is a very smart guy and he was careful to couch his comments with irony,” Cashill noted. “But Ayers was not aiming his irony at critics like me. He was aiming his irony at the White House, letting Obama know that he could blow Obama out of the water, if he gets serious about it.” What damage could Ayers do Obama? “Ayers is very anti-war and he is upset about our military involvement in Libya,” Cashill answered. “All Ayers would have to do is give a press conference in which he demonstrated he was the principle craftsman behind ‘Dreams’ and the whole myth of Obama’s literary genius would come crashing down.” Jack Cashill’s literary investigation uncovers revelations galore about Obama’s alleged life narrative.

Order the new book “Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Love and Letters of America’s First Post-Modern President” Christopher Anderson, in his 2009 book “Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage,” reported that a desperate Obama in the mid-1990s, facing a second canceled book contract, sought the help of Ayers. “In the end, Ayers contribution to Barack’s “Dreams From My Father” would be significant,” Anderson wrote on page 165 of “Barack and Michelle,” “so much so that the book’s language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’ own writings.” Anderson credited Ayers with providing the assistance Obama needed to complete his unfinished autobiography. “Thanks to help from the veteran writer Ayers, Barack Obama would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Brooks,” Anderson continued on page 166.

“With some minor cuts and polishing, the book would be on track for publication in the early summer of 1995.” The SDS invitation for the Ayers event at Montclair State described the speech as “Education and the New Activism: How Did Bill Ayers Evolve From Radical Activist to Educator?” Cashill first raised questions about the possibility of Ayers’ ghostwriting for Obama during the 2008 campaign. Sen. John McCain had questioned Obama’s relationship with Ayers – a story broken by WND’s Aaron Klein – during debates. Obama dismissed his relationship with Ayers as casual, referring to him as “just a guy in the neighborhood.” Ayers served as one of the leaders of the Weather Underground terrorist group that sought to overthrow the U.S. government and took responsibility for bombing the U.S. Capitol in 1971. His wife, Bernardine Dohrn, was suspected of planting a bomb in a San Francisco police station that killed one officer. The pair emerged from more than a decade underground in 1980. Dohrn, once on the FBI’s most wanted list, was fined $1,500 and served three years probation.

Ayers was never convicted of anything. The Ayers speech at Montclair State was attended by between 125-150 people. Including answering questions, Ayers spoke for approximately two hours. If you would like to sound off on this issue, participate in today’s WND Poll . Special offers:

Question: Who wrote "The Audacity of Hope"?
Answer: Barack Obama