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Overnight Open Thread

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Sheepdogess6/24/2009 3:25:21 am PDT

Three, Two, One …

Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write Dreams From My Father, he had written very close to nothing. Then, five years later, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called — with a straight face — “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”

The public is asked to believe Obama wrote Dreams From My Father on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. Writing is as much a craft as, say, golf. To put this in perspective, imagine if a friend played a few rounds in the high 90s and then a few years later, without further practice, made the PGA Tour. It doesn’t happen.

And yet, given the biases of the literary establishment, no reviewer of note has so much as questioned Obama’s role in the writing, then or now. As the New York Times gushed, Obama was “that rare politician who can write … and write movingly and genuinely about himself.” These accolades matter all the more because Obama has built his political persona around his presumably superior intellect, Dreams being exhibit A.


Shy of a confession by those involved, I will not be able to prove conclusively that Obama did not write this book. As shall be seen, however, there are only two real possibilities: one is that Obama experienced a near miraculous turnaround in his literary abilities; the second is that he had major editorial help, up to and including a ghostwriter.


The weight of the evidence overwhelming favors the latter conclusion and strongly suggests who that ghostwriter is. In that this remains something of a work in progress, I am willing to test my hypothesis against any standard of proof and appreciate any and all good leads.


Who Wrote Dreams and Why It Matters

americanthinker.com