Author and professor Jack Cashill thinks Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s first book, Dreams From My Father:
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.”
Cahill goes into some detail comparing the metaphors, sentence length and reading level of Ayers’ autobiography Fugitive Days and Dreams. He makes the point that Ayers served as a merchant seaman and used sea metaphors often in Fugitive Days:
If there is any one paragraph in Dreams that has convinced me of Ayers’ involvement it is this one, in which Obama describes the Black Nationalist message:
“A steady attack on the white race… served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair.”
As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as “ballast” unless I knew exactly what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely did.
YET ANOTHER TWIST: Michelle Obama and Bernadine Dorhn, terrorist wife of terrorits Bill Ayers, worked at the same law firm as early as 1988.