Faced with a likely thrashing in November, the nutjob contingent on the far-right is engaged in a massive freakout (Hunter Baker on Christopher Buckley’s endorsement of Obama: “The National Review is dead to me.”) Just peep the Corner, where Andy McCarthy is asserting that Obama’s Dreams from My Father was written by William Ayers.
There is nothing in Obama’s scant paper trail prior to 1995 that would suggest something as stylish and penetrating as, at times, Dreams from My Father is. And when Obama speaks extemporaneously, one doesn’t hear the same voice one encounters in the book. Now maybe Obama has a backlog of writing fom Columbia or Harvard that signal great literary promise, but he not only hasn’t shared it, he’s assiduously hidden traces of it. And, to be sure, writing is different from speaking — in fairness, some of Obama’s off-the-cuff bumbling when he speaks is certainly due to the rigors of the campaign which would cause even the most gifted communicator to faulter from time to time. But it’s not unreasonable to expect more similarity between Obama the writer and Obama the orator.
Let this be a lesson to all of us about the pitfalls of ideological stringency.
UPDATE: Even fellow Cornerite Jonathan Adler takes issue.
C’mon Andy. Giving credence to Jack Cashill’s maybe-Ayers-wrote-Obama’s-book theory is a bit much. This is even more outlandish than his stuff alleging a possible connection between Enron and Ron Brown’s death. Even if Obama’s book was ghost-written — and I’ve seen no evidence that it was — fingering Ayers as the potential author is nutter-territory stuff.
