Obama -- Dreams from my father

The Book -- The Myth

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Dreams From My Father

The Myth

Obama's New Book Deal

Spring 2009 -- The White House has posted the personal financial disclosure reports for Obama, and here are some interesting tidbits.

Obama's report shows evidence that he and the first lady trust the government with their money. The couple has somewhere between $1 million and $5 million invested in Treasury bills.

In the category of It's Never Too Early to Seek New Supporters, the forms show that Obama in January struck a $500,000 advance deal with Crown Publishing Group for an abridged version of his best-seller, "Dreams From My Father," aimed at "middle grade or young adult readers." When the book comes out, Obama will rack up more in royalties: 15% of the hardcover sales price and 10% of the paperback price.

It's hard to figure out net worth from these forms because they only ask for broad ranges when reporting value of assets and debts. But the Obamas tax day filing had showed they paid $855,323 in taxes on a combined income of $2,656,902.

Google Books -- Dreams From My Father

Here's a link to Google Books limited version of "Dreams..." -- you can bounce around by section -- click "Contents" link next to Zoom symbols.

The Search function in the left column is neat -- it searches entire text -- very powerful and returns page and paragraph of search phrase -- better than having to read the book.

Dreams From My Father -- The Book -- The Myth

Well, it probably started with "Dreams . . .."

In the introduction, Obama acknowledged his use of pseudonyms, composite characters, approximated dialogue and events out of chronological order. "He was trying to be careful of people's feelings," said Deborah Baker, the editor on the first paperback edition of the book. "The fact is, it all had a sort of larger truth going on that you couldn't make up."

Obama's story as told by Obama, and a few others, has more than a few holes in it -- and his relationships are extraordinary.

Well, folks put that information away. Everybody puffs up their resume -- no harm -- no foul.

A Closer Look At Obama's Odyssey

Jack Cashill is back with more, and with Christopher Andersen's new book, "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage," it has become increasingly clear that Obama friend and neighbor, Bill Ayers, gave the book its structure. As Andersen relates, after four futile years of trying to finish the contracted book, a "hopelessly blocked" Obama delivered his family's "oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes" to Ayers for a major overhaul.

Interesting read, here . . .

Obama's Ghostwriter From Hell

Author Chris Andersen said on "The Mancow Show," a talk-radio show from Chicago, that he had two sources that suggested unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers played a large part in the writing of Barack Obama's fable, "Dreams From My Father," a book that Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."

Andersen's on-air comments confirmed what he alleges in his new book, and confirms the literary forensic work of columnist Jack Cashill, who has provided compelling evidence that the co-founder of the radical Weather Underground, and author of its manifesto, "Prairie Fire," fleshed-out and polished Obama's incomplete manuscript with his exceptional writing skills.

After Obama was selected as the first affirmative-action president of the Harvard Law Review, he was approached by an agent, Jane Dystel, who got him a contract for a book from Poseidon Press upon his graduation.

He was given free use of an office at the University of Chicago, a law school fellowship, and a $125,000 advance, to finish his manuscript. Obama and Dystel worked mostly by telephone and sending draft manuscripts by Federal Express between New York and Chicago. Even with Dystel's editing, Obama struggled to finish. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, said he eventually retreated to Bali for several months with his wife, Michelle, "to find a peaceful sanctuary where there were no phones."

The real reason Obama scurried off to Bali was to seek his mother's help with his manuscript -- but to no avail.

Anyway, Obama blew his advance, and Dystel got him a second, $40,000 advance from Random House for the same book.

Again, he was unable to deliver a manuscript to Random House, and, in desperation, he turned to his friend and employer at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Bill Ayers, to help him finish what was to become a work of fiction, supposedly on the advice of wife, Michelle. Thanks to the help he received from the skilled Ayers, Obama was able to submit a manuscript to his editors.

Cashill had picked up a copy of Bill Ayers 2001 memoir, "Fugitive Days." In reading the book, he discovered that Ayers writes very well, and very much like Obama. This prompted Cashill to examine "Dreams...," and he found that the book's language, its oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear an uncanny similarity to Ayers's own writing. Cashill pointed out that in contrast to "Dreams," the Obama writing samples unearthed before 1995 "are pedestrian and uninspired."

Last fall, Cashill commissioned an independent scientific comparative analysis of writings by Obama and Ayers to determine whether Ayers had a significant role in the writing of "Dreams...," and reported at least four different stylometric analysts supported his extensive forensic evidence.

His experts included university professors from the U.S. and England in the statistical analysis of authorship, systems engineers, writers and Ph.D. literary analysts. One analyst said it was possible Ayers served as a "book doctor," drastically rewriting work Obama already had done.

Obama has skated by on his skin-tone, smile, personality and "BS" his entire life -- he's a complete fraud. Even today, he is helpless and hapless without the ever-present TOTUS.

Obama Comes To The Mainland

Jack Cashill writes, for more than a year I have been making the case that Bill Ayers played a major role in the authorship of Barack Obama's acclaimed 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father."

And for more than a year the hundreds of literary and political critics in the major media have refused to even glance at what is arguably the most consequential literary fraud of our time. Astonishingly, not one of the myriad reviewers of Christopher Andersen's bestseller Barack and Michelle even commented on the six pages he dedicates to confirming my thesis.

If analyzing the several Ayers and Obama books in question is too much of a bother, I would recommend these critics wander through any two pages of Dreams and concentrate on the nuggets of fraud and falsehood they can find without even looking hard.

As an example, let us take a look at the two pages of Dreams (144-145 in the 2004 paperback) in which young Barry Soetoro first visits the mainland. The date of the visit is specific: "during the summer after my father's visit to Hawaii, before my eleventh birthday." This was 1972. Traveling around the country on Greyhound busses with his mother, grandmother and baby sister, the ten-year old Obama and his family "watched the Watergate hearings every night before going to bed."

Of course, Obama took this trip a year before the Watergate hearings, which actually began in the late spring of 1973. This is not an isolated misrepresentation. From the flow of these two pages, I suspect that Ayers took the raw data of Obama's life and improvised as he saw fit. He does this throughout the book to score ideological points and make the case for Obama as political prodigy.

According to Dreams, the little family with one year-old Maya in tow made a long distance detour from the obvious places they might visit -- Seattle, Disneyland, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone -- to spend three days in Chicago.

As Obama tells it, the family rode some 1500 miles on Greyhound buses from the Grand Canyon and another 1000 miles back to Yellowstone to spend three dreary days in a motel in the South Loop of Chicago. Something does not make sense here.

In Chicago, Obama's most vivid memory is of seeing the shrunken heads on display at the Field Museum. Yes, the museum did have those heads on display. They were considered, according to one source, as a "crucial rite of passage for generations of Chicago kids." Ayers was one such kid. He grew up in suburban Chicago.

In Dreams, Obama remembers the heads to be of "European extraction." The man looked like a "conquistador" and the woman had "flowing red hair." This reversal of Euro-fortune struck the precocious Barry as "some sort of cosmic joke."

This memory too is thoroughly contrived. That some conquistador would wander into the Ecuadorian jungle with a woman in tow, let alone Lucille Ball, and end up as a shrunken head defies all probabilities. No source on the Field exhibit even hints that these were Europeans. In fact, one source suggests that the tribe in question vanished seven hundred years before the first European arrived.

Ayers, however, has something of a fascination with headhunting. In his 2001 memoir Fugitive Days, Ayers recounts a 1965 anti-war protest on the Michigan campus that proved formative in his own radicalization.

At the protest, Ayers saw a series of photos that moved him. One showed "four American boys kneeling in the sun, bare-chested, smiling broadly." Although these soldiers looked like the kind of guys Ayers grew up with, they "cradled in their hands now, the severed heads of human beings, their dull, unseeing eyes eternally open, their ears cut off, strung into a decorative collar worn around one smiling kid's neck." That this photo never made its way beyond this particular protest testifies to the malevolence of Ayers' imagination.

Another of the photos Ayers saw at this same protest showed water buffaloes and "small boys with bamboo sticks perched upon their backs." Curiously, in Dreams, Obama also remembers seeing a boy sitting "on the back of a dumb-faced water buffalo, whipping its haunch with a stick of bamboo." Note that these boys whip the beast not just with sticks but with bamboo sticks.

There's a lot more here . . .

Ayers Admits Writing Dreams

He blurted out: "I wrote ‘Dreams From My Father... Michelle asked me to." Then he added "And if you can prove it we can split the royalties."

Anne responded, "Stop pulling my leg!"

But he repeated insistently, "I wrote it, the wording was similar [to Ayers' other writing.]"

Anne responded, "I believe you probably heavily edited it."

Ayers stated firmly, "I wrote it."

Read James Simpson's account of Anne Leary's run-in with Bill Ayers here . . .

A Closer Look At Obama's Odyssey

Jack Cashill is back with more -- Cashill believes that Christopher Andersen's new book, "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage," it made it increasingly clear that Obama friend and neighbor, Bill Ayers, gave the book its structure. As Andersen relates, after four futile years of trying to finish the contracted book, a "hopelessly blocked" Obama delivered his family's "oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunk-load of notes" to Ayers for a major overhaul.

Interesting read, here . . .

Here's a link to Google Books limited version of "Dreams..." -- you can bounce around by section -- click "Contents" link next to Zoom symbols.

The Search function in the left column is neat -- it searches entire text -- very powerful and returns page and paragraph of search phrase -- better than having to read the book.

How Obama Himself Made More Than "Enough Money"

Jack Cashill says in defending his administration's efforts at putative financial reform, Obama suggested a ceiling, perhaps government-imposed, for Wall Street executives. Although he did not begrudge them income that is "fairly earned," he added ominously, "I do think that at a certain point, you've made enough money."

Obama may be projecting guilt from his own excellent adventures in greed. A surprising 2006 article for the American Century Foundation by liberal publisher Peter Osnos sheds useful light on this subject. As Osnos relates, a 1990 New York Times profile on The Harvard Law Review's first black president caught the eye of a hustling young literary agent named Jane Dystel.

Dystel persuaded Obama to put a book proposal together, and she submitted it. Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, signed on and authorized a roughly $125,000 advance in November 1990 for Obama's proposed memoir.

With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago, where the University of Chicago offered him an office and stipend to help him write. Obama dithered. At one point, in order to finish without interruption, he decamped to Bali for a month. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. He was surely in way over his head.

"Obama had missed deadlines and handed in bloated, yet incomplete drafts," David Remnick tells us in The Bridge. Simon & Schuster lost patience. In the summer of 1993, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. According to Osnos, the publisher asked that Obama return at least some of the advance

Not surprisingly, the Obama-friendly Remnick skips some of the details that Christopher Andersen includes in his book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, such as how Obama had spent $75,000 of the advance and could not pay it back. According to Andersen, the publisher let Obama keep the money only after he pled poverty due to "massive student loan debt" -- this despite a combined salary for the still childless Obamas well into six figures, not to mention the trip to Bali and a trip to Kenya for the couple as well.

As Osnos tells it, Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Books, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.

During this same period, Obama was working as a full-time associate at the law firm of Davis Miner, teaching classes at the University of Chicago Law School, and spinning through a social whirl that would have left Scarlett O'Hara dizzy. Writes Remnick, "He and Michelle accepted countless invitations to lunches, dinners, cocktail parties, barbecues, and receptions for right minded charities." Obama had also joined the East Bank Club, a combined gym and urban country club, and served on at least a few charitable boards.

In addition, Obama, as Remnick admits, was a slow writer. He would later explain his plodding, 19th-century technique to 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."

As Andersen tells it, Obama found himself deeply in debt and "hopelessly blocked." At "Michelle's urging," Obama "sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers." What attracted the Obamas were "Ayers's proven abilities as a writer." Noting that Obama had already taped interviews with many of his relatives, both African and American, Andersen elaborates, "These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers." The result was "Dreams From My Father" -- Obama's automythology

Although Dreams did not do particularly well in 1995, the sales shot through the roof after Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. As Osnos relates, Obama unceremoniously dumped his devoted longtime agent after Dreams took off and then signed a seven-figure deal with Crown, using only a by-the-hour attorney.

Obama pulled off the deal after his election but before being sworn in as Senator in order to avoid the disclosure and reporting requirements applicable to members of Congress. Although an Obama-supporter, Osnos publicly scolds Obama for his "ruthlessness" and "his questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday."

As to the question of income "fairly earned," Obama makes Fabrice 'Fabulous Fab' Tourre look like a lumberjack.