WHO WROTE "DREAMS FROM MY FATHER"?

Barack Obama first garnered national attention with the publication of his memoir, Dreams From My Father, in 1995.

Reliapundit has noted Obama's perfidious, disloyal, and treacherous treatment of the literary agent who got him that book deal when he was a virtually unknown lawyer and "community organizer" here, here, here, here, here, and here.

That story is important, because it illustrates that Obama's selfish, double-dealing character was established well before he became an elected politician.

There's another intriguing angle regarding that book, however.

An experienced, published author, Jack Cashill, thought that Dreams From My Father was so much better written than anything else known to have been penned by the Illinois junior Senator, that he analyzed Obama's first memoir by comparing it to a memoir authored by Bill Ayers. His conclusion? That Bill Ayers was the ghostwriter who translated Obama's notes into a book.

The evidence is of course purely literary; it is based on careful scrutiny of the two texts. This is the sort of thing that scholars of literature do all the time in order to demonstrate the authorship of anonymous texts.

Obama's discarded agent might know more, but she is prevented from making any statement by the terms of her settlement with Obama.

Now comes another angle, however.

A professor of Greek and Latin literature at Ohio State presents a close reading or explication de texte of the introductions to the various editions of Obama's book, and makes a very curious observation: nowhere in the introductions does Obama actually simply state that he wrote the book!

Very lawyerly, and very reminiscent of the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime, isn't it?