One clue comes from an unexpected source, Rashid Khalidi, the radical Arab-American friend of Obama’s and reputed ally of the PLO.
In the acknowledgment section of his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire, Khalidi pays tribute to his own literary muse, the man who has made “unrepentant” a household word, Bill Ayers.
Writes Khalidi, “Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family’s dining room table to do some writing for the project.” Khalidi did not need the table. He had one of his own. He needed the help.
Khalidi had spent several years at Chicago University’s Center for International Studies. At a 2003 farewell dinner on the occasion of his departure from Chicago, Obama toasted him, thanking him and his wife for the many dinners that they had shared as well as for his “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.”
The emergence of a previously unseen writing sample proves all but conclusively that Barack Obama did not in any meaningful way write Dreams From My Father, the book that Time Magazine has called “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”
The emergence of a second writing sample, this one by a legitimate author, provides convincing evidence as to who did.
In 1990, the University of Illinois at Springfield published a collection of essays called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois. Obama contributed a chapter, titled: “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City.”
1990, by the way, was the year that Obama, the newly elected president of the Harvard Law Review, received a six-figure advance from Simon & Schuster to write what would become Dreams From My Father.
The publishers must not have read “Why Organize.” Although the essay covers many of the issues raised in Dreams and uses some of the memoir’s techniques, it does so without a hint of style, sophistication, or promise.
Indeed, the essay is clunky, pedestrian, and wonkish, a B- paper in a freshman comp class. The following two excerpts capture Obama’s range or lack thereof:
“Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda.”
“But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well . . . and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts.”
These cliché-choked sentences go beyond the merely unpromising to the fully ungrammatical. “Organizing” does not “face.” “Efforts” do not leave “skeletons.” “Agendas” do not have “anathemas.”