What will Random House do as this kind of clear evidence accumulates that the sitting president of the United States lied to them and the American people about having written his memoir by himself?… For now the clever “I was joking” story is working fine … except for the timing. Unless someone can show me another “I was joking” incident prior to theHannity incident, I think the evidence leads to Andersen outing Ayers by mistake, and the chain-yanking being a ploy.

In all seriousness, who’ll be the second elected Republican to buy into this kookery? Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) was the first.*

An earlier version of this post referred to Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), not Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah). We regret the error.

- Jonah Goldberg of National Review.

I am not sure what to make of the story that Ayers has now admitted to writing Obama’s autobiography. If it pans out, that is to my mind a very big story. Stay tuned. But I do think I should revise my earlier pooh-poohing of Jack Cashill’s effort to prove the Ayers-Obama connection.

- Vox Day of WorldNetDaily.

I don’t know if Ayers wrote it or not, but I’m entirely confident that Obama didn’t. Very few politicians and public figures write their own books, and Obama is far too much of an empty suit to have written the two that have his name on them.

- Carol Platt Lieblau of Townhall.com.

One has to wonder why no one in the MSM ever thought of simply asking “Professor” Ayers the same question. Will anyone in the MSM bother to follow up?

- Tom Maguire of JustOneMinute.

Something can be the truth even if reduced to a joke… I think the Dreams story is pretty accessible – Ayers is Obama’s ghost-writer.

- James Simpson of The American Thinker and Examiner.com.

Was he, as she had asked, pulling our collective legs? Other sources report rumors that Ayers is very upset both about not getting any credit for helping Obama on ‘Dreams,’ and may also be put off by being summarily thrown under the bus along with Rev. Wright and everyone else who becomes an inconvenience to this President.

- William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection.

Will Obama issue a denial of Ayers’ accusation? Will the usually compliant press ask a real question for once? Probably neither, which is too bad.

And finally, sort of, the fantasy-inclined Ann Althouse.

Let’s say he did write it. Well, he’s not really admitting that. He’s making fun of the way some conservative bloggers think they’ve found evidence that he wrote it. He knows most sensible people believe their evidence is bullshit, and this has been amusing to him because he — in this scenario of mine — knows that, actually, they are right.

The last two bloggers are law professors.

Benjy Sarlin talked to Ayers for the definitive response to all this.

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The Washington Independent’s David Weigel, for instance, is among those who dismiss [Christopher] Andersen’s claim because he credits me as a source… Had he read Andersen’s book, which he does not appear to have, Weigel would have seen that Andersen’s retelling of the story was based not on what I had written but on what Andersen had been told by someone who was on the scene.

Confession: I have read only the Ayers bits of Andersen’s book, and you can find some excerpts of them after the jump. Andersen is a quick turnaround author who makes mistakes, such as referring to Ayers’ wife as “Bernadette Dohrn” — her name is Bernardine. And I’ll reiterate what I last wrote — the evidence Andersen gets from an anonymous source does not back up what Cashill has been saying.

In an interview with Cashill, Andersen claims to have “two sources” for his “Ayers as Obama guru” theory. In the book, he only cites “another Hyde Park neighbor [of Ayers and Obama]” and… Jack Cashill. The neighbor tells Andersen that Obama gave Ayers (in Andersen’s words) “oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes,” and says (in the neighbor’s words) that Ayers and Obama were “friends” who “worked on various projects together.”

Cashill puts together the “Ayers as guru” theory for Andersen.

And from there:

That, if true, is interesting and reveals that Obama misrepresented his friendship with Ayers last year. But Cashill’s argument has not been the “informal editing service” argument. It’s been that Ayers wrote “the better part” of “Dreams From My Father,” something not even Andersen suggests. In one of his columns on the subject, Cashill even argues that Ayers either ghost-wrote the epilogue of “The Audacity of Hope,” or helped Obama get into Harvard, or both. First, here’s how Cashill proves the “ghosting.”

Obama talks about our “collective dreams.” Ayers uses the word “collective” the way others use “and” and “the.” The Weather Underground was organized into “collectives.” He refers to “collective well-being,” “collective gloom,” “collective goodwill” and a dozen other Marxist-spawned “collective” sentiments.  Speaking of Marx, Obama uses the concept of “process” in a consciously dialectic sense as does Ayers.

“Both law and politics required compromise,” the man tells him, adding that he himself had thought about going into politics but was unwilling to compromise.  Historically, the real life Ayers has sounded much like Obama’s academic sage. In “Fugitive Days,” for instance, he tells us that he and his comrades were eager to “combat the culture of compromise.”

The punchline? Andersen, who has written dozens of tabloid-style books, cites someone else for the Ayers research. He cites Jack Cashill.

According to Cashill, Andersen’s contribution to the Ayers storyline is the recollection of “a Hyde Park neighbor” who claims that Obama, struggling with the book, gave “oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes” to Ayers and asked for advice. Any author or anyone who knows an author is probably chuckling at this point — passing unfinished portions to colleagues with some time and experience is pretty standard.

If you take Andersen on his word, it’s true that this anecdote portrays Ayers and Obama as closer friends than they let on during the campaign. But it’s a big leap from there to Cashill’s characterization of “the Obama-as-Milli Vanilli story.” Indeed, Andersen doesn’t even report that story out. He writes that “Ayers’ contribution to Barack’s ‘Dreams From My Father’ would be significant – so much so that the book’s language, oddly specific references, literary devices and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’s own writing.” For that analysis he cites Cashill, whose previous analyses of “Dreams” been along these lines:

[W]hen the young Obama pontificates about “angry young men in Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta,” one hears the voice of someone much edgier and more aware than Obama. This reference reflects Ayers’ worldview of America as a “marauding monster,” one that terrorizes its own citizens of color just as it does those in the Third World.

Ayers does not define himself as being part of this monster but rather sees himself and his colleagues as saboteurs “behind enemy lines.”

Curiously, Obama used the exact same phrase – “behind enemy lines” – to describe his own status while working in corporate America.

I think it’s telling that when asked to expand on this in an interview with Sean Hannity, Andersen moved on. The most potentially explosive section of his book and he doesn’t want to talk about it? Would he do that if his research consisted of more than citing the obsessive Cashill?

I’ve read both “Dreams From My Father” and Ayers’s memoir “Fugitive Days,” which was published six years after “Dreams.” Ayers’s book is worse. He uses a William Faulkner trope and eschews quotation marks; Obama liberally reconstructs conversations with friends, even creating some composite characters to speak with. And Ayers’s book is stuffed with howlers like “The Fourth of July bombs were all good bombs, except sometimes” and “I felt now at the epicenter of a resistance so wide and so deep that it would quickly disrupt the cotton wool of consciousness afflicting the country.” The irony of the Ayers conspiracy is that Obama is a better writer than Ayers, whose pretentiousness oozes off the pages.

Cashill’s column on the whole mess basically argues that the Ayers theory should wreck Obama’s credibility, because “the left has been at pains to depict Republicans – George Bush and Sarah Palin most recently – as dunces because they were unable to write their own books.” Of course, Obama wrote a second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” 10 years after “Dreams,” and so far no literary analysts have tried to prove it was ghosted by Jeremiah Wright. So it’s really not clear to me what this conspiracy theory is supposed to prove. Might Ayers have programmed Obama by making suggestive references to the Mekong Delta in the den of a Hyde Park mansion 14 years ago? I’ll quote David Freddoso, the author of the bestselling “The Case Against Barack Obama,” whom I asked about this theory.

Cashill’s stuff on this was a lot of crap, all conjecture and no concrete evidence.

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In any case, the latest evidence:

- Both men misquote Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” and refer to the city as “Hog butcher to the world” instead of “for” the world. Google turns up 60,000 other examples of this slight misquote.

- Six characters in “Dreams” share names with people in Ayers’ books, including “Freddy,” “Tim,” and “the old man.” (Two of the books Cashill cites were published after “Dreams.”)

- Both men talk about “knowledge” and “power.”

And so on. Cashill makes two admission/observations that are key to his analysis and probably deserve quoting. First:

For the record, “baleful” means “threatening harm.”  I had to look it up.

And:

Not familiar with the term “bill of particulars?”  Uncertain myself, I looked that one up too.  It means a list of written statements made by a party to a court proceeding.  Ayers and Obama each refer knowingly to a “bill of particulars.” Doesn’t everyone?

Actually, lots of writers use those terms: I quickly counted five journalists who referred to a “bill of particulars” in writing about Obama. And that’s pretty much all you need to know about Cashill’s quixotic adventure, which I’m sure will persist until January 2013 or 2017 at least.

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