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.”

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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