This past week several people called my attention to a post by Scott Johnson on his influential PowerLine blog that addressed the literary relationship between Barack Obama and his radical friend, Bill Ayers.
In the post Johnson spoke of his high regard for David Garrow’s “staggeringly researched” 2017 Obama biography, Rising Star. “Without resolving all mysteries,” Johnson writes, “[Garrow’s] scholarship belies the notion that [Dreams from My Father] was ghostwritten by Bill Ayers or other such collaborator.”
Johnson emailed Garrow to follow up on the authorship question, and Garrow responded, “I don’t recall exactly where the Bill Ayers [stuff] got started, but it, like the Frank-Davis-as-father notion, is just beyond loony, ’cause Dreams is already *in galleys* when Barack and Bill first get to know each other.”
I do know where the Ayers stuff got started because I started it with a major assist from American Thinker on these pages on October 9, 2008. I never said Ayers wrote Dreams, but I presented overwhelming literary forensic evidence that Ayers, a skilled writer and editor, helped Obama shape Dreams.
I did not advance this theory casually. I understood then what Obama biographer David Remnick would later affirm, namely that my theory, “if ever proved true, or believed to be true among enough voters, could have been the end of [Obama’s] candidacy.”
Deconstructing Obama
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My research on this topic, aided by several helpful literary detectives, culminated in my 2011 book, published by Simon & Schuster, Deconstructing Obama. I think I can safely assume Garrow has never read it. I would invite those curious about the evidence to read the book or even to read the preliminary article cited above.
That Garrow does not know the source of a theory he dismisses offhand as “beyond loony” is, unfortunately, altogether typical of establishment political writers. His airy dismissal, in fact, reinforces the theme of my forthcoming book Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency.
In the book, I use the phrase “samizdat” — Russian for underground press — to describe the loose coalition of conservative blogs, online publications, talk radio shows, and legal monitors such as Judicial Watch that challenged the Left — and, occasionally, the “responsible” right — for control of the Obama narrative.
For eight-plus years, the samizdat broke virtually every major unflattering story about Obama and his presidency, some of which the major media grudgingly confirmed, some of which they continue to suppress. In the book I tell how the individuals in question managed to break these stories out. In every case, as you might imagine, the samizdat journalists were met with condescension, if not outright contempt, from the major media.
Obama’s biographers were among the more contemptuous. Curiously, the four major biographers are all named David — Mendell, Remnick, Maraniss, and Garrow. The last three are Pulitzer Prize winners. To his credit, Garrow was the only one of the four who refused to prop up what Remnick called Obama’s “signature appeal: the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal.”
The story Obama told about his happy multicultural family at the conventions was pure fiction. According to Garrow, Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, and Barack Obama Sr. “never chose to live together at any time following the onset of Ann’s pregnancy.” Garrow quotes approvingly one unnamed scholar to the effect that Obama Sr. was no more than “a sperm donor in his son’s life.” All of this was common knowledge in the samizdat as early as 2008, but it came as news to many of Garrow’s readers in 2017.
