03/09/2011
For background, read: America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance.”
Jack Cashill, the author of Deconstructing Obama, recently sat down with Front Page Mag’s Jamie Glazov, in an interview that was published today.
FP: ….
Let’s begin with how you came to believe that Obama was not the principal author of his acclaimed memoir “Dreams from My Father”.
Cashill: ….
I first picked up the book in July 2008. Early on in the first read, the quality of the writing caught my attention…. In my twenty-five year career in advertising and publishing, I have reviewed the portfolios of at least a thousand professional writers. Not a half-dozen among them wrote as well as the author of the book’s best passages. When I looked into Obama’s other efforts in print, I saw that nothing he wrote was nearly this good. What surprised me was that no one was even suspicious of Obama’s ability.
FP: Ok, so tell us why it matters if Obama wasn’t the real author.
Cashill: The literary gatekeepers had already anointed Obama a genius on the basis of Dreams, the sacred text in the cult of Obama. The Obama campaign machine, Organizing for America, encouraged its minions to “get out the vote and keep talking to others about the genius of Barack Obama.” This, I sensed from the beginning, was a myth that one challenged at his own peril.
FP: You ultimately came to the belief that Bill Ayers was the craftsman behind Dreams from My Father. How did you come to make this judgment?
Cashill: Entirely by accident. About six weeks after reading Dreams, I ordered a copy of Ayers’s 2001 memoir Fugitive Days and started reading. The stylistic parallels were stunning. At this point, I had my first Eureka moment, albeit a dumb one–Gosh, I thought, they both live in Chicago. They must have shared the same ghostwriter! I had not known that Ayers was a skilled writer and editor….
FP: In the fall of 2008, what would have happened to the Obama campaign if your thesis had been accepted?
Cashill: Obama biographer David Remnick got this much right. Said he, “This was a charge that if ever proved true, or believed to be true among enough voters, could have been the end of the candidacy.”
FP: How did the media respond?
Cashill: With a shrug. This did not surprise me. Real knowledge might just have undermined their commitment to a philosophy so evasive — “Yes, we can?” — they themselves would be at a loss to describe it. That much I got. What I did not get was why the “respectable” conservative media were mimicking the turtle-like defenses of their mainstream peers. I was not asking them to buy my thesis sight unseen but to kick the tires and take it for a test drive….
FP: Your own personal belief on the birther issue? Do you think Obama was born in the United States?
Cashill: Yes, but when strategist David Axelrod first combed through the official Obama records–the grades, the SAT and LSAT scores, the college theses, the passport, his parents’ marriage license, the college applications, the birth certificate–he likely saw more red flags than in his parents’ May Day parades and so decided to bury them all. I think there is something on the birth certificate that will throw the much told nativity story of Barack Obama into doubt, quite possibly the date of birth or even the place. Unreported so far by the media, little Barry spent the first year of his life in Washington State….
FP: What are your feelings about Obama’s second book, “Audacity of Hope”?
Cashill: To credit Dreams to Obama alone, one has to posit any number of near miraculous variables… To credit Audacity to Obama alone, one has to posit at least two additional variables: one is his adoption of a modified and less competent style, and the second is his ability to write such a book given the punishing schedule of a freshman senator.
Whoever wrote Obama’s speeches wrote large sections of Audacity, perhaps all of it…. Easily the best candidate for authorship is Obama’s wunderkind speechwriter Jon Favreau….”
[”Deconstructing Obama,” Frontpagemag.com, March 7, 2011.]
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