[Vision2020] Dr. Bruce Heiden, Professor of Greek and Latin at The Ohio State University, agrees that Obama did not write “Dreams”

[No Weatherman]

Obama in Plain Sight: Intro to "Dreams" Implies He Didn't Write It

Jack Cashill has assembled evidence suggesting that Barack Obama's
memoir Dreams from My Father may be the work of a ghostwriter: Obama's
Chicago neighbor William Ayers. Obama agrees with Cashill on one
important point: in his own Introduction to Dreams, which describes
his book's genesis, Obama himself strongly implies that he didn't
write it.

According to Obama, he did some writing on another book, not a memoir
but "an essay on the limits of civil rights litigation in bringing
about racial equality" (xiii; all citations refer to the 2004
paperback edition). This book was never finished, and it doesn't
exist. Obama says that his work on the "civil rights litigation"
project was aborted by personal memories that forced themselves upon
him: "I found my mind pulled. . ." (xiv). But he doesn't say how these
memories turned into the book Dreams from My Father. In particular, he
doesn't say he wrote the book. He says that Dreams "found its way onto
these pages" (xvi).

Most readers of Dreams have probably assumed that Obama's curiously
impersonal description is merely figurative, a display of humility, a
modest way of saying that he did write the book the reader has in
hand. I have no doubt that Obama hoped the words would be understood
that way. Nevertheless, it should be noted that Obama's display of
humility is so extreme that although he devotes his Introduction to
just a single topic — where Dreams came from — he omits the writing
altogether. Instead he replaces the writing of Dreams by a
quasi-automatic process whereby memories somehow took form in words
and found a way onto the page by themselves. This picture is so
fantastic that it can't be taken literally, and therefore can't be
suspected of falsehood. In describing a genesis of Dreams that is
blatantly impossible, Obama is counting on readers to think, "he can't
really mean it," and he leaves it to us to come up with our own idea
of what he did mean. That's very convenient for Obama, since in
saying, as in essence he does, "this book came into existence without
anybody writing it," Obama also implies, "and I, the credited author,
didn't write it." Unlike "nobody wrote this book," "I didn't write
this book" is not a fantastic statement that cannot mean what it
literally says. Lots of people didn't write Dreams from My Father.
Maybe Barack Obama is one of them. Maybe when he said he didn't write
the book — because nobody did — he meant it. And maybe he was telling
the truth. That would explain why Obama would want to say something as
implausible as "[it] found its way onto these pages": he used an
implausibility to muffle an implicit, plausible, and truthful, but
dangerous statement: "I didn't write it."

Obama's whole Introduction to Dreams has the odd rhetorical project of
persuading the reader that Barack Obama, the author of Dreams from My
Father, actually had nothing to do with writing his book and couldn't
have written it. Describing how the project began, Obama explains that
the idea for his first book was not his in the first place: the
"opportunity to write it arose" when newspapers reported that he had
been elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and
"a few publishers" (i.e., nobody in particular, the idea for his book
was nobody's), who must have thought Obama was a writer or could
become one, took the initiative to call him (xiii). Obama then
accepted the role of writer which publishers had offered him, and he
"agreed to take off a year after graduation and put [his] thoughts to
paper." As Obama describes it, he did not exactly agree to write a
book, but rather to do some writer-like things, that is, to clear his
agenda for time to write, and "put thoughts to paper." Would the
transition of thoughts to paper involve words? Obama leaves that part
to the reader's imagination.

Obama began to play at being a writer with only a vague idea of his
subject matter, "imagining [him]self to have something original to say
about the current state of race relations." He demurs at claiming he
actually had anything original to say, or anything to say at all:
Obama only claims to have imagined he had something to say, and
eventually he concluded on his own that the theories in his plan
"seemed insubstantial and premature," and he gave them up (xiv). So
far Obama has stated that he "sat down and began to write," but not
that he ever got past "began to." His incipient writing was soon
interrupted by forces outside his control, just as Obama's legal
career had been sent onto a detour by the calls of publishers who
thought he was a writer and convinced him to "take a year off"; except
now the impersonal alien forces approached Obama from inside himself:
"I found my mind pulled toward rockier shores. First longings leapt up
to brush my heart. Distant voices appeared, and ebbed, and then
appeared again" (xiv). One might have expected Obama to explain that
these voices were a kind of Muse, and that by listening to them he
became the writer who wrote Dreams. But he doesn't; on the contrary,
he states, "I strongly resisted the idea of offering up my past in a
book."

Obama does once mention writing in connection with his memories, but
the passage does not refer to writing Dreams from My Father. Obama
says that in reflecting upon oral stories told him by others, he
discovered "I had spent much of my life trying to rewrite these
stories" (xvi). Even here Obama only claims that he was trying to
write, and the activity he calls rewriting yields no inscription of
words in any permanent medium where they might be read. This
metaphorical "writing" has no text and produces no books — it's all in
the head. So Obama the author is affirming that, yes, he was after all
a writer, he'd been one for a long time, only not the kind who writes
books.

Obama's writing-without-writing allows him to explain how he became
the author of Dreams without writing it and without wanting to write
it. After evoking his lifetime process of "trying to rewrite these
stories," Obama arrives at Dreams from My Father this way:

"At some point, then, [note the temporal vagueness] in spite of a
stubborn desire to protect myself from scrutiny, in spite of the
periodic impulse to abandon the entire project, what has found its way
onto these pages is a record of a personal, interior journey —"

In other words, Dreams from My Father is Obama's "writing," even
though he won't say he wrote it, because he wrote it metaphorically:
it told stories he'd been "trying to rewrite" all his life. But as for
actually writing the book the reader is holding, nobody did that. It
just "found its way onto these pages."

So as I said, Obama agrees with Jack Cashill on one critical point:
Obama didn't write Dreams from My Father. Where he and Cashill differ
is that according to Obama, nobody wrote Dreams, while Cashill thinks
somebody wrote it for him. Needless to say, of the two positions, only
Cashill's is plausible. It's a certainty that somebody wrote Dreams
from My Father. If Barack Obama didn't write it, then somebody else
did.

Obama's Introduction to Dreams from My Father is a pretty strange
document. But the Preface he affixed to the 2004 reissue is even
stranger. Bear in mind that the Preface is printed immediately before
the Introduction in the 2004 edition, so that it would not be
difficult for anyone to read both of them and compare. Like the
Introduction, the Preface also narrates the genesis of Dreams. But
Obama seems to have forgotten parts of his own story.

"As I mention in the original introduction, the opportunity to write
the book came while I was in law school, the result of my election as
the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. In the
wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher
and went to work with the belief that the story of my family . . .
might speak in some way to the fissures of race, etc." (vii, emphasis
added)

The "burst of publicity" that testified to Obama's "modest
accomplishments" in the Introduction has here been reduced to "some
modest publicity." The "few publishers" who initiated Obama's project
when they "called" him have given way to "an advance" (i.e., a cash
incentive) that Obama received from "a publisher." But most
importantly, Obama's original project (the essay on the limits of
civil rights litigation), his project agenda, his work-in-progress,
the memories that arose unbidden to overwhelm his theories, his
struggle to resist the direction in which those memories were leading
him, the final triumph in which his inner journey "found its way onto
these pages" — all this has disappeared. According to the 2004
Preface, when Obama received his advance, he already had a "belief"
about the story he could tell, and he immediately "went to work."

Obama says he "went to work" on Dreams from My Father, but he still
does not say that he wrote it. In the Introduction Obama also said he
went to work on his essay about civil rights litigation, and even that
he "sat down and began to write." But he never wrote that book, and it
doesn't exist. When Obama says in the Preface that he "went to work"
on Dreams, it's impossible to know whether this means he started
writing the book, started thinking about writing it, or started
imagining how to deliver a book to his publisher without writing one.
"Went to work" claims only that Obama made some early contribution to
the Dreams project as a content-provider, whatever a content-provider
might be.

Obama's narrative then skips straight from "went to work" to the
completed book's publication. Neat! Utterly uninformative about the
work of writing Dreams — or the miracle that created it, whatever it
was — Obama pronounces confidently about the side of authorship that
involves book reviews, promotional appearances, and sales. "Like most
first-time authors," he explains, sounding like a veteran mid-list
publishing personality, "I was filled with hope and despair." But when
his book enjoyed only modest success, Obama says, "I went on with the
business of my life." According to Obama, being an author was not part
of the business of Barack Obama's life. It was merely a temporary and
superficial intrusion upon a life devoted to other things that Obama
took much more seriously. Referring to his short-lived "career as an
author" as a "process" he was "glad to have survived," Obama seems to
be referring to the negotiations with his publisher and their
promotional campaign. He hasn't said anything about writing.

Obama's statement that he "went on with the business of [his] life"
strikes another note of discord with the Introduction, where Obama had
explained that Dreams somehow emerged from an inner work of "trying to
rewrite" that had occupied "much of [his] life" (xvi). In that sense
his authorship of his book, although not the actual writing of it, was
putatively continuous with Obama's life and not an intrusion upon it.
But in the 2004 Preface to Dreams the life of Obama is no longer a
private "journey" but public "business" instead. When Obama's
ephemeral performance as book-trade personality has run its course, it
disappears from his life without residue: not only does Obama not
write anything else, he doesn't even reflect: "I had little time for
reflection over the next ten years" (viii). This is not the same
"Obama" who described himself in the Introduction to Dreams.

Taking a paragraph to illustrate the business of this period, "Obama
2004" kicks off his narrative by mentioning a voter registration
project that he ran in the 1992 election cycle. This is a strange
touch, because the period supposedly summarized began in 1996, after
Dreams was published (hardback 1995, paperback 1996, according to the
copyright page). Perhaps "Obama 2004" just wanted to sneak in a plug
for his voter registration talking-point, and didn't bother to reflect
on the chronology of the life he was narrating.

When the summary arrives at 2004, Obama wins the Democratic nomination
for U.S. Senate, and finds himself in the news again (his first
fifteen minutes of fame, we recall, having come when he was elected
the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review); and
once again, as if through an odd coincidence of mistaken identity,
powers outside Obama descend upon the busy public man and impose the
role of author: "Just as that spate of publicity prompted my
publisher's interest a decade ago, so has this fresh round of news
clippings encouraged the book's re-publication" (ix).

What follows these words is a passage whose peculiar unbelievability
exceeds even Obama's high standard.

"For the first time in many years, I've pulled out a copy and read a
few chapters to see how much my voice may have changed over time. I
confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled
sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly
practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so,
possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity." (ix)

After reading in the Introduction to Dreams that the book recorded
Obama's "search for his father, and through that search a workable
meaning for his life as a black American" (xvi), that the book
culminated a lifetime effort at attempted "rewriting" of intimate
stories, undertaken "in the hope of extracting some granite slab of
truth upon which my unborn children can firmly stand," it comes as a
surprise that the author should have stored this hard-won granite slab
in a virtual attic and never read it again for many years. But "Obama
2004," we recall, has denied that reflection was ever part of the
business of his life, or that he even had time for it. So when Obama
2004 is moved to pull out a copy of Dreams, he isn't interested in the
personal achievement of his stories. Nor does this man, who in the
Introduction admitted he periodically thought of abandoning the whole
book in deference to "a stubborn desire to protect myself from
scrutiny" (xvi), now feel even a little bit curious to see whether the
republication of his personal book might expose something that on
second thought he would rather have kept private. No, Obama 2004, the
vote-drive organizer, law professor, family man, Illinois state
legislator, and candidate for U.S. Senator — the guy who admits he
never thought of publishing a book at all unless someone else, aroused
by publicity, thought of it first and asked him — Obama pulls out his
own book solely to measure the changes in what he calls his "voice" by
examining a few sample passages ("a few chapters"). Supposing Obama's
"voice" did change; why should a man so busy with an active political
life have cared about his changing "voice," and cared about this
"voice" above all else? That would make sense for a teacher of
rhetoric, a literary scholar, or a professional writer. Or even for a
serious recreational writer. But Obama, according to the
self-portraits of the Introduction to Dreams and the 2004 Preface, was
none of these.

Let me translate Obama's statement that he reopened Dreams "to see how
much my voice may have changed over time." This means that Obama — the
real, living Obama, "I," the one who pulls out Dreams to read it — he
suspects that the "voice" of the author-on-the-page Obama doesn't
sound like his voice, the real Obama's voice. For some reason this
concerns him, and he wants to see how much the author of Dreams
doesn't sound like Obama. Now what is this phenomenon Obama calls his
"voice"? First he discusses the prose style of Dreams, and this, he
affirms, is not the "voice" of Obama 2004 (who I reiterate is the only
actual, living Obama). But according to Obama, "voice" is not prose
style alone, because after describing how alien the prose of Dreams
seems to him, Obama declines to disavow the "voice" in Dreams after
all: "I cannot honestly say, however, that the voice in this book is
not mine — that I would tell the story much differently today than I
did ten years ago, even if certain passages have proven to be
inconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and
opposition research" (ix). So Obama is saying that by "voice" he means
two different things: (a) prose style, and (b) something other than
prose style that includes content political opponents might want to
highlight. Of these, Obama considers the latter the more important to
"voice," since he says that although the prose style really is not
his, the voice still is.

Fine; but in that case, affirming ownership of the "voice" (content)
would involve reading through the whole book, and not just
representative passages, which is what Obama says he did. Examining "a
few chapters" would be satisfactory only if Obama was interested in
checking the style and nothing else.

Notice, moreover, how at the end of the paragraph Obama acknowledges
that passages in Dreams had already become a topic of media comment
and opposition research. At the beginning of the same paragraph he
said that for many years he never so much as pulled out a copy of
Dreams until his run for the U.S. Senate encouraged the book's
republication. So Obama is saying he knew opponents were reading his
book to mine it for dirt, but Obama himself wasn't interested enough
in the book to go back and see what they might find there, until his
publisher showed an interest in reissuing it to the marketplace? I
compute only three possible explanations for Obama's account of how he
finally "pulled out a copy" of Dreams after neglecting it for many
years: he's lying, he's clueless, or both.

But perhaps the strangest feature of this paragraph is Obama's
commentary on the change he observed in the prose-style aspect of his
"voice." Obama does not merely assess the quantity of change, as he
says he wished to ("to see how much my voice may have changed"); he
assesses the quality of the writing in Dreams; and his assessment is
brutal. Where else does an author who has published only one book, and
that one only moderately known, append a preface to a republication of
his own sole book informing readers that the prose in it is painful to
read, and so flabby that fifty pages should be cut? I doubt those
sentiments were shared by the critics whose "mildly favorable" reviews
Obama had mentioned earlier in the Preface. The testimonials printed
on my paperback include "beautifully crafted," "beautifully written,"
and "a book worth savoring." Why would an author of a book whose
writing is so often selected as a special object of praise append a
preface saying that the writing in his book stinks? It certainly
couldn't be a sales pitch. And if Obama's assessment was sincere, if
he really thought the prose in Dreams so bad, why didn't he just
revise it, and give readers a better book? Even writers of well-known
classics sometimes make considerable revisions for later editions.
Dreams from My Father was hardly a classic whose circulation outside
its author's control inhibited revision. Not yet, anyway.

There is clearly something about the writing in Dreams that
embarrasses Obama. But it is not at all plausible that what
embarrasses him is what he says it is, the ineptitude of the writing.
Because the writing in Dreams is far from inept, and even if it were
inept, the author himself would have no conceivable reason to observe
and advertise his own ineptitude, unless he had already published
other books and gained a reputation for a better sort of writing. But
at the time of the 2004 Preface Obama's only reputation as a writer
was as the author of Dreams from My Father, and no reader of the
reissued book could have had any expectation of an authorial voice
other than the one that was there, if they had any expectations at
all.

So if the writing in Dreams embarrassed Obama, but not because it was
inept, what was it that embarrassed him?

An inference may be drawn from Obama's description of the curiosity
that supposedly drew him back to Dreams: he wanted "to see how much
[his] voice may have changed over time." Even before Obama discovered
that the writing in Dreams was inept, he already knew (or strongly
suspected) that its voice was not his. Now the way Obama puts this
implies that the voice in Dreams, including its prose style, was his
once; but for Obama who goes back to Dreams, the voice he is looking
for, and the one he finds, is not his. Instead of saying, however, "I
didn't write this, it found its way onto the page by itself," as in
essence he did in the Introduction, in the Preface Obama implies
instead that he did write Dreams, but he was a different and very bad
writer when he wrote it, so bad that he's now ashamed to be associated
with the writing in his book.

Well, Obama 2004 was right about one thing: the "voice" in Dreams
isn't his. The distance between reader-Obama 2004 and the writing in
Dreams can be gauged from the writing in the 2004 Preface, whose text
we have under examination: it has none of the lyricism of Dreams from
My Father (or of the Introduction to Dreams). Or by looking at the
writing in The Audacity of Hope, a preview excerpt of which is printed
at the back of my copy of Dreams from My Father. Very little lyricism
there either. Let's give Barack Obama a little credit for
perceptiveness: when he said he was curious about how much the
prose-style-voice of Dreams differed from that of Obama 2004, his
instinct, if that's what it was, was right on target: the author of
Dreams and Obama 2004 do sound like different people. The question is,
why?

Obama's critique of the prose style of Dreams preempts that question
by providing an immediate answer: Obama's prose style was changed by
"time." He then provides a few illustrations of the improvements time
brought to his taste in writing. To the implausibilities already noted
we now may add another, the implausibility of someone becoming a
markedly different and, in his estimation, better writer, without any
acknowledged effort to improve his writing, or even any acknowledged
practice at writing in the interim — by Obama's account between 1995
and 2004 he had no time even for reflection, much less for writing.
Nevertheless during this span his writing improved significantly, the
work, he suggests, of time (whenever Obama discusses writing, he never
does anything, the writing just happens).

But Obama's whole self-critique is implausible, whether he's bashing
the writing in Dreams or congratulating himself for becoming better.
So if we can't accept "time improved Obama's style" as a plausible
answer to the question of why the author of Dreams and Obama 2004
don't sound like the same writer, what would an alternative answer be?
One possibility, obvious when the question is properly phrased, is
that one or both of the authorial Obamas isn't Barack Hussein Obama at
all. This would mean that at least one ghostwriter was involved in the
two books credited to author Barack Obama. Since none of Barack
Obama's publications acknowledge any writing assistance besides his
agents, editors, and consulted advisors, the involvement of one or
more ghostwriters would mean that Obama has misrepresented himself as
the author of at least one of his two books.

According to this analysis, Barack Obama's Introduction to Dreams from
My Father and his 2004 Preface offer an obfuscated,
self-contradictory, and unbelievable representation of his authorship
that, upon close reading, proves vacant. As Obama tells it, his
authorship of Dreams was miraculous, because although he lacked the
writing skill to be the author of anything, and he didn't want to be
the author of a memoir, and he resisted becoming the author of a
memoir, and he tried in vain to become the author of a different kind
of book, and he never had an idea of being the author of anything
until one or several publishers had the idea first and he agreed to
accept the opportunity they offered to be an author, and even then he
only considered himself an author as long as his publisher was selling
his book, after which he reverted back to a complete non-author,
reverted so completely that he wasn't even moved to reread his book
when political opponents were using it against him — because, in
short, despite all the reasons Obama gives why he couldn't have
written a book like Dreams from My Father, and despite the fact that,
according to Obama's account, he didn't write Dreams from My Father,
nevertheless Dreams from My Father somehow "found its way" onto the
page with Barack Obama's name under the title as the author. That's a
miracle. It couldn't have happened.

But if Obama's fantastic story contains one believable detail, one
grain of truth, it would probably be that Obama did not write Dreams
from My Father. Because if he had written it, why would he have
concocted an alternative story about its genesis that is so
implausible, much less one that implies he didn't write it? Instead of
telling an outright lie — "I wrote Dreams from My Father" — Obama
would have told the truth, but obfuscated it.

But why wouldn't he have lied? If Obama had a ghostwriter and wanted
to hide it, why wouldn't he have covered his tracks better? Perhaps
we'll never know; and unless Obama someday proves that he did write
Dreams after all — i.e., unless he puts all doubts to rest by
replacing the story he has already told in two inconsistent and
unbelievable versions with a third that he could have told at the
beginning if it was the truth — then the question of Barack Obama's
incomplete self-concealment will intrigue psychoanalysts and literary
scholars for a long time to come. Here I will offer speculation of a
comparatively mundane and practical sort.

The person who wrote Dreams from My Father was not merely a hired
professional wordsmith. He or she was a literary talent: no creative
genius perhaps, but someone with a definite gift and the ambition to
develop and use it. Since Obama was not that kind of person — as he
repeatedly insists — then by claiming to be the author (i.e., the
writer) of Dreams, he would have assumed a role that brought with it
expectations he could not meet and did not wish to. Barack Obama did
not have another Dreams from My Father in him — he wasn't even
comfortable acknowledging authorship of this one. So he would have
tried to avoid a massive, elaborate charade that might consume his
life and run a high risk of exposure. Instead he would indirectly tell
as much truth as he could, by refraining from saying that he actually
wrote Dreams, and also by acknowledging that he wasn't a writer at
all, so no further writing should be expected of him. I suspect that
when Obama said in the 2004 Preface that he knew his career as an
author would be short-lived, but he was "glad to have survived the
process with his dignity more or less intact," he was glad indeed he
had survived without the loss of dignity that exposure would bring,
and glad he could stop pretending to be the author he wasn't. And when
Obama described the ten years after Dreams as if he couldn't do enough
to forget about his book, maybe that had some truth in it too.

Barack Obama, and the literary author who may have put Obama's Dreams
into writing on paper where a publisher could sell it and people could
read it, escaped the curious attention of readers for a long time.
Nobody much cared who wrote Dreams from My Father until Barack Hussein
Obama became a candidate for the U.S. presidency. But those days of
untroubled obscurity may soon be ending for the author or authors of
Sen. Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father.
http://thepostliberal.com/2008/10/obama-in-plain-sight-intro-to-dreams.html