Bill Ayers, the True Author of Obama’s (Supposedly) Dreams From My Father

The cat’s out of the bag:

Then, unprompted he (Ayers) said–I wrote Dreams From My Father. I said, oh, so you admit it. He said–Michelle asked me to. I looked at him. He seemed eager. He’s about my height, short. He went on to say–and if you can prove it, we can split the royalties. So I said, stop pulling my leg. Horrible thought. But he came again–I really wrote it, the wording was similar. I said I believe you probably heavily edited it. He said–I wrote it. I said–why would I believe you, you’re a liar.

That explains two things I’ve mused on in this blog.

It explains Why William Ayers Matters, which I posted in the latter stages of the campaign last year.  It means that my Option 2 was the correct one:

The second is that he (Obama) has been (influenced by William Ayers,) in which case we’ll have what I’ve been hoping to avoid for a long time: a country run by an elite that basically hates it.  Getting past the obvious problem relative to foreign policy, if those at the top don’t like this place, it’s only a matter of time before those at the bottom get the same idea.  It will be hard to fill our military, and even harder to get our economy going when hopes of improvement are dimmed by a hefty tax take and the realisation that the taxes are going to people who neither like us nor have our best interests at heart.  Such a realisation will make the downward turn in the stock market look minor.

It also explains Why My Family Business Left Chicago (where I quote from the book directly):

However, in a world where the state explicitly enforces the perpetuation of “traditional” society–necessary to prevent the problems that Obama describes in the quote above–corporations will lose the power to make such decisions.  They will be forced to perpetuate operations such as Vulcan’s in Chicago in the manner they’ve been operated until the company is forced to close them without a sequel or face nationalisation, which only stalls the inevitable.

And such “traditional” societies have a strong appeal to Obama’s latté liberal core constituency, not only for purely sentimental reasons (the loss of a way of life, the lamenting of which drove Obama’s mother for so many years) but also because such societies favour the perpetuation of established elites, be those elites hereditary aristocracies or bureaucracy-ensconced mandarins.  And, to be honest, such a scenario has a strong appeal to the end product of multi-generational success like myself.

Chicago was the quintessential “can-do” city.  People like Ayers and Saul Alinsky have eroded that.  That’s why companies like Vulcan had to leave.  That’s why I don’t take promises such as “green jobs” and growth through expanded government seriously.

HT to William Sulik.  BTW, it doesn’t bother me that Dreams From My Father was ghostwritten, just who the ghost is.