Did Bill Ayers ghostwrite “Dreams From My Father”?

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Did Bill Ayers ghostwrite “Dreams From My Father”?

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 | Misc |

The first time I saw this I didn’t buy it, but the claim that Ayers ghostwrote much of Obama’s second book is starting to look credible. From Jack Cashill:

Yavelow contacted me and I sent him some relevant materials. When he ran the two books nominally by Barack Obama, the 1995 Dreams From My Father and the 2006 Audacity of Hope, through FictionFixer, he concluded, “They were written by different people.”

As Yavelow explains, authors don’t go from a 3.8 percent use of the passive voice in 1995 to an 8.3 percent use in 2006. For developing writers, the use of the passive almost always diminishes with experience. Yavelow cites a score of other characteristics that change too conspicuously from one Obama book to the next, among them the Flesch Reading Ease score, the use of gender words, sentence starters, adverbs, discouraged words, sensory triggers, and more. When, however, Yavelow compared Obama’s Dreams with Bill Ayers’ memoir, Fugitive Days, he found the similarity of the two books “striking.” He then quickly corrects himself: “’Striking’ is an understatement for the relationship FictionFixer uncovered between Fugitive Days and Dreams From My Father.” For instance, Dreams averages 17.61 words and 26.48 syllables for non-dialogue sentences. Fugitive Days averages 17.62 words and 26.27 syllables. Another example is what Yavelow calls “attributions”—e.g., he “asked,” she “said,” they “wondered.” Some authors use as few as three. Many use fewer than twenty. Dreams, however, uses 36; Fugitive Days 34, and with only four exceptions—three of these used only once—the two books use the very same attributions. Yavelow compares the two books on any number of other characteristics and concludes, “There is a strong likelihood that the author of Fugitive Days ghost-wrote Dreams From My Father using recordings of dialog (either tape recorded or notes). Alternatively, another scenario could be possible: Ayers might have served as a ‘book doctor’.”

Systems engineer Ed Gold, with twenty years experience in pattern recognition and classifier design, ran tests of his own. His conclusion: “The statistical style analysis performed by our research team suggests that the writing style of Dreams From My Father is significantly more similar to the style observed in Fugitive Days than to the style found in other works by Barack Obama such as Audacity of Hope. “

Gold continues, “Even more interesting, when we extract those sections of Dreams From My Father that Dr. Cashill believes to be Ayers’ writing and treat this as a unique document, the style analysis software identifies a stronger correlation between this sample and Ayers’ Fugitive Days than we see between this same sample and the remainder of Dreams From My Father! Thus we have reason to believe that Dreams From My Father had at least two authors, and one author’s measured style features more closely match those of Ayers than they match those of the other author(s).”