Barack Obama, writer?

It would never have occurred to me to ask whether or not Sen. Obama wrote the books attributed to him; but as the Anchoress points out, writers write. It’s what they do, because the need to write drives them. If circumstances are such that they have little time or energy to spare from the other demands of life, they may write very little, but when they can, what they can, they write.Which does raise the reasonable question: do we see that kind of drive in Sen. Obama’s life? Put another way, do the existence and quality of his books (and particularly Dreams from My Father) square with the rest of his writing career? We know Barack Obama wrote virtually nothing for the Harvard Law Review despite serving a term as its president; we know that at Occidental College, he wrote some truly awful poetry; and we know that when it comes to any other evidence of his ability as a writer—”a school paper, an article, a notebook, his Columbia thesis”—that he’s been careful not to let us see it. Jack Cashill argues that on the basis of this evidence, the only reasonable answer to the question is “no”:

Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write Dreams From My Father, he had written very close to nothing. Then, five years later, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called—with a straight face—”the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”The public is asked to believe Obama wrote Dreams From My Father on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. Writing is as much a craft as, say, golf. To put this in perspective, imagine if a friend played a few rounds in the high 90s and then a few years later, without further practice, made the PGA Tour. It doesn’t happen.

If Cashill’s skepticism is correct, this might seem a curiosity; it’s not exactly a major literary scandal, after all. Indeed, in the realm of political ghostwriting, it would be at most a distant second to JFK accepting the Pulitzer for Profiles in Courage. If Cashill’s analysis, which is close and compelling but not conclusive, is correct that Barack Obama’s ghostwriter was none other than Bill Ayers, that would certainly give the lie to his efforts to deny any kind of close relationship between the two of them, but again, it’s not like there’s any great wrongdoing here. The fact that this question can be not only raised but convincingly argued, however, is a reminder of one very serious issue with the Obama campaign: even after all these months, despite the books, we still don’t really know all that much about Barack Obama, let alone feel like we know him—and he’s done everything he possibly can since bursting on the national scene to keep it that way.