From HillBuzz: We’ve started something here: Democrats and Republicans working together for what’s best for the country. Please help us take it to the next level and spoil Obama’s Kool-Aid Festival for good.

Chicago DeMcCrats for McCain have teamed up with Chicago Young Republicans to spoil Obama’s Election Night Kool-Aid Festival. Please help us raise the $3,500 we still need to stage an enormous Election Night Results Party (complete with ample security, don’t worry) at the Hilton Chicago, directly across the street from the giant Kool-Aid Festival Obama is staging in Grant Park. Read more at Hillbuzz.wordpress.com

Comprehensive argument against Obama from Hot Air Blog

Very well thought out and reasoned argument against Obama’s policies at Hot Air Blog. Lots of video goodies too.

Hot Air: The comprehensive argument against Barack Obama

Drive Thru Voting in California

In another attempt to pump more fraudulent votes through the electoral system, California is testing a drive thru voting system. Eight electronic voting terminals are setup in a parking lot in a similar fashion to ATMs to make it easier for hundreds and thousands of fraudulent and illegal voters to make it to the polls for  registration and early voting.

McVoting at California\’s Drive Thru Polling Booth

Joe Biden warns of international Crisis within 6 months if Barack Obama is elected.

Mark my words, It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking.

The Cubam missle crisis didn’t turn out too well for John Kennedy. IIt’s not a very smart comparison to make when your trying to say Obama would make a good commander and chief.  Kennedy ended up backing down to the Soviets after a 2 week long imminent nuclear threat on the US mainland and having to secretly remove the Jupitor and Thor missle batteries from Turkey that detered further Soviet incursion south and east toward europe. Definitely not Kennedy’s most shining moment as president.

If that wasn’t definitive enough to sway reasonable democrats from voting for this pair. Biden stuck his foot back in his mouth and made it even clearer that Obama is not the right person for the job.

Watch. We’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.

And he’s going to need help . . . to stand with him. Because it’s not going to be apparent. . . it’s not going to be apparent that we’re right.

So not only will we definitely have an international crisis specifically because of Obama’s inexperience but Joe is warning us now that Obama is going to screw it up. This either means screw it up like the Democrats think Bush screwed up the Iraq war or that he’s going to do nothing and cave to our enemies. So either way Biden is admitting that Obama and the Democrats have been lying to us for years. He’s also admitting that the Bush policies of preemption and strong examples of military force are the proper ways to deal with threats to our national security. Even if he means to imply that an Obama administration would not use force and instead do nothing in retaliation, its confirms even more the effectiveness of military force which was made all the more apparent recently by the success of the troop surge in Iraq. Anyone listening to him can easily infer this from his comments.

We have been told that the world will love us if only we elect Barack Obama. If the world loves him so much and wants to work with him, why would they take his election as an opportunity to attack us? It’s obvious this is a lie, dictators of the world know he is weak and inexperienced, and they will use a weak Obama presidency to gain influence, territory, and wealth in the world knowing he will do nothing to stop them. The fact is there are many threats and Biden is right. These dictatorships will immediately pounce on weak American leadership. There is Russia’s recent incursions on Georgian territory, activities in Venezuela and threats against Ukraine. There is China’s intent to invade Taiwan. Iran’s desire to create nuclear weapons and destroy Israel and many other international threats that the next president will have to provide leadership and strength to ward off and as Biden said in the primaries, “The presidency is no place for on the job training”.

What this is really telling us is that Biden has seen the intelligence briefings as has Obama, McCain, Palin, and their respective transition teams and he has seen at least one very likely credible threat that will happen if Obama is elected president because foreign dictators know as we do that he is inexperienced and spineless, and Joe in his typical dimwitted way was trying to put out some early damage control to his supporters. He knows this country does not love defeat like his campaign does, he knows we will not stand for a president who cannot and will not protect us in a crisis, and he knows he must warn and shore up the Obama base in the left wing of the Democrat party and the media so Obama doesn’t get the same horrible treatment the Democrats and the media gave to Bush for the past 8 years.

So moderate Democrats remember what Biden said, a vote for the Obama/Biden ticket is a vote for an imminent international crisis and a vote for disgrace for your party. Think of how many congressional seats you will lose when your party’s president is more disliked than Bush. Do you really think that you will be able to maintain control when there is a crisis and no republican to blame?

Update:

Madeline Albright confrims Bidens comments that Obama will be tested with an international crisis.

McCain & Obama at Al Smith Dinner

Funny

Not even remotely funny

Insight into the Obama/Biden education plan

When Dan Quale misspelled potato it was national news for the rest of the Bush 41 administration. Why is it not newsworthy that Joe Biden doesn’t know how to count. In a speech the other day Joe tells supporters that jobs is a 3 letter word. They are going to say he meant job, well why did he reiterate and spell it J-O-B-S. He also said Obama thinks its a 3 letter word too. The fact is he is a moron and that is why the media and the Obama campaign are hiding him.

Zombietime: The Left’s Big Blunder 15 October, 2008

An interesting statistical and psychological analysis of the lefts strategy in 2008 and its impending failure. Its extremely long so I quoted some of the more important sections below so you could get the basic idea.

The disastrously counter-productive strategy of Obama\’s supporters

Excerpts;

The illusory quest for conformist decision-making in the 2008 presidential election

Say, for example, that you were an Obama supporter who watched the Vice Presidential debate and felt that Palin had done well and was a more effective debater than Biden — though not well enough to change your mind about voting for the Obama-Biden ticket. Immediately afterward you encounter an online poll, asking you to vote on who won the debate. What do you do? I suspect that most, if not nearly all, Obama supporters would lie and still vote in the poll that Biden had won the debate, even though they felt that Palin had in fact defeated him. But why do so? As an Obama supporter, you still want your candidate to win, so that every action you take should revolve around only one question: Will this help Obama win? Probably unconsciously, people assume without really thinking about why, that if enough people say Biden won the debate, then a general consensus will be reached that Biden did win the debate, and as a result some vague category of Americans who up until that point had not been Obama supporters will change their allegiances and in reality vote for Obama-Biden on election day.

The Obama campaign itself also takes advantage of the sympathetic media to construct a facade of inevitability. The campaign will stage-manage crowds and dictate camera angles so that Obama is seen to not only have overwhelming numbers of fans but the correct demographic proportion of fans; the campaign will coordinate Obama appearances to coincide with rock concerts or other festivals so they can point to the huge crowds who showed up to watch Obama; and the media plays right along.

McCain supporters often complain about this strategy by the Left, going to great pains to point out the poll stuffing, the deceptive photos, the crowd overestimation, the slanted media coverage, and so forth. But should conservatives be so concerned? I propose that McCain supporters should be GLAD this is happening — because the Left is in fact making a disastrous strategic blunder.

Who Does the Polling?

A key component of this strategy is an over-reliance on polling, since poll numbers which show Obama apparently in the lead can be used to club undecided voters or McCain supporters into submission. You’re all alone. Nobody else thinks like you. Your side is losing. You’re out of touch. Change your mind — join the winning team. But the polls may not reflect what we imagine they reflect.

The actual grunt-work of doing public-opinion polling is a low-paying job that doesn’t require much (or any) experience. The people asking the “Who will you vote for?” questions either sit in a room for hours on end making repetitive calls, or walk door-to-door in potentially dodgy neighborhoods — not particularly high-end work. Who would apply for and accept such a job? Not someone who already has a higher-paying job. Not someone who has experience or skills that would allow them a better career or position. Not someone who is middle-class or middle-aged. Not someone who is wealthy. Generally, I wager, college students, the under-employeed and/or the under-educated make up the majority of people who do the actual rubber-meets-the-road polling of asking the questions and writing down the answers. Though there are no published statistics about the demoographics of pollers themselves, the fact that, for example, The Gallup Poll routinely recruits entry-level call-center employees on college campuses lends support to this supposition. And, anecdotally, when I was a college student I briefly worked for a public-opinion call center doing this exact kind of job, and my fellow pollers were almost all college students or underemployed folks, some of whom only worked a limited number of hours per week so as to still qualify for government benefits.

……..

This fact has potentially significant implications for the outcomes of polls. Imagine, for a moment, that you were one of the rare McCain supporters in a polling call-center; wouldn’t you be a little depressed if person after person you called stated that they were intending to vote for Obama? How could you not be? But what if you were an Obama supporter working in that same call center? Wouldn’t you be elated or enthused to hear the votes for Obama piling up? Of course you would. Ah, but pollers are under strict instructions to not reveal their personal opinions to the people they’re polling. And I’m sure that most try to follow the rules. But even if you grant that, say, 90% of them manage to maintain complete neutrality, and not let some kind of expectation creep into their voice or attitude, that still leaves 10% who might consciously or unconsciously be slanting the results. And that’s all it would take to screw up a poll. Even a 95% honesty rate leaves room for 5% bias in the results, which can be very significant in a close race like this one.

Yet I’m not concerned about the 10% or 5% of pollers who consciously allow their personal opinion to slip into the conversation. I’m concerned about the 90%+ who try to appear impartial. The operative word here is “try” — because as we learned from an amazing horse (yes, a horse), “trying” isn’t good enough.

Conformity and the Asch Experiments

Solomon Asch (on the far right) and six assistants trick the test subject (third from the right with a white shirt, tie, and crew cut) into thinking he’s taking a vision test.

Implicit in the Left’s continuous attempts to exaggerate Obama’s perceived support is the belief that “a crowd draws a crowd” and that undecided voters will be drawn to the Obama camp if they think “everyone else” is supporting him. But is that an accurate assessment? Is there any evidence that it’s true?

Well, actually, yes. There is evidence. Or should I use scare quotes: “evidence.” I believe that a series of experiments carried out in the 1950s by social psychologist Solomon Asch were in fact the (now long-forgotten) inspiration for and justification for the current strategy, especially the strategy of online opinion-poll-stuffing after debates and other major news events.

Starting in 1951, Asch, a professor at Swarthmore College, ran a series of unusual experiments to generate a quantitative measurement of the subjective term “conformity.” The experiments, which many now consider somewhat unethical and a bit sadistic, went like this:

A volunteer was recruited to participate in a vision test. He was brought to a room with seven other volunteers who were also to take the same test, in a group. Little did the volunteer know, however, that his fellow “volunteers” were all confederates of the experimenter, and the test was not a vision test but a psychological torture session designed to elicit conformist behavior. The experimenter would then unveil a pair of displays, one showing a single black line, and the other showing three black lines of varying lengths. The volunteer is told to simply state which of the three lines most closely matches the length of the single line.

A volunteer was recruited to participate in a vision test. He was brought to a room with seven other volunteers who were also to take the same test, in a group. Little did the volunteer know, however, that his fellow “volunteers” were all confederates of the experimenter, and the test was not a vision test but a psychological torture session designed to elicit conformist behavior. The experimenter would then unveil a pair of displays, one showing a single black line, and the other showing three black lines of varying lengths. The volunteer is told to simply state which of the three lines most closely matches the length of the single line.

Which line on the right — A, B or C — matches the length of the line on the left? In the privacy or your own home and your own mind, you’d almost certainly answer “A.” But if you were in a large group of people who all insisted that “C” was the answer, you might very likely answer “C” as well — either because you feared being rejected socially by the group, or because you doubted your own perceptions and deferred to the opinions of others.

Sounds simple, right? In every instance, the correct answer was quite self-evident, as only one of the lines was even close to the correct length. The volunteer, who was always placed in the second-to-last position, was only allowed to state his answer after he had heard most of the other faux-volunteers give their answers. For the first two rounds, these confederates were instructed to give the obviously correct answer; in each instance, the test subject would then also give the correct answer. But starting on the third round, the confederates, as instructed by Asch, intentionally gave a consistently wrong answer; the goal of the experiment was to see if the volunteer would “break” and also begin to chime in with the wrong answer as well. Most volunteers would resist for a few rounds, but eventually the majority would cave in at least part of the time and give the wrong answers in complete defiance of their own perceptions. Overall, the test subjects gave the wrong answers 36.8% of the time — an astonishing result.

………

What would you do if you had the ability to conduct this “experiment” on a vast scale? And if the results of the experiment were not just of academic interest, but affected the real world? What would you do if you had a monopoly on the media, and could affect each individual’s perception of how the general public felt? You could take the Asch experiment nationwide. You could deceive every single individual voter into thinking he was all alone in his opinions. And consequently, due to social pressures to conform, they’d change their allegiances. You could use it to win elections.

That’s the position in which the Left — the Obama campaign, its supporters, and the liberal media — imagine themselves to be. They’re trying to use the principle of behaviorial conformity as a weapon in the campaign. But there is a terrible flaw in their plan. The Asch experiment doesn’t work unless the test subject is unaware that he is being duped. And I’m telling the subject right now: you’re being duped.

Normative and Informational Conformity

In post-experiment interviews, during which Asch revealed the ruse, the test subjects gave one or the other of two completely different reasons for agreeing with the wrong answers. One personality type said that, although they were fully aware what the correct answer was and that everyone else was giving the wrong answer, they themselves repeated the wrong answer publicly because they “didn’t want to go against the grain” or to appear like a freak or an outsider, or be rejected by their peers. This attitude was given the unwieldy moniker “normative conformity“, in which “a person publicly accepts the views of a group but privately rejects them.” The other personality type doubted their own perceptions, and assumed that if an entire group of people thought Line “C” was the correct answer, then it must in fact be the correct answer, despite the subject’s own first impression that it was the wrong answer. This type of person actually changed their opinion based on the group’s apparent consensus, and would have answered “C” even if allowed to do so anonymously. This attitude was dubbed “informational conformity,” in which “a person accepts the views of the group” as actually valid and adopts them internally.

……

I submit that this assumption is a catastrophic blunder. To the extent that there is any conformist behavior being exhibited by McCain supporters and undecided voters, it is much more likely to be normative conformity. In other words, people who are confronted with apparent overwhelming support for Obama may indeed announce that they too support Obama, but do so only in order to avoid ostracism or accusations of racism. Inside, however, they have not changed their minds. On November 4, they will go into that voting booth, and in total privacy and anonymity, they are free to vote for whomever they want, without fear of social condemnation for doing so. And in such a setting, normative conformity disintegrates, because there is no “norm” to conform to when your vote is anonymous.

……

Conclusion

Now, it could very well be that, after all is said and done, Obama will indeed win this election — I can’t predict the future any better than can anyone else. The Obama campaign and its supporters are also engaging in many other strategies (unrelated to the exaggeration of his popularity) that have likely been effective — such as blanketing the airwaves with advertisements, disparaging McCain, insulting Palin, and so on. The unabashed and unapologetic Obama boosterism from the traditional media certainly isn’t hurting either. In prior elections, candidates worried about an “October Surprise,” some last-minute revelation or scandal that threatens to realign the entire race. But in 2008, two or three October Surprises seem to be cropping up every single day, and there’s no reliable way to predict what will happen next (other than that the media will try to emphasize the anti-McCain news and downplay the anti-Obama news). And it may be that less than 50% of the population was ever interested in voting for McCain in the first place, and that an Obama victory was a foregone conclusion long before the campaign even began; I simply don’t know. However, if Obama does win, it will be IN SPITE OF the counter-productive antics of his supporters, not because of them. I feel that all the exaggerations and bias polling and online poll-stuffing and comment-spamming have only served to increase a desperate come-from-behind energy in the McCain campaign, and induce a sense of complacency and inevitable victory among rank-and-file Obama voters. However: If McCain wins, then Obama’s supporters will only have themselves to blame.

Will the exaggerations become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as assumed, or are Obama supporters spinning further and further away from reality, constructing one unsupportable exaggeration on top of another — only to be stunned on election day when the actual results, once again, don’t match either their pre-vote opinion polling or their post-vote exit polling?

Yet it may very well be that an army of glum, dispirited and pessimistic conservatives will reluctantly trudge to the polls on November 4, each one imagining they are the only remaining person in the entire country voting for McCain, and lo and behold — they’ll turn out to be a silent majority after all.

Obama owes Palin, McCain, and supporters an apology

The secret service announced today that they had investigated the claims that a McCain supporter yelled “Kill Him” at a rally w/ Sara Palin the other day and have found the allegations completely unfounded. There was absolutely no one, including the security for the event that could coroberate the claim made by a single local leftist reporter,  David Singleton of the Scranton Times-Tribune at the event.  I think Obama needs to apologise to McCain for using this completely false charge several times in last night’s debate. He even went as far as to whine that Sara Palin “didn’t mention, didn’t stop, didn’t say hold on a second”. Thats because it didn’t happen, now we know that Sara wasn’t even on stage at the time the local hack reporter made the claim. Congressional candidate Chris, Hackett was speaking at the time of the now debunked claim.

Fox to move World Series Game 6 to accomodate Obama Ad

Fox to change World Series time for Obama By Paul J. Gough

To accommodate a half-hour Obama time buy on Fox on Oct. 29, Major League Baseball has agreed to move the start time of World Series Game 6 by about 15 minutes. That would move the start of the game from 8:20 p.m. ET or so to 8:35 p.m.

“Fox will accommodate Senator Obama’s desire to communicate with voters in this longform format,” Fox Sports said in a statement. “We are pleased that Major League Baseball has agreed to delay the first pitch of World Series Game 6 for a few minutes in order for Fox to carry his program on Oct. 29. If requested, the network would be willing to make similar time available to Senator McCain’s campaign.”

Along with CBS and NBC, Fox was approached by the Obama campaign last week to purchase the 8-8:30 p.m. time slot Oct. 29. If a Game 6 is needed, Fox is obligated to carry the game. That prevented the network from agreeing outright to carry the commercial, which was cleared by CBS and NBC last Thursday.

Was Terrorist Ayers Obama’s Ghostwriter of “Dreams of My Fathers”

Jack Cashill of the American Thinker discovers striking similarities when comparing literary analysis of Dreams and Ayers own book Fugitive Days. Surprising or not Obama’s second book is much less sophisticated than Dreams while Fugitive Days is a near literary match.

Who Wrote Dreams From My Father? (American Thinker 9, October 2008)

By Jack Cashill:

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.

And yet, given the biases of the literary establishment, no reviewer of note has so much as questioned Obama’s role in the writing, then or now. As the New York Times gushed, Obama was “that rare politician who can write . . . and write movingly and genuinely about himself.”  These accolades matter all the more because Obama has built his political persona around his presumably superior intellect, Dreams being exhibit A.

Shy of a confession by those involved, I will not be able to prove conclusively that Obama did not write this book.  As shall be seen, however, there are only two real possibilities: one is that Obama experienced a near miraculous turnaround in his literary abilities; the second is that he had major editorial help, up to and including a ghostwriter.

The weight of the evidence overwhelming favors the latter conclusion and strongly suggests who that ghostwriter is.  In that this remains something of a work in progress, I am willing to test my hypothesis against any standard of proof and appreciate any and all good leads.

In my career in advertising and publishing, I have reviewed the portfolios of a thousand professional writers, all of them crowded with writing samples, but only a handful of these writers would have been capable of having a written a book as stylish as Dreams.  I have also written a book on intellectual fraud, Hoodwinked, and examined any number of bogus biographies that excited the literary left to the point of complicity, Edward Said’s and Rigoberta Menchu’s prominent among them, Menchu winning a Nobel Prize for hers.  Obama’s ascent seems to follow a century-old pattern.

Tracing Obama’s literary ascent is complicated by what Politico.com calls a “scant paper trail.” That trail begins at Occidental College whose literary magazine published two of Obama’s poems — “Pop” and “Underground” — in 1981. Obama calls it some “very bad poetry,” and he does not sell himself short.  From “Underground”:

Under water grottos, caverns

Filled with apes

That eat figs.

Stepping on the figs

That the apes

Eat, they crunch.

The apes howl, bare

Their fangs, dance . . .

It would be another decade before Obama had anything in print and this an edited, unsigned student case comment in the Harvard Law Review unearthed by Politico. Attorneys who reviewed the piece for Politico described it as “a fairly standard example of the genre.”

Of note, Politico reporters Ben Smith and Jeffrey Resner observe that “the temperate legal language doesn’t display the rhetorical heights that run through his memoir, published a few years later.”

Once elected president of the Harvard Law Review –more of a popularity than a literary contest — Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, “A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time.”

A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama’s election as Harvard’s first black president caught the eye of agent Jane Dystel. She persuaded Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to authorize a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama’s proposed memoir.

With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where he dithered.   At one point, in order to finish without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali.  Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. He was surely in way over his head.

According to a surprisingly harsh 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos, which detailed the “ruthlessness” of Obama’s literary ascent, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract.  Dystel did not give up.  She solicited Times Book, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.

Then suddenly, somehow, the muse descended on Obama and transformed him from a struggling, unschooled amateur, with no paper trail beyond an unremarkable legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes, into a literary superstar.

To be sure, it is not unusual for successful politicians to hire ghostwriters — John McCain gives due credit to Mark Salter for his memoir, Faith of My Fathers — but it is highly unusual for unknown young Chicago lawyers to hire ghostwriters.

I have attempted to contact Dystel by phone and email without success.  It is highly unlikely she refashioned the book, and Osnos admittedly did not.  If my suspicions are correct, the ghost on this book shared many of Obama’s sentiments, spoke his language and spent considerable time reworking the text.

I bought Bill Ayers’ 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, for reasons unrelated to this project.  As I discovered, he writes surprisingly well and very much like “Obama.”  In fact, my first thought was that the two may have shared the same ghostwriter.  Unlike Dreams, however, where the high style is intermittent, Fugitive Days is infused with the authorial voice in every sentence. What is more, when Ayers speaks, even off the cuff, he uses a cadence and vocabulary consistent with his memoir.  One does not hear any of Dreams in Obama’s casual speech.

Obama’s memoir was published in June 1995.  Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant.  In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama’s path to political power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.

In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama’s career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama’s belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.

For simplicity sake, I will refer to the author of Dreams as “Obama.”  Without question, he contributed much of the book’s raw material, especially the long-winded accounting of events and conversations, polished just well enough to pass muster.  The book’s fierce, succinct and tightly coiled social analysis more closely matches the style of Fugitive Days, a much tighter book.

Ayers and Obama have a good deal in common. In the way of background, both grew up in comfortable white households and have struggled to find an identity as righteous black men ever since.  Just as Obama resisted “the pure and heady breeze of privilege” to which he was exposed as a child, Ayers too resisted “white skin privilege” or at least tried to.

“I also thought I was black,” says Ayers only half-jokingly. As proof of his righteousness, Ayers named his first son “Malik” after the newly Islamic Malcolm X and the second son “Zayd” after Zayd Shakur, a Black Panther killed in a shootout that claimed the life of a New Jersey State Trooper.

Tellingly, Ayers, like Obama, began his career as a self-described “community organizer,” Ayers in inner-city Cleveland, Obama in inner-city Chicago. In short, Ayers was fully capable of crawling inside Obama’s head and relating in superior prose what the Dreams’ author calls a “rage at the white world [that] needed no object.”

Indeed, in Dreams, it is on the subject of black rage that Obama writes most eloquently.   Phrases like “full of inarticulate resentments,” “unruly maleness,” “unadorned insistence on respect” and “withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage” lace the book.

In Fugitive Days, “rage” rules and in high style as well.  Ayers tells of how his “rage got started” and how it evolved into an “uncontrollable rage — fierce frenzy of fire and lava.” Indeed, the Weathermen’s inaugural act of mass violence was the “Days of Rage” in 1969 Chicago.

As in Chicago, that rage led Ayers to a sentiment with which Obama was altogether familiar, “audacity!”  Ayers writes, “I felt the warrior rising up inside of me — audacity and courage, righteousness, of course, and more audacity.”  This is one of several references.

The combination of audacity and rage has produced two memoirs that follow oddly similar rules.  Ayers describes his as “a memory book,” one that deliberately blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history.  Obama says much the same.  In Dreams, some characters are composites.  Some appear out of precise chronology.  Names have been changed.

As a control, allow me to introduce my own book, Sucker Punch, which is no small part a memoir about race, specifically in my relationship, at great remove, with Muhammad Ali and the world of boxing.  In the book, I describe my own unreconstructed coming of age in racially charged Newark, New Jersey as it happened.  I change no names, create no composite characters, alter no chronologies.  Most memoirs observe the same conventions.  Dreams and Fugitive Days, however, are both suffused with repeated reference to lies, lying and what Ayers calls, in his pitch perfect post-modern patois, “our constructed reality.”

“But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie,” writes Obama, “something I’d constructed from the scraps of information I’d picked up from my mother.”

“That whole first year seemed like one long lie,” Obama writes of his first year in college in Los Angeles, one of at least a dozen references to lies and lying in “Dreams,” a figure nearly matched in “Fugitive Days.”

The reader knows that Ayers — with some justification — has much to hide.  He senses that Obama does too, but he is never quite sure why.  This presumed poetic license leads to the frequent manipulation of dates to make a political point.

“I saw a dead body once, as I said, when I was ten, during the Korean War,” writes Ayers. This correlation is important enough that Ayers mentions it twice.  The only problem is that Ayers was eight when the Korean War ended.

Obama tells us that when he was ten, he and his family visited the mainland.  On the trip, back in their motel room, they watched the Watergate Hearings on TV. The problem, of course, is that those hearing started just before Obama turned twelve.

One could forgive a single missed date, but inconsistent dates and numbers appear frequently in both books and often reinforce some moment of lost innocence.  In the same spirit, both books abound in detail too closely remembered and conversations too well recorded.  These moments in both books occasionally lead to an awareness of the nation’s seemingly ineradicable racism.

In 1970, for instance, the 9-year-old Obama alleges to be visiting the American embassy Indonesia. While waiting, he chances upon “a collection of Life magazines neatly displayed in clear plastic binders.”

In one magazine, he reads a story about a black man with an “uneven, ghostly hue,” who has been rendered grotesque by a chemical treatment.  “There were thousands of people like him,” Obama learned, “black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.”

Obama’s attention to detail is a ruse. Life never ran such an article. When challenged, Obama claimed it was Ebony. Ebony ran no such article either.  Besides, black was beautiful in 1970.

In a similar vein, Ayers tells of hitching a ride in Missouri with “Bud,” the driver of a “brand-new Peterbilt truck.”  The man proceeds to regale Ayers with a string of dirty jokes — at least two of them retold word for word — before reaching under his seat and pulling out a large pistol, his “N****r neutralizer.”

“White people can never quite remember the scope and scale of the slavocracy,” Ayers reminds the reader again and again, writing as though he were not a member of this benighted race.

These parallels intrigue perhaps, but they prove little.  To add a little science to the analysis, I identified two similar “nature” passages in Obama’s and Ayers’ respective memoirs, the first from Fugitive Days:

“I picture the street coming alive, awakening from the fury of winter, stirred from the chilly spring night by cold glimmers of sunlight angling through the city.”

The second from Dreams:

“Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds.”

These two sentences are alike in more than their poetic sense, their length and their gracefully layered structure.  They tabulate nearly identically on the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), something of a standard in the field.

The “Fugitive Days” excerpt scores a 54 on reading ease and a 12^th grade reading level.  The “Dreams’” excerpt scores a 54.8 on reading ease and a 12^th grade reading level.  Scores can range from 0 to 121, so hitting a nearly exact score matters.

A more reliable data-driven way to prove authorship goes under the rubric “cusum analysis” or QSUM.  This analysis begins with the measurement of sentence length, a significant and telling variable.  To compare the two books, I selected thirty-sentence sequences from Dreams and Fugitive Days, each of which relates the author’s entry into the world of “community organizing.”

“Fugitive Days” averaged 23.13 words a sentence.  “Dreams” averaged 23.36 words a sentence.  By contrast, the memoir section of “Sucker Punch” averaged 15 words a sentence.

Interestingly, the 30-sentence sequence that I pulled from Obama’s conventional political tract, Audacity of Hope, averages more than 29 words a sentence and clocks in with a 9^th grade reading level, three levels below the earlier cited passages from “Dreams” and “Fugitive Days.” The differential in the Audacity numbers should not surprise.  By the time it was published in 2006, Obama was a public figure of some wealth, one who could afford editors and ghost writers.

The publisher of Dreams, the openly liberal Peter Osnos, tells how this came to be.  According to Osnos, Dreams took off during Obama’s much-publicized race for the U.S. Senate in 2004, nearly ten years after its modest release.   After winning the election, Obama dumped his devoted long time agent, Jane Dystel, and signed a seven-figure deal with Crown, using only a by-the-hour attorney.

Obama pulled off the deal before being sworn in as Senator, this way to avoid the disclosure and reporting requirements applicable to members of Congress. To his credit, Osnos publicly scolds Obama for his “ruthlessness” and “his questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday.”

Unfortunately, the technology is not currently available to do a fully reliable authorship analysis.  As expert in the field Patrick Juola of Duquesne University observed,  “The accuracy simply isn’t there.”  He cautioned that for high stakes issues like this one, “The repercussions of a technical error could be a disaster (in either direction).”

That much said, preliminary QSUM analysis supports an Ayers-Obama link.  Systems designer Ed Gold–with twenty years of high-level experience in image and signal processing, pattern recognition, and classifier design and implementation–volunteered to run a QSUM scan on multiple excerpts from both memoirs. “I have completed the analysis,” he wrote me, “and I think you will be pleased with the findings.” In assessing the signature of sample passages from Dreams, he found “a very strong match to all of the Ayers samples that I processed.”

Like Juola, Gold recognized the limitations of the process and of his own resources. He has volunteered to make the raw data available to more established authorship authentication experts, and I will be happy to pass that data along.  Gold saw the complementary value, however, in text analysis, as did Juola, who encouraged me “to do what you’re already doing . . . good old-fashioned literary detective work.”

Given that advice, I dug deeper into both memoirs and established one metaphoric thread that ties the two books together in a way I believe is just shy of conclusive, a thread that leads back to Bill Ayers’s stint, after dropping out of college, as a merchant seaman.

“I’d thought that when I signed on that I might write an American novel about a young man at sea,” says Ayers in his memoir, Fugitive Days, “but I didn’t have it in me.”

The experience had a powerful impact on Ayers.  Years later, he would recall a nightmare he had while crossing the Atlantic, “a vision of falling overboard in the middle of the ocean and swimming as fast as I could as the ship steamed off and disappeared over the horizon.”

Although Ayers has tried to put his anxious ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go. “I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience,” Ayers writes of his maritime adventures.  Yet curiously, much of this same nautical language flows through Obama’s earth-bound memoir.

“Memory sails out upon a murky sea,” Ayers writes at one point.  Indeed, both he and Obama are obsessed with memory and its instability.  The latter writes of its breaks, its blurs, its edges, its lapses.  Obama also has a fondness for the word “murky” and its aquatic usages.

“The unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs,” he writes, one of four times “murky” appears in Dreams. Ayers and Obama also speak often of waves and wind, Obama at least a dozen times on wind alone.  “The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed,” he writes in a typical passage.  Both also make conspicuous use of the word “flutter.”

Not surprisingly, Ayers uses “ship” as a metaphor with some frequency.  Early in the book he tells us that his mother is “the captain of her own ship,” not a substantial one either but “a ragged thing with fatal leaks” launched into a “sea of carelessness.”

Obama too finds himself “feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship.” He also makes a metaphorical reference to “a tranquil sea.”  More intriguing is Obama’s use of the word “ragged” as an adjective as in the highly poetic “ragged air” or “ragged laughter.”

Both books use “storms” and “horizons” both as metaphor and as reality. Ayers writes poetically of an “unbounded horizon,” and Obama writes of “boundless prairie storms” and poetic horizons-”violet horizon,” “eastern horizon,” “western horizon.”

Ayers often speaks of “currents” and “pockets of calm” as does Obama, who uses both as nouns as in “a menacing calm” or “against the current” or “into the current.” The metaphorical use of the word “tangled” might also derive from one’s nautical adventures.  Ayers writes of his “tangled love affairs” and Obama of his “tangled arguments.”

In Dreams, we read of the “whole panorama of life out there” and in Fugitive Days, “the whole weird panorama.”  Ayers writes of still another panorama, this one “an immense panorama of waste and cruelty.”  Obama employs the word “cruel” and its derivatives no fewer than fourteen times in Dreams.

On at least twelve occasions, Obama speaks of “despair,” as in the “ocean of despair.” Ayers speaks of a “deepening despair,” a constant theme for him as well.  Obama’s “knotted, howling assertion of self” sounds like something from the pages of Jack London’s “The Sea Wolf.”

In Obama’s defense, he did grow up in Hawaii.  Still, the short Hawaii stretch of his memoir is largely silent on the island’s natural appeal. Sucker Punch again offers a useful control.  It makes no reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to ships, seas, oceans, calms, storms, wind, waves, horizons, panoramas, or to things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, or murky.  None.  And yet I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean.

If there is any one paragraph in Dreams that has convinced me of Ayers’ involvement it is this one, in which Obama describes the Black Nationalist message:

“A steady attack on the white race…  served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair.”

As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as “ballast” unless I knew exactly what I was talking about.  Seaman Ayers most surely did.

One more item of interest.  In his 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, Bill Ayers walks the reader through his Hyde Park neighborhood and identifies the notable residents therein.  Among them are Muhammad Ali, “Minister” Louis Farrakhan (of whom he writes fondly),  “former mayor” Eugene Sawyer, “poets” Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and “writer” Barack Obama.

In 1997, Obama was an obscure state senator, a lawyer, and a law school instructor with one book under his belt that had debuted two years earlier to little acclaim and lesser sales.  In terms of identity, he had more in common with mayor Sawyer than poet Brooks.  The “writer” identification seems forced and purposefully so, a signal perhaps to those in the know of a persona in the making that Ayers had himself helped forge.

None of this, of course, proves Ayers’ authorship conclusively, but the evidence makes him a much more likely candidate than Obama to have written the best parts of Dreams.

The Obama camp could put all such speculation to rest by producing some intermediary sign of impending greatness — a school paper, an article, a notebook, his Columbia thesis, his LSAT scores — but Obama guards these more zealously than Saddam did his nuclear secrets.  And I suspect, at the end of the day, we will pay an equally high price for Obama’s concealment as Saddam’s.