Bill Ayers: Obama’s ghostwriter?

“Birthers, meet ghosters,” said Steve Benen in The Washington Monthly. Certain “right-wing circles” believe that Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Barack Obama’s book Dreams From My Father, and as with "the rest of the bizarre conservative conspiracy theories, reality doesn’t much matter.” The funny thing is, a “surprising number of conservatives” were taken in by Ayers’ clearly tongue-in-cheek Dreams ghostwriting confessions to National Journal and a conservative blogger.

Who has Ayers “duped so far”? said David Weigel in The Washington Independent. “Jonah Goldberg, his mother Lucianne Goldberg, Tom Maguire, Dennis Byrne, Carol Platt Lieblau, and a bunch of other conservatives.” Some of them “try to split the difference” a bit, but really, “how embarrassing.”

Okay, maybe Ayers “was just having a joke with us,” said James Simpson in American Thinker. But he’s “playing with fire” here, because it’s “pretty clear that Ayers did write most or all of the book for Obama.” This is probably Ayers’ idea of a “smear campaign”—those who speak the truth will be “castigated, like people who question Obama’s eligibility.” But this “blockbuster story” matters because it “completely discredits Obama’s carefully crafted image.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“I disagree,” said Ed Morrissey in Hot Air. Even if Ayers did ghost-write Dreams, what does that prove? “It’s hardly an earth-shaking revelation that politicians use ghostwriters for memoirs”—see Palin, Sarah—and if you wanted to prove he is a radical literary fraud, the time to do it was during the campaign. We have “plenty to criticize about his performance” now without obsessing about his past.