The October I Owned the October Surprise

And Why the People Who Should Have Helped Did Not

As this October winds to a close I find myself reflecting back to October 2008, the month I might have changed the course of American history but—spoiler alert—did not. In September of that year, I stumbled onto the likelihood that candidate Barack Obama commissioned terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers to put in superior prose the memoir Obama proved incapable of writing himself, the 1995 Dreams from My Father.

For Obama the revelation that Ayers was his muse would have been doubly problematic. For one, it would have dispelled the notion, widely believed among the literati, that Obama was about to become “the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln.” For another, more importantly, it would prove Obama lied boldly during a primary debate when he dismissed Ayers as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” In fact, the communist Ayers lived inside Obama’s brain.

My thesis, conceded New Yorker editor and Obama biographer David Remnick, “if ever proved true, or believed to be true among enough voters, could have been the end of his candidacy.”

After some preliminary articles in WND.com, I knew that to make my case before the 2008 election, I needed considerable space in a prominent conservative publication. Unfortunately, establishment conservatives had become cautious to the point of cowardly—especially on the issue of race.

After much back and forth, Human Events punted on my research. The National Review did too. The FOX producers downstairs showed interest, but the suits upstairs did not. The once bold American Spectator waffled and then waved the white flag.

The feckless response of the Weekly Standard, a publication for which I occasionally wrote, echoed the others: “An interesting piece, but I’m rather oversubscribed at the moment, the length is considerable, and cutting would not do it justice. (Also, we had a long, rather critical, piece on Obama’s ouevre not too long ago.) So permit me to decline with thanks for allowing me take a look.” The kind of editors who would use a word like “oeuvre” in the heat of an election proved themselves so perfectly disdainful of Donald Trump that they oeuvred themselves out of business.

As I was about to despair, Thomas Lifson, publisher of the upstart American Thinker, came to my rescue. In 3700 words, I was able to summarize most of what I had learned to date: Obama’s failed publishing history, his lack of any prior quality work, the stunning parallels in imagery and style with Ayers’s books, and the often identical arguments.

My claims enraged those of the Left who bothered to read them. Wrote Remnick in his 2010 Obama biography The Bridge, “Cashill’s assertions might well have remained a mere twinkling in the Web’s farthest lunatic orbit had it not been for the fact that more powerful voices hoped to give his theory wider currency.” No voice would be more powerful than that of Rush Limbaugh, a man who haunted the liberal imagination the way Kong did Skull Island’s.

On October 10, at noontime, I checked my voice messages only to discover my inbox was full. The first voice mail explained it all, “Are you listening? Rush is talking about you.” Limbaugh was playing audio excerpts from Dreams and commenting on them. The one that triggered my name was this, “A steady attack on the White race, the constant recitation of black people’s brutal experience in this country served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal responsibility . . . . “

“Stop the tape,” said Rush “What is this? Ballast? He doesn’t talk this way.” Ayers, a one time merchant seaman, did talk that way. “You know,” Rush continued, “there are stories out there, he may not have written this book. There’s a guy named Jack Cashill . . . . “

Remnick, whose chief hobby seems to be imputing racism to people who live west of 10^th Avenue, called Rush’s remarks one of the “most racist insinuations of the campaign.” He concluded that our collective “libel about Obama’s memoir—the denial of literacy, the denial of authorship—had a particularly ugly pedigree.”

Through some combination of naiveté and courage, author and attorney Andy McCarthy came to my defense in National Review Online. McCarthy called my analysis of Obama’s Dreams “thorough, thoughtful and alarming – particularly his deconstruction of the text in Obama’s memoir and comparison to the themes, sophistication and signature phraseology of Bill Ayers’ memoir.”

The Left quickly pounced on McCarthy and the National Review, not with counter arguments but with ad hominems. The Atlantic turned to emerging black superstar Ta-Nehisi Coates to put McCarthy in his place. He extracted one of McCarthy’s quotes in my defense and introduced it with the barb, “How desperate can it get? This desperate.” The Atlantic added another quick review that began thusly, “At The Corner, Andy McCarthy evaluates Cashill’s argument and proves himself to be an idiot.”

Before the emergence of Donald Trump, Republicans reflexively folded their hands when the Left played the race card. As the weeks wound down to the election, I found myself mouthing the lyrics to that old Randy Travis song, “Is it still over? Are we still through? Since my phone still ain’t ringing, I assume it still ain’t you.” Despite my efforts to prime the pump, I did not receive a single call from anyone in the print or television media—right, left, or center.

In the years to come, all new evidence strengthened my case. In April 2011, when testing the presidential waters, Trump told Sean Hannity, “I heard [Obama] had terrible marks, and he ends up in Harvard. He wrote a book [Dreams] that was better than Ernest Hemingway, but the second book [Audacity of Hope] was written by an average person.”

“You suspect Bill Ayers?” said Hannity.

“I said, ‘Bill Ayers wrote [Dreams],’” Trump replied.

The media ignored Trump’s claim and zeroed in on his birth certificate challenge. The authorship challenge, they knew, could blow up in their faces.