Author Jack Cashill (who admittedly is sometimes given to fairly conspiratorial conclusions) was puzzled at the accomplished prose of Senator Obama in his first book, “Dreams from My Father.” Cashill has “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.” Cashill notes that there are almost no writing samples from Senator Obama prior to his having produced his first book, and those that exist are either puerile or pedestrian. He then analyzed Senator Obama’s first book and a Bill Ayers’ memoir, and has reached the shocking conclusion that Bill Ayers ghostwrote parts of Obama’s first book. Excerpt from Cahsill’s piece in the American Thinker:

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 12th grade reading level. The “Dreams’” excerpt scores a 54.8 on reading ease and a 12th 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…

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 9th 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…

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…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.

Cashill concludes: “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…” Question: is it possible that we know even less about Senator Obama than the little we think we do?

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