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Now, back to the subject of whether the post-Harvard Obama cd write his way out of a wet paper bag. First, is he sufficiently proficient w grammar to tackle a book-length project? Well, here’s a very sm, limited list of just a few of his grammatical triumphs:

‘“Well, first of all, I do continue to believe that the greatest threat to United States security are the terrorist networks like al Qaeda …”

“Obviously, our efforts to continue to go after extremist organizations that would do harm to the homeland is uppermost on our minds.”

“Good morning, Marines … Diplomacy and assistance is also required to help the millions of displaced Iraqis.”

“Our families, our businesses, and our long-term fiscal health demands that we act and act now.”

“Each of these institutions are full of honorable men and women doing important work that helps our country prosper.”

“I know, I like Frank, we’ve had conversations between Frank and I.”

“… my conversation with Sergeant Crowley, there was discussion about he and I and Professor Gates having a beer here in the White House.”

“I have to say that nobody was more surprised than me about winning the Nobel Prize for peace.”

These grammatical blunders represent only the tip of the Obama iceberg.’

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/08/16/NYT-Ripped-Bush-Grammar-mistakes-ignores-obamas

But when it comes to writing itself, here is my personal favorite:

“Law week, two men, Richard and Michael, walked into you office and asked for your help.

You learn that they are a monogamous, gay couple who have been living
together for the past ten years. Both men are successful architects, and after devoting the past decade on their respective careers, they have now decided that they want to marry and raise children together.”

Now pause for a moment, x, and reflect on just how bad the writing in this sample is. Where to even start w it? Consider, the men walked into your office ‘law week’ yet ‘you learn’ is present tense. So you didn’t learn ‘law wk’; you somehow, miraculously, learn in real time what was said to you ‘law week’. [The term for it is ‘tense-shifting’, and it’s an embarrassingly basic mistake. He should have learned better, if he needed to, in his first yr at Occidental.]

Next consider the painful wordiness/clumsiness of the phrasing. Cd you use more words to describe the same scenario? Maybe, but it wd take a Herculean effort. Cd you use less? W the greatest of ease, and w even greater effectiveness.

There’s more, much more, but face it, the above writing is the product of a literarily dysfunctional mind. The person who wrote it has no conception of even the most basic principles of good writing. Indeed, you might even say he has a ‘gift’ for wretched writing, since writing this bad doesn’t come easy. [And please, spare me the pathetic line that it’s just slapdash writing for a legal exam. Writers write. They write when they do prose, memoir, correspondence or simple notes. I’ve read examples of ‘slapdash’ writing by some literary greats. It’s a wonderful, amazing experience. You hear their voice—the same one that made them famous, won prizes, etc.—even in the briefest notes. They write well b/c they write well. It’s part of who they are. Just as Astaire wasn’t graceful and coordinated on stage and a klutz when walking down the street, so writers don’t turn it on and off. Good writers write well, period.]

One thing we can say for sure. The writer of ‘law week’ is not the author of Dreams. The writing in the one cd not be more different than the writing in the other. The writer of Dreams knew what he was doing [even if you don’t like his style, which I don’t]; he used the English language to tell an effective tale [at least for the intended audience] and won accolades for the effort. The writer of ‘law week’ skirmished w the English language and lost...badly.

Okay. Most of what I'd seen compared Dreams to the "Breaking the War Mentality" article written by Obama at Columbia, and my assumption was that over time people do learn to write better than they did as college juniors. Maybe they don't. Or maybe Obama never did.

My second assumption is that when people say something that isn't strictly true, they usually have some partial truth to rely on. So a politician who claims that he wrote all his own books may at least have hacked out a rough draft for others to work over and polish into grammatical English.

There's some subjectivity involved. One person's rough draft or first draft may be another person's rough notes. I don't doubt that ghost writers and heavy editing were involved. My hunch is that there was some kind of rough manuscript -- or a dictated version -- for Obama to base his claim of authorship on.

Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe it's the other way around. If you decide to lie, maybe you convince yourself that there's a half-truth in there somewhere. If Obama wanted to claim authorship, maybe he just convinced himself that his contribution was more than what it actually was.

I'm not sure that Andersen really knows much more than anyone else, though. He's putting two and two together -- Obama being friends with Ayers, Ayers being a better writer than Obama, Ayers supposedly helping his friends with their writing -- and concluding that Ayers was the ghost writer. I'm not wholly convinced that Anderson has the evidence or that he actually knows who wrote the book.

In any case, I have found references online to a "trunkload" of notes. That may be true and may have made it into the book, but when it gets magnified to a "truckload" of notes, you can see where I might be skeptical.