Decide for yourself

I am posting a big chunk of this from Roger Kimball on WFB's son's endorsement of The One, as it pertains to Barack's book:

Is Cashill one of those right-wing “kooks” WFB warned about or a credible witness? I do not know. Read the piece and decide for yourself. He has certainly assembled an impressive mound of circumstantial evidence. He acknowledges that, given what we know for certain now, he cannot prove his contention. (Though could we not subject Dreams From My Father to the same sort of analysis that was used to discover the author of Primary Colors?) Cashill argues that there are really only two live 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.” Cashill believes “The weight of the evidence overwhelmingly favors the latter conclusion.”

Obama has called Ayers “just a guy the neighborhood.” Stanley Kurtz and Andrew McCarthy have put paid to that fib (see, for example, here and here). And Andy has a thoughtful piece on the significance of Christo’s endorsement of Obama on the grounds of intelligence and literary talent:

Taking Christopher Buckley as a measure of what intelligent people who favor Obama are thinking, it’s fair to say there’s a lot riding on Obama’s writing. I’d like to feel more confident that he wrote it: If he wins, Obama will be my president, and as I’m not a MoveOn Democrat who’d rather tear down my country than see a president I opposed succeed, I’d like to feel some of Christopher’s hope for what that portends.

Me too, on all counts.

As I say, when it comes to passing off other people’s work as their own, politicians often–not always, but often–get a free pass. It’s OK to hire someone to write a speech for you and then pretend it’s your speech. It’s not, as Joe Biden discovered to his sorrow, OK to pilfer someone else’s speech (which was itself possbily written by a third party) and pretend it is yours. When Obama announced that Biden was to be his running mate, I wrote a piece called “The Neophyte and the Plagiarist.” Maybe it should have been titled “The Neophyte Plagiarist and the Experienced One”–if, that is, secretly employing a ghostwriter counts as plagiarism. Maybe it doesn’t. In many cases, it is A-OK for a politician to hire a ghostwriter to write a book to which the politician will sign his own name. Would it be OK in Obama’s case, when part of the point of Obama, was his honesty, his authenticity? And what if Cashill turns out to be correct and Dreams From My Father was written by Bill “the bomber” Ayers? What then? Would that tarnish his reputation as a man possessed of a “first-class temperament”?

UPDATE: Scott Johnson, Powerline:

New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick devotes a long, pseudo-invevestigative article to the relationship between John McCain and hiis memoir Faith of My Fathers. It's an aimless and somewhat mystifying article. One is apparently to take away the thought that McCain's coauthor (Mark Salter) superimposed an inauthentic narrative theme on McCain's authentic experience. My only question is whether the Times will devote a comparable article to Obama's Dreams from My Father.