OPINION:
It is now apparent that our president has lied to us. He lied when he crooned soothingly about improving the health care of millions of Americans through vast changes in health care policy that would actually lower their costs. Those costs are now going up, and they are going up for almost everyone. They will not come down.
He lied when he said we could keep our current health care policy. Those policies are rapidly disappearing. He lied again when he said we could keep our doctors. He lied when he said his plan would not involve rationing. I could go on, but in sum, he is lying about most aspects of the most massive social policy in American history. It is also the greatest social-policy disaster in the history of social policy. President Obama is a rank amateur.
He has lied from the start of his political life, which began not that long ago. For instance, when he informed an audience of teachers in July 2008 on the campaign trail, “I’ve written two books I actually wrote them myself.” It was a lie. He has never written an eloquent line in his life, and those two books were professionally written. He speaks with the assistance of teleprompters. His rhetoric is formulaic. At best, he counseled with a couple of ghostwriters to write the books that bear his name. At worst, one was Bill Ayers, once a member of Students for a Democratic Society who turned terrorist and then turned “educator” at the University of Illinois’ Chicago campus. If he were a right-winger, he would probably still be in prison.
Writers from as varied backgrounds as Jack Cashill, the conservative journalist, to Mr. Obama’s popular biographer, Christopher Andersen, author of “Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage,” have adduced evidence refuting Mr. Obama’s claim to authorship of his books. Last week, Investors Business Daily cast still more doubt on Mr. Obama’s claim to have “written two books.” Now Mr. Ayers is speaking up suggestively, as he has a book out, which it is not selling all that well. Enticingly, he suggests that he is the real author of Mr. Obama’s first book, “Dreams From My Father.”
Frankly, I would have advised our president to come clean about his bogus authorship years ago. Mr. Ayers is a decidedly shifty fellow, and his wife, the former SDS member Bernardine Dohrn, is worse. They were always spoiled, university-bred radicals, always expecting the republic to fall for their Marxist mumbo jumbo. Yet America has never been very hospitable to the disciples of Papa Marx, much less when those disciples have pipe bombs in their hands. Now, at the end of a misspent life, Mr. Ayers suddenly anticipates yet another act. He will serve as a Saul Alinsky for the millennials. He will write an updated “Rules for Radicals” with diagrams on how to disable mother’s smartphone or how to hack into her bank account.
First, however, he needs to attract attention. My guess is that he will admit to having written Mr. Obama’s best-selling “Dreams From My Father.” He has suggested as much to the curious public. In October 2009 at Reagan National Airport when asked if he had “edited” the book for his friend, Mr. Obama, he told a friend of mine that, in fact, “I wrote it.” He explained that Michelle Obama had sought his help. In March 2011, during a question-and-answer session at Montclair State University, he admitted authorship of the book, saying, “Did you know I wrote it?” and for emphasis he added, “I wrote ’Dreams From My Father.’”
Mr. Obama’s friends in the media wrote all this off to sarcasm on Mr. Ayers’ part. Mr. Obama still has a lot of friends in the media. Do you recall when Joe Klein yawped that “Dreams” “may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician”? Yet they are tiring of covering for a president caught in the disaster of Obamacare.
At any rate, time is running out for Mr. Ayers. He is showing himself to be desperate for his last act. If he is going to identify himself as the real writer of “Dreams From My Father,” it is going to have to come pretty soon. His publisher, Beacon Press, seems to agree. In its promotion of “Dreams” on Amazon.com, there appear these words: Mr. Ayers “finally ’confesses’ that he did write ’Dreams From My Father.’” Well, good for him. Yet I feel Mr. Ayers’ last act will be futile. The lies of Mr. Obama may have begun with his literary product, but they will end with Obamacare, and soon. It is the true disaster.
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is editor in chief of the American Spectator and the author of “The Death of Liberalism” (Thomas Nelson, 2012).
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