The Buckley Endorsement
Roger Kimball discusses the Christopher Buckley Obama endorsement.
But here’s a question. Is Barack Obama the rara avis Christo supposes? Or is he that more familiar creature, the vulgaris avis who pawns off other people’s work as his own? Apparently, there is more than a little question about this. Does it matter? Politicians often sign their names to other people’s work. It is an open secret that Profiles in Courage was written not by John F. Kennedy, whose name is on the copyright page, but rather by Ted Sorensen. Most of us don’t think less of JFK for it. But since Christo singles out Obama’s literary intelligence, it is worth delving into the question. Obama had never distinguished himself as a writer. Indeed, in his tenure as editor of the Harvard Law Review he wrote–nothing. Not a single article. . . . 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”? I’m looking forward to asking Christo on our next mission to Nootka.