A would-be November surprise goes bust

A Republican businessman approached an Oxford philosopher last week to help him prove that William Ayers, the former Weatherman and domestic terrorist, wrote Barack Obama's acclaimed memoir, "Dreams of My Father," according to the (London) Times.

Robert Fox, the brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah, offered the philosopher Peter Millican $10,000 to compare Obama's memoir with Ayers's own book, "Fugitive Days," looking for similarities, the newspaper reported. Millican has designed software that compares texts and identifies signature patterns in word use and construction. Millican -- who found the theory "highly implausible" from the start -- told the Times that Fox backed out once Millican made it clear that he'd publicize his conclusions, as well as the identity of the funders of the research, whatever the results. Fox, Millican said, didn't seem to want it known that Republican money was behind the study.

Contacted by the Times, Cannon and Fox offered conflicted accounts of whose idea this really was, each pointing the finger at the other.

Jack Cashill, an obscure conservative writer, has been peddling the Ayers-authorship theory, but he's been largely ignored by the mainstream conservative press -- one exception being Andy McCarthy, a writer for the National Review, who endorsed the thesis on The Corner, NR's group blog. That led to a sharp retort from Jonathan Adler, another Corner writer, who said McCarthy was embracing "nutter-territory stuff." The thesis has apparently gained traction in some quarters on the right, however.

Forgoing the ten grand, Millican went ahead and posted a quick analysis of the two books online, explaining -- monumental implausibility aside -- that the data show that Cashill's theory is baseless. "I feel totally confident it is false," Millican writes.

"I hope that interested visitors to this site," he writes, "whether Democrat or Republican or indeed entirely independent of American politics, will be pleased to discover that the probable next leader of the free world did not get his impressive first book written by Bill Ayers!"

Via Crooked Timber