Conspiracies

Did Ayers Write Obama’s Memoirs?

Republicans recruit Oxford academic to prove link.

In a last-ditch attempt to besmirch Obama, Robert Fox, a California businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah, asked an Oxford University teacher to prove that Weatherman Bill Ayers was the real author of Obama’s two volumes of memoirs. Dr. Peter Millican, a philosophy academic at Hertford College, Oxford, was approached to apply his computer software program, which detects when works are by the same author by comparing favorite words and phrases, to Obama’s autobiography and match them to Ayers’ account of his own life. “He was entirely upfront about this. He offered me $10,000 and sent me electronic versions of the text from both books,” Millican told the London Sunday Times. Millican’s verdict? “Very implausible.”