If you have his books you can keep them: "I've written two books," Senator Barack Obama told a crowd of teachers in Virginia on the campaign trial in July of 2008. The teachers applauded. "I actually wrote them myself," he added with a wink and a nod, and now the teachers exploded in laughter. They got the joke: Republicans were too stupid to write their books. Actually, talking about a politician too stupid to write his own book - a politician now known to be a liar - read on. You see: The only problem, of course, is that Obama did not write either of those books "by myself." He was as incapable of writing those books as he was of guaranteeing that his eponymous health care system would allow millions of individual policyholders to keep the health care plans that they liked. Still, he had no obvious qualms about deceiving the public in either case. The deception: As Andersen told it, Obama found himself deeply in debt and "hopelessly blocked" even after accepting a second contract [to write the same book]. At "Michelle's urging," Obama "sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers." What attracted the Obamas were "Ayers's proven abilities as a writer." Noting that Obama had already taped interviews with many of his relatives, Andersen elaborated, "These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers." I've read The Audacity of Hope. It wasn't just turgid and platitudinous. The personal anecdotes struck me as formulaic and not particularly resonant or revealing. Now I realise that Bill Ayres couldn't be a mindreader as well as a ghost.