Fugitive Dreams

clipped from www.cashill.com “I picture the street coming alive, awakening from the fury of winter, stirred from the chilly spring night by cold glimmers of sunlight angling through the city.” Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days.   “Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds.” Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father. Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write Dreams From My Father, he had written very close to nothing. As an undergraduate, Obama had written what he justifiably calls some “very bad poetry.” He published nothing under his own name in The Harvard Law Review, where he served as an editor and as president. And after leaving Harvard, he published nothing in its review or in any law journal. Then, in 1995, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called--with a straight face-- “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”