An Oxford University don was the subject of a last-ditch attempt by the Republican Party to prevent Barack Obama’s election as US President this week.
The Democratic Party nominee secured a landslide victory in Presidential polls on Tuesday, seeing him elected to the White House as America’s first African-American President.
However, just nine days before voters cast their ballots, leading Republicans made a last-minute effort to derail the Illinois senator’s campaign by trying to prove that his autobiography had in fact been ghostwritten by a former terrorist.
The academic recruited for the task was Dr Peter Millican, a philosophy professor at Hertford College who has developed a computer program that can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favourite words and phrases.
Terrorist memoirs?
Dr Millican was contacted by Robert Fox, a Californian businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon – a Republican congressman from Utah. He was offered $10,000 dollars to analyse alleged similarities between Obama’s bestselling memoir “Dreams from My Father” and “Fugitive Days,” a work by William Ayers.
Mr Ayers, now a university professor in Chicago, co-founded the radical group Weather Underground which carried out bombing campaign against public buildings during the 1960’s and 70’s.
He became the source of much attention during the US presidential race after it emerged that he and Senator Obama had once served together on a charity board, sparking Republican attack adverts accusing the Democratic nominee of “palling around” with a terrorist.
Dr Millican confirmed on his website that he had received a call from Mr Fox on October 26th detailing the offer.
“extremely unlikely”
“He was entirely upfront about this. He offered me $10,000 and sent me electronic versions of the text from both books,” he said.
“I thought it was extremely unlikely that we would get a positive result.”He added that further analysis of the two works had confirmed to him that the allegations were completely untrue, highlighting that it would have been “very surprising” for Ayers to write Obama’s life story before he had even penned his own.
“I would be astonished if anything came to light to reverse this verdict. The next leader of the free world did not get his impressive first book written by Bill Ayers.”
When asked to comment, Congressman Cannon said that he merely recommended the computer testing of the books, although he did doubt whether Obama had written his autobiography.
“If Ayers was the author, that would be interesting,” he said.
