Chris Matthews slams wrong author

By Jack Cashill

On Monday night, Hardball host Chris Matthews made the not unreasonable comment, "Don't you essentially disrespect somebody who walks in and puts a book on the table and said they wrote it, when you know somebody else did?"

The problem is that Matthews was talking about Sarah Palin. Palin, however, has never concealed the fact that she had editorial assistance with her new book, Going Rogue: An American Life. In the book's acknowledgement section, she openly credits Lynn Vincent for "her indispensable help in getting the words on paper." That much said, the story is told honestly and sincerely in Palin's voice. There is not a sentence in it that Palin could not have written herself.

Matthews would have done better to direct his critique at Barack Obama. "I've written two books," Obama told a crowd of teachers in Virginia last year. "I actually wrote them myself." In fact, Obama had massive help with both his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father and its 2006 sequel, The Audacity of Hope.

Matthews must know this. Earlier this fall, he interviewed celebrity journalist Christopher Andersen on the subject of his book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage.

Andersen spends six pages detailing how a "hopelessly blocked" Obama turned to "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers" to help him finish Dreams From My Father.

Andersen writes, "In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant -- so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."

In the interview, Matthews chose not to raise this subject. Don't you essentially disrespect an alleged "hardball" host who interviews an author an and then avoids his most politically provocative charge?