…sitting in a tree. K I S S I N G:
Obama’s playing dumb about ACORN is disingenuous in the extreme. His longstanding activist, political, and financial connections to the group, as Stanley Kurtz showed prior to the presidential election, are wide and deep. Indeed, they constitute his most significant and enduring tie to the anti-capitalist and revolutionary “New Left” movement of the 1960s.
Sol Stern writes that ACORN sprang from “one of this movement’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization.” The NWRO’s strategy was to eliminate welfare requirements and overwhelm welfare offices with clients, simultaneously staging disruptions and sit-ins, in order to bring about “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.”
Obama could have only been buying into this vision by intimately allying himself with ACORN and its ilk over the years.
And speaking of mendacity about his past, was Jack Cashill right?
Obama had not as yet written anything. But he had taped interviews with family members. Andersen writes: “These oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers.” Look over those words. A man Obama said before the campaign — after conservative pundits continually raised the issue that he was friends with an “unrepentent terrorist” — that he knew only in passing as someone in the neighborhood. He was simply an acquaintance — not someone he had any real friendship or relationship with. Yet Obama evidently gave Ayers his notes, tapes, and the small amount that he had already written.
On the latter point, Andersen also writes, quoting a Hyde Park neighbor of Obama: “Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together. It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both.” Why should it be secret? We know the answer to that. Obama was denying this relationship, as well as suggesting it was not true they worked on projects together. Everything that was ferreted out at the time that proved this was hardly likely was simply ignored by the MSM.
Finally, Christopher Andersen concludes: “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.”
Makes sense to me. There is no extant evidence of Obama’s writing ability other than the books (particularly since he continues to hide his academic records). We have no particular reason to think that he was some kind of savant genius who suddenly became an eloquent writer (particularly when listening to him off the prompter). So he did go to “just the guy in his neighborhood” for “help” in writing the book.
[Update a few minutes later]
There’s a good comment at Radosh’s piece:
Writers of the caliber of the prose in Dreams tend to be compulsive about expressing themselves. Thus one would expect to see both examples of earlier, less polished works and a multitude of articles and essays, etc., flowing from Obama’s pen after the critical success of Dreams. Instead the entire Obama oeuvre outside of Dreams consists of one embarrassingly sophomoric article in the student newspaper from Obama’s days at Columbia, a very short law review note, the pedestrian campaign kick off book The Audacity of Hope and a couple of mediocre op eds.
A quality writer pressed for time may hire an assistant to do the research and knock out a rough draft, but he or she makes time to polish the final product. Those op eds suggest that not only can’t Obama write very well, he can’t even distinguish between good writing and the work of hacks well enough to hire a top notch ghoster.
I’m pretty sure that if I wrote a book on space policy, no one would accuse me of having a ghost, because I have an extensive public record on that topic, and of writing in general. This doesn’t exist for Barack Obama. But his defenders will continue to live the liedream.
Now that’s an interesting hypothesis. If true, it gives me hope for the future. The greatest danger in the election of Barack Obama has been the possibility that he really is a smart cookie, and will prevent the madmen running the Democratic Party from driving it over the cliff.
If he’s actually a figurehead, a little empty between the ears, pumped up and promoted by others, then he doesn’t have those smarts, and we can look forward to a full-on high-speed face plant.
Someone needs to explain the difference between a blog and a blog post to Radosh.
I guess conspiracy-minded Obama opponents have learned nothing from the birther fantasy, so now they’ll chase the Ayers-wrote-Dreams hallucination. Should they be called ghosters? He can’t really be an American. He can’t really be a talented writer. Apparently just objecting to his actions in office isn’t enough — you have to believe that he’s an elaborate fraud.
Writers of the caliber of the prose in Dreams tend to be compulsive about expressing themselves. Thus one would expect to see both examples of earlier, less polished works and a multitude of articles and essays, etc., flowing from Obama’s pen after the critical success of Dreams.
Yeah, just look at all the novels that Harper Lee and Ralph Ellison wrote after their first books were so well received.
It’s either that, or he really is that stupid.
Me, I don’t have a problem with the “stupid” hypothesis. It also conforms to the “Never ascribe to evil what can be explained by stupidity” standard.
Unfortunately, somebody that stupid, getting elected president, brings us back around to the fraud hypothesis again. To which I can only respond that if 52% of the voters in 2008 are as stupid as the candidate they voted for, the only fraud is that all those people are considered qualified to vote.
“Yeah, just look at all the novels that Harper Lee and Ralph Ellison wrote after their first books were so well received.”
Your comparisons mean nothing. From the Wikipedia page on Harper Lee:
Bolds added by me. And if you go to the Wikipedia site for Ralph Ellison, you get what looks to me to be a fairly comprehensive rundown of the various things he wrote over his career, which didn’t consist of single novels that just came out of the blue. And both Lee and Ellison are (in Ellison’s case, were) obviously creative people who wrote, and were encouraged to write by others, from early on. We don’t know if Obama is like this, since so much of his creative output, if it exists, is being kept under wraps. Since there is no good reason for doing this (I can understand not wanting anyone to get hold of your teenage diary, but your college papers are a different matter), the only effect this has is to render him even further a cypher, which at the very least is annoying and doesn’t exactly build trust between the government and the people.
And I forgot — we’re not expecting Obama to become a best-selling author, we’re trying to find out how he came up with this stunning burst of creativity (assuming his memoirs are that good) when to all apparent knowledge he never before and has never since displayed any indication he had this talent in him.
Indeed, this is much too elaborate to be real. Imagine the elaborate conspiracy required to ghost-write a book, for example:
“Bill, would you write this book for me?”
“Sure thing.”
~.~ 6 months later ~.~
“Here’s your book.”
“Thanks, Bill!”
See? It’s impossible!
Titus – have you ever written a book? It takes quite a long time, actually, and more if, in the case of a biography, you need to do research. So why exactly would Ayers do this for free?
Don’t forget – the book only became a best seller after Obama became famous – when it was written, there was a relatively small (read “not much money paid”) print run.
BTW, Andersen’s “source” is Jack Cahill – the same guy who made these claims during the election.
So why exactly would Ayers do this for free?
Who says he did it for free?
Andersen’s “source” is Jack Cahill – the same guy who made these claims during the election.
We don’t know whether or not Cashill is the source, or if he has an independent one. I suspect the latter. The quote from the Hyde Park friend isn’t from Cashill.
And it puts the lie to the president’s claim that Ayers was “just a guy in his neighborhood.” Don’t these lies ever bother you? Or are you only bothered that people point them out?
What research did Ayers need to do? It was sold as Obama’s own autobio — Ayers had the source right there: Obama. And in any case, the amount of time it took to write it is hardly the point.
Andrea, it would be impossible for Bill Ayers to just sit down and interview Obama for a book. I mean, it’s Bill Ayers, not Bill Moyers! Impossible!
Rand – the lie that bothers me is the attempt to paint Ayers as some puppetmaster pulling Obama’s strings.
Rand and Andrea Harris – the point is “what was Ayers’ motivation?” Obama’s book would have been lucky to make Obama $20K in total before the 2004 re-issue. The advance would be a fraction of that, and the only certain money out of the deal.
So Ayers spent hundreds of hours on a book he couldn’t claim credit for in order to split a few thousand dollars? Or to get the undying gratitude of some unknown lawyer in Chicago – a lawyer dishonest enough to get somebody to ghost his own autobiography?
It doesn’t make sense.
…the lie that bothers me is the attempt to paint Ayers as some puppetmaster pulling Obama’s strings.
By whom? And how can it be a “lie” if people who say it believe it?
So, you’re more bothered by mistaken conspiracy theories by some than by actual lies by The One?
So Ayers spent hundreds of hours on a book he couldn’t claim credit for in order to split a few thousand dollars? Or to get the undying gratitude of some unknown lawyer in Chicago – a lawyer dishonest enough to get somebody to ghost his own autobiography?
How do you know that some third party wasn’t providing money to both Obama and Ayers? Didn’t you ever wonder how did Obama got the book deal itself? Whoever arranged that might have been funding its production as well. Barack Obama seems to have had mysterious (and some not-so-mysterious, like Rezko) benefactors all of his life. This could simply be another case of that, that the media has never had an interest in digging into.
It’s always amazed me that a man who’d accomplished essentially nothing in his life would even dare write one autobiography, much less two of them. Caught w/o his teleprompter and off-script Obama has invariably proven himself incapable of expressing or even forming a coherent thought.
Rand – how do I know you’re not really a one-eyed space alien from Arcturus? I mean, be serious. The media, McCain and Clinton have had “an interest in digging into” all of this. They didn’t find anything. Failure to find something could mean it’s well hidden – or it could mean that there’s nothing to find.
And how can it be a “lie” if people who say it believe it? If they have absolutely no evidence to support their statement, but they make it anyway, then it’s reckless disregard for the truth.
mistaken conspiracy theories by some than by actual lies by The One? In regard to the book, you have absolutely zero proof that Obama lied. Allegations and speculations are not proof.
How do you know that some third party wasn’t providing money to both Obama and Ayers? Why would anybody in 1994 be subsidizing a has-been like Ayers and an unknown like Obama?
The media, McCain and Clinton have had “an interest in digging into” all of this.
The media had an interest into digging into this? You’re joking, right?
The media was too busy sending people to the Wasilla library to look into what was going on in Hyde Park.
In regard to the book, you have absolutely zero proof that Obama lied.
I didn’t say he lied with regard to the book. Read for comprehension. I said he lied when he said that Ayers was “just a guy in my neighborhood.” I stand by that statement.
Why would anybody in 1994 be subsidizing a has-been like Ayers and an unknown like Obama?
Why would anybody in 1994 give Obama a book deal? Answer one, and you may have the answer to the other. You may not like the answers, though.
Rand – so Fox News and the Wall Street Journal had no interest in looking into Obama? Nor his hometown (and editorially Republican) Chicago Tribune?
Regarding Ayers – please provide the name of somebody who saw Ayers and Obama together at a social engagement. If you’re going to even credibly suggest that Ayers did the ghosting, you need to make that engagement in 1994 – because to meet a July 1995 publication date, the manuscript would have to be to the editor by October 1994.
As to why he got a book deal, Obama wrote the highly personal book when he was in his early 30s, after being approached by a publisher when he became the first black person elected Law Review president.
It was a single run of 20,000 copies in trade paperback – not enough to retire to Tahiti on. All kinds of people get book offers – I know personally half a dozen people who wrote books in their spare time and got them published. Most still have day jobs.
Regarding Ayers – please provide the name of somebody who saw Ayers and Obama together at a social engagement.
Go ask Chris Anderson — he’s the one who did the interviews in Hyde Park. And you know, just a wild guess, I wonder if we were to be allowed to see The One’s transcripts, that they would show that he took a class from Bill Ayers at Columbia?
Obama wrote the highly personal book when he was in his early 30s, after being approached by a publisher when he became the first black person elected Law Review president. It was a single run of 20,000 copies in trade paperback – not enough to retire to Tahiti on.
Not even enough to necessarily justify publishing it. So the publisher was in the charity business? Why?
Fox News and the Wall Street Journal had no interest in looking into Obama?
They did look into Obama. We probably wouldn’t have heard of Reverend Wright without them, for example. But they have finite resources — they can’t be expected to do all the heavy lifting. But I guess they had to, since the rest of the media sure as hell didn’t want to vet him.
Regarding Ayers – please provide the name of somebody who saw Ayers and Obama together at a social engagement.
Would you consider the kickoff of Obama’s first political campaign a “social occasion”? It took place in Ayers’ living room.
Rand –
Chris Anderson is not providing any sources. Nor are you – you are making accusations and engaging in speculation. Obama and Ayers were in a class consisting of just the two of them?
Although a 20,000 book run is not best-seller territory, it is solidly in mid-list sales for a major publisher. Most first novels, for example, have a run of half that. 20K copies at $14.95 list made the publisher $150K (assuming a 50% markup at retail).
Obama and Ayers were in a class consisting of just the two of them?
What did I write that prompted this stupid question?
Chris Anderson is not providing any sources.
It’s good enough for Bob Woodward. Why not for Chris Anderson?
Would you consider the kickoff of Obama’s first political campaign – the meeting was in 1995, after the book was out. So unless Obama jumped in a time machine and went back to 1994 after that meeting, Ayers can hardly have ghostwritten the book.
It’s not even clear who issued the invite. Alice Palmer was the person running the meeting – she was stepping down from the state senate. All of which is a huge distance from Obama taking a course from Ayers in the early 1980s.
What did I write that prompted this Unless you provide a witness to put Ayers and Obama together in the 1980s, you can’t prove they met. So if they were in class together, who else was in the class?
It’s good enough for Bob Woodward. Woodward has a track record, and is known to have access to Washington sources. He did hang out with Bush, for example, to write his series of books about the man. What sources does Anderson have in Chicago?
I’m leaving for vacation, so I will make one last point. Like they say in the detective shows, to convict somebody of a crime, you need motive, opportunity and means.
Obama had no motive to ghostwrite a book. Doing so would be taking a huge risk of exposure, ridicule and legal repercussions. That’s not something you do lightly, especially when the subect is your own life.
Ayers had no motive to ghostwrite a book. It was not that big of a financial success until years later, when Obama unexpectedly became famous.
Ayers and Obama had no opportunity to ghostwrite a book. There is no indication or evidence that the two men had even a nodding acquantance with each other until 1995 – after the book was done.
Both men did have means, in that Obama had a book deal and Ayers had written books. But having the means alone doesn’t prove much of anything.
the meeting was in 1995, after the book was out. So unless Obama jumped in a time machine and went back to 1994 after that meeting, Ayers can hardly have ghostwritten the book.
Have you ever taken a course in logic?
The fact that we know they knew each other in 1995 does not somehow magically prove that they didn’t know each other earlier.
So if they were in class together, who else was in the class?
How in the world would I know? But I certainly never postulated that no one was.
Woodward has a track record, and is known to have access to Washington sources.
So does Anderson.
Obama had no motive to ghostwrite a book.
Sure he did. He’s a lousy writer. There’s no evidence to the contrary, other than the books, which he may not have written.
There is no indication or evidence that the two men had even a nodding acquantance with each other until 1995 – after the book was done.
Anderson says there is.
I can’t believe that Chris Gerrib is as naive and unworldly as he is presenting himself here. I mean, anything is possible, but even I know that all kinds of people — yes, [hushedtonesofawe] lawyers [/hushedtonesofawe] too — have their own memoirs ghostwritten, or at the very least copyedited (which is what Anderson is claiming; copyediting is not ghostwriting). The reason they do that is they are trying to get their name out in the public eye (or in part of the public’s eye — for example, Obama was probably trying to reach the sort of people who are impressed by the fact that he was the first black guy in charge of the Harvard Law Review) but they lack either the time or the talent to write them themselves.
It’s possible that Obama had read Ayers’ books and was impressed enough to either take on his style either consciously or unconsciously, or else to go to him because he knew the guy at least casually and ask if he’d help in some fashion, and that in working on the book Ayers found Obama’s personal writing style was so bland that he ended up interjecting more of his own style, just to make the book more interesting to read (and Obama was an Ayers fan so didn’t object). Please note I said “it’s possible” — obviously I have no proof but the scenario sounds quite plausible to me.
One more thing — Chris’ harping on Ayers’ mysterious motivation, which couldn’t be money — as if money was the only reason to write a book or ghostwrite a book or do anything at all! Consider who we are talking about here — a rich man’s son who belonged to a terrorist organization that caused several deaths, who somehow escaped justice for his crimes, and who is still unrepentantly anti-American (at least anti- the American he lives in) as we can see from that magazine article from not too long ago (I forget what magazine it’s in) which has a picture of him smirking and standing on an American flag. Gosh, what could possibly motivate William Ayers if it isn’t money?
And you keep saying that Obama was a “nobody.” That word, it does not mean what you seem to think it means. They don’t set “nobodies” to be head of the Harvard Law Review. It’s pretty clear to me that Obama has been groomed for quite some time to be “somebody,” and Ayers wasn’t stupid — here was someone being guided into a future of power and influence, and he was asked to help. What white, rich-boy leftist “ex”-terrorist could refuse?
Exactly. And Chris’s squid ink about how little money the book made on first printing makes the question of the advances even more interesting. Reportedly, the advance was $125,000. And he failed to deliver the book, and then got a further $40,000 advance. For a memoir from a recent law school graduate? Really????
Yeah, Chris didn’t even address that. The book may not have made a lot of money but Obama sure got a lot of money for writing it. I’m pretty sure that’s not SOP for publishers taking on new authors, unless those 9,966,421 things I’ve read on the internet and in books and magazines cautioning budding young writers not to expect to make a lot of money for some time if ever were all lies.
Rand wrote:
And it puts the lie to the president’s claim that Ayers was “just a guy in his neighborhood.”
Did Obama ever claim such a thing? The closest I can find is:
This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from.
— Federal News Service transcript of April 16, 2008 Democratic Primary Debate (click my name for the rest)
They don’t set “nobodies” to be head of the Harvard Law Review.
The “they” in this case are the editors of the Harvard Law Review, who elect their president. I doubt you could name any of the other editors (besides Obama) who voted in that election. They were doubtless smart, well-educated young people, and disproportionately from affluent backgrounds. A few may even have relatives who are household names for one reason or another. But as individuals they were all “nobodies” at that stage of their careers.
It’s pretty clear to me that Obama has been groomed for quite some time to be “somebody,”
Which is odd, because you don’t seem to grant that Obama has extraordinary gifts, which causes one to wonder why he in particular would be singled out for this grooming.
Would you consider the kickoff of Obama’s first political campaign a “social occasion”? It took place in Ayers’ living room.
Correction: Ayers was the host for a campaign coffee, one of several that Obama’s campaign put on. The official campaign kickoff event was held at a hotel.
He’s a lousy writer. There’s no evidence to the contrary
Click my name for a letter that Obama wrote in 1990. It was not written by a lousy writer.
Yes, that’s certainly soaring literature, Jim.
Hilarious.
because you don’t seem to grant that Obama has extraordinary gifts
Sure he does. He has extraordinary gifts of con artistry. That can be very useful to power mongers.
I didn’t say anything about Obama lacking in “gifts.” I said he doesn’t seem to have any talent for writing — by which I mean any talent for writing anything that people would want to read, rather than have to read — such as that letter you linked to, which is not exactly compelling reading; in fact, it’s completely characterless — which it probably should have been considering its topic and purpose — but I could not get any sense of the man from it. All that letter indicates is that he’s able to perform the technical requirements of writing a legible sentence. So he can write law briefs, which I guess are kind of like technical manuals in that they are supposed to be precise, methodical, and impersonal. (I guess — I’m not a lawyer, maybe someone here who is a lawyer can tell me if stuff lawyers write is supposed to be like that or if it’s supposed to read like lyrical prose.) But a talent for one kind of writing doesn’t always mean a talent for another kind of writing.
From what little we know of the examples of writing, other than the memoirs, that we have from Obama don’t indicate anyone with any special ability to produce lyrical prose. Even his speeches are bland once you see them written down and don’t have the spell of his magnetic voice making the words sound special. Obama’s gifts, in fact, seem to consist of the ones most useful to politicians: a mesmerising speaking voice, the ability to convince people he and they share a special connection, the ability to make hackneyed concepts sound new — being able to write like Malcolm X is icing on the cake, and not really necessary to the career of a successful politician. But it is useful when you’re trying to impress a certain class of people — and that would be the increasingly influential Ivy-League-educated, leftist generation. Most of them are late Baby Boomer like Obama, or Gen X like that guy who just stepped down from whatever cooked-up “czar” position he was in (he’s been roundly mocked over at Althouse as a “look at this fucking hipster” example). And their mentors, admired influences, and intellectual celebrities are people like William Ayers.
Anyway, these people are always saying as how they are impressed by writing ability, because they all read the same trendy authors and are all so steeped in academia that they have ink in their veins instead of blood (or these days, toner), and they are all into incestuously impressing each other so in order to get in with their club — and get the aid of their growing political clout — you have to pump out something that looks good on their bookshelf next to The Painted Bird and those Don Delillo novels. But Obama writes stuff like that boring letter, and that awful poem about the apes and figs (which just seems to me like he knocked it off as a joke or just to get rid of an assignment), so he decided, or someone advised him, to ask Bill Ayers to help him pull his notes and whatever he had written into something that wouldn’t read like a law brief. Now I don’t think Ayers “ghostwrote” the book, but it looks like his help was considerable, so much so that he should at least have gotten the academic sop of a thanks in the dedication, if not co-author credit.
These guys are the Democrat equivalent of Republicans who were still insisting, even after the David Frost interviews, that Nixon didn’t do anything wrong in the Watergate scandal.
Correction: Ayers was the host for a campaign coffee, one of several that Obama’s campaign put on.
Oh. Well, that obviously means that he didn’t know him at all.
[rolling eyes at hilariously stupid and desperate nitpickery]
[rolling eyes at hilariously stupid and desperate nitpickery]
There’s a reason you call that gathering a “kickoff” instead of a coffee — you want to exaggerate Ayers’ importance in Obama’s life. And there’s a reason you turn “This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, …” into “He’s just a guy in my neighborhood”, full stop. You want to prove that Obama lied about his relationship with Ayers, so you put words into Obama’s mouth.
Yes, that’s certainly soaring literature, Jim.
I did not claim it was — I claimed that it was not the work of a lousy writer. I’d say that it is conveys information and ideas quite clearly. Do you disagree?
I’d say that it is conveys information and ideas quite clearly. Do you disagree?
No, but in the context of the discussion, which was (as Andrea noted) about being a writer of things that people would actually pay to read, it’s irrelevant.
There’s a reason you call that gathering a “kickoff” instead of a coffee
Yes. The reason is that I had been informed that that’s what it was. Even if it wasn’t, it doesn’t take away from the point, despite your desperate flailing at trivialities.
The hell? How are those two sentences different in their meaning? True, Rand’s is less verbose, so Rand actually did Obama the favor of rewriting him slightly to make him sound less pretentious and wordy. You know, like Ayers probably did. (By the way, it’s called paraphrasing, which means “rephrase and simplify: to restate something using other words, especially in order to make it simpler or shorter.” It’s not putting words into Obama’s mouth — if anything, it’s taking them out. But it’s a dumb nitpick, rather like getting upset when someone says “you told me ‘good morning'” and you say “no! I told you ‘what a fine morning it is’!” They both mean the same thing; there is no difference in meaning, only in the amount of words used to get the meaning across.
I want to get back to this
I live in Illinois, I read the Chicago Tribune and yes, it had no interest in investigating Obama. It certainly did nothing about the Annenberg Challenge. More significantly, it was the Tribune that, to a large extent, got Obama in the Senate by unsealing Jack Ryan’s divorce papers and splashing the later shown to be exagerated allegations across the front page.
How are those two sentences different in their meaning?
One says that Ayers lived in Obama’s neighborhood; the other implies that Obama’s relationship to Ayers was exclusively that of a neighbor.
Earlier in this thread Rand wrote that an item in Anderson’s book “puts the lie to the president’s claim that Ayers was ‘just a guy in his neighborhood.'” It obviously does not “put the lie” to what Obama actually said in the debate.
“One says that Ayers lived in Obama’s neighborhood; the other implies that Obama’s relationship to Ayers was exclusively that of a neighbor.”
Okay, now your coy obtuseness is just insulting. I don’t know what sort of brain trusts you are used to dealing with in your daily life, but I’m someone who actually knows how to speak my own language. THOSE two things ALSO mean the same thing, just said in different ways. That’s a favorite liberal trick, by the way — saying something with a slightly different choice of words and claiming they’ve said something fresh, new, and different. Leftists use it all the time because they are still under the quaint impression that “rightwingers” (which means anyone who won’t buy their bullshit) are stupid people who don’t know grammar past a third-grade level. We’re onto you, you know.
THOSE two things ALSO mean the same thing, just said in different ways.
No, they don’t. There’s no inconsistency between “he’s a guy who lives in my neighborhood” and “he’s my best friend in the world”; both things can be true. But “he’s just a guy who lives in my neighborhood” is not consistent with “he’s my best friend in the world” — if the second is true, the first is false.
Adding the word “just” adds meaning. It says that the relationship is limited to that of neighbors. That meaning is not present in the original wording.
You wrote something but it’s all in gobbledygook*, so I’m afraid I can’t respond. Please write only in English, thanks!
*Is that a racist word yet?
Andrea,
Jim is just parsing his butt off. He is trying to contextualize the meaning of “guy who lives in my neighborhood.” What he avoids presenting is anyone describing their best friend would not refer to them as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” without the qualifier “he’s my best friend.”
The flip side is, “This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from.” does not exclude the possibility of a more involved relationship. I am concerned that such a soaring writer would be so grammatically incorrect by ending a sentence with a preposition.