Posted on 02/24/2008 8:27:17 PM PST by Travis McGee
In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.
Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from a man in the Hyde Park left to one closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.
“I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers’ house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress,” said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. “[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor.”
Obama and Palmer “were both there,” he said.
Obama’s connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their home — part of a campaign courtship — reflects more extensive interaction than has been previously reported.
Neither Ayers nor the Obama campaign would describe the relationship between the two men. Dr. Young described Obama and Ayers as “friends,” but there’s no evidence their relationship is more than the casual friendship of two men who occupy overlapping Chicago political circles and who served together on the board of a Chicago foundation.
But Obama’s relationship with Ayers is an especially vivid milepost on his rise, in record time, from a local official who unabashedly reflected a very liberal district to the leader of national movement based largely on the claim that he can transcend ideological divides.
In one sense, Obama’s journey toward the cultural and political center is not unusual among national politicians. But its velocity is.
Politicians of an earlier generation had their own relationships with figures now far to their left. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for instance, interned at a radical San Francisco law firm while in law school.
On the other side of the political spectrum, many in the generation before hers shifted dramatically on civil rights. John McCain voted against creating a holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr. and later called that a mistake.
The relationship with Ayers gives context to his recent past in Hyde Park politics. It’s milieu in which a former violent radical was a stalwart of the local scene, not especially controversial.
It’s also a scene whose liberal ideological features — while taken for granted by the Chicago press corps that knows Obama best — provides a jarring contrast with Obama’s current, anti-ideological stance. This contrast between past and present — not least the Ayers connection — is virtually certain to be a subject Republican operatives will warm to if Obama is the Democratic nominee.
The tension between the present and recent Chicago past is also evident in some of his positions on major national issues. Many national politicians, including Clinton, have moved toward the center over time. But Obama’s transitions are still quite fresh.
A questionnaire from his 1996 campaign indicated more blanket opposition to the death penalty, and support of abortion rights, than he currently espouses. He spoke in support of single-payer health care as recently as 2003.
Like many of the most extreme figures from the 1960s Ayers and Dohrn are ambiguous figures in American life.
They disappeared in 1970, after a bomb — designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, and turned themselves into authorities in 1980. They were never prosecuted for their involvement with the 25 bombings the Weather Underground claimed; charges were dropped because of improper FBI surveillance.
Both have written and spoken at length about their pasts, and today he is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she’s an associate professor of law at Northwestern University.
But — unlike some other fringe figures of the era — they’re also flatly unrepentant about the bombings they committed in the name of ending the war, defending them on the grounds that they killed no one, except, accidentally, their own members.
Dohrn, however, was jailed for less than a year for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating other Weather Underground members’ robbery of a Brinks truck, in which a guard and two New York State Troopers were killed.
“I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough,” Ayers told the New York Times in 2001.
(More at the link)
Yes....I think there’s like eight of them. : )
Yes....there is.....though many of us laughed, someone wasn’t too happy. (Of course, we later felt badly...it was in fun...oh, then that reminds me of the Saran Wrap......)
Our church was going to start a university in Kenya a number of years ago, but they started getting wind of hinky things developing in the government and moved to Burundi instead. The university has now been in operation over 4 years now and has over 2000 students drawn from surrounding African countries. Instruction is in English and French. Several years ago the school started a health professions program and now is starting a medical school. I’m glad they found out about the Kenyan shenanigans before starting building. By the way, look at Odinga and see what black really means.
Chocolate covered donnettes. I have a few left on my nightstand, they'll be gone by morning. lololol
LOL!
you are soooo bad.
Saran wrap - girl you twisted. Lololololol
Okay.......we should likely return to the topic before we get in trouble, lol.
So.......from the article:
On the other side of the political spectrum, many in the generation before hers shifted dramatically on civil rights. John McCain voted against creating a holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr. and later called that a mistake.
I was surprised concerning the above? Well, surprised in that McLame has campaigned as being a "conservative". Abraham Lincoln was willing to go to war to end slavery, but McLame couldn't even vote to honor someone who wished for all races to live in peace and be equal. I am surprised this has not yet come up (that I know if) during the campaign. Have you heard anything on t.v. about this?
We only go around once and I don’t want to spend what little precious time we have on this planet always starving and on a diet.
Agreed!
How does Mcpain and those who call him a conservative not choke when they use that word in association with him.
I have no clue!
But how can the lamestream media hide Obamasama’s obvious communist connections???
They’ll shove that creature down our throats. Then we’re going in the hunkering down mode. Local and state is where we’ll set our sights.
That is needed; however, that is not going to be good enough to prevent what is already being implemented at the highest levels.
It’s too far gone; local level cannot stop anything that .gov has already done and is doing.....too late!
I'll see you around FR tomorrow. Have a good night and sleep well, nic.
You too, pph!
Sweet dreams!
Buy a couple cases of TWINKIES.....I hear they are indestructable and have an infinite shelf life....LOL
The current generations know nothing of communism...and have been indoctrinated by our schools (which are totally infected) to believe that Government is the solution to all that ails mankind.
Lucy???
Oh my.
That is so true, I think perhaps, more than many of us even realize.
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