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)
Think you SERIOUSLY misread my post. I don’t attribute bombings to Obama, but he shares with them the same idiotic, misguided and immoral objective of “ending” a just war through defeat. Hope that is clearer.
“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.”
The bomb killed their own members but it was intended for US servicemen. Give me a break-if it had not gone off accidently
dozens of servicemen would have been murdered.
btt
Have been listening for the past hour plus to John Batchelor and he has been on this and Resko, etc. re Obama.
I and others have been on this info for some time.
McCain may not be our version of a 100% conservative but he is a hell of a lot better than Marxist Obama who will destroy our country period.
Time to build the bunker.
Whew....what a choice.
Ayers, Rezko Ping
McCain may not be our version of a 100% conservative but he is a hell of a lot better than Marxist Obama who will destroy our country period.”
I supported duncan too. But you are right, we have to expose osama. Go McCain, what else can we do.
Obama's Bill Ayers problem
http://marathonpundit.blogspot.com/2008/02/obamas-bill-ayers-problem.html
...Jump ahead to 2000...In addition to his professoship, Ayers is The Woods Fund board chairman, and a young state senator, who like Ayers is living in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, is a fellow board member--that person of course is Barack Obama. Why any organization would have Ayers serving on their board (he's not chairman any more, but Ayers is still on The Woods Fund board), is astonishing to me and any other person with common sense. And who'd want to serve with him? That year, Ayers and Obama (who should've abstained) voted to invest $1 million in Woods Fund money into a firm run by a former boss of the then-state senator, Allison Davis. In a different business venture, Davis partnered with Tony Rezko...
Boy, just all kinds of great things about this guy coming out.
The Clinton's are not going to go down to Obama without a fight. No way will the let a political amateur win the White House after beating her. They would gladly see him lose in November in order to retain a tad of her legacy as well as his. If he wins in November, he will be more remembered for beating Hillary than McCain. Even if the ship is taking on more water, they’ll dump whatever trash they can on Obama in order to make their buds in the media cover it and ask questions about , even after the primary is considered over.
Here's a picture of Obama, with Raila Amolo Odinga, in Kenya, in August of 2006:
A year later, in August of 2007, Raila Amolo Odinga signed an agreement with Sheikh Abdullahi Abdi to implement Sharia law if Odinga were to win the Muslim vote:
Kenyan Christians could be subjected to Sharia lawNow, a mere five months later, we've got Odinga supporters burning and hacking Christians to death:
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/kenyan.christians.could.be.subjected.to.sharia.law/15638.htmConcerns Raised Over Alleged Vow to Enforce Islamic Law in Kenya
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20071218/30541_Concerns_Raised_Over_Alleged_Vow_to_Enforce_Islamic_Law_in_Kenya.htm
Children torched in Kenya churchThis, of course, is the same Raila Amolo Odinga who claims to be Barack Hussein Obama's cousin:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23000292-601,00.htmlIn broad daylight, a crowd of Kenyans set a church filled with hundreds of terrified families on fire and listened to their screams as flames engulfed them. According to witnesses including police and a Red Cross volunteer, those who escaped the Assemblies of God Church in Eldoret, about 300km west of Nairobi, were hunted down with machetes; others hid inside pit latrines...
The December 27 presidential election was narrowly won by the incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, amid allegations from defeated challenger Raila Odinga that the vote was rigged.
The violence is the worst Kenya has witnessed since a failed coup in 1982.
With Mr Kibaki belonging to Kenya's largest tribe, the Kikuyu, and Mr Odinga to the second-largest, the Luo, the violence has taken on a distinctly ethnic hue, with tit-for-tat killings and targeted arson attacks.
"What I saw was unimaginable and indescribable," said the director of the Kenyan Red Cross, Abbas Gullet, after visiting several of the worst hit areas of western Kenya. "This is a national disaster."
Those massacred in the church were mostly Kikuyus...
Odinga says Obama is his cousin
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7176683.stmObama urges talks in phone call to Kenya's Odinga
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/world/obama-urges-talks-in-phone-call-to-kenyas-odinga/2008/01/09/1199554690401.html...Odinga told the BBC radio that he had spoken twice with Obama, whose father was from Kenya and like Odinga was a member of the Luo tribe, and added that he and Obama are relatives.
"He called me twice yesterday to express his concern and to say he is also going to call president Kibaki so that Kibaki agrees to find a negotiated satisfactory solution to this problem," said Odinga.
"Barack Obama's father is actually my maternal uncle," said Odinga, who is battling to overturn disputed presidential elections which have plunged Kenya into turmoil...
Amid allegations of vote-rigging, violence erupted 10 days ago leaving 600 people dead and 250,000 displaced and sending diplomats scurrying for a political solution to the crisis...
That's one I missed. Source?
Obama graduates as editor of harvard law review, is courted by every major law firm in the country, has no wealth, and decides to be a “community organizer” in south side chicago.
How far out of the mainstream do you think he is??
“Unfortunately, this only matters to a few of us. Most people in the street have no idea what this is about and most of those who do, such as the media see it as a positive.”
I would imagine that most people under the age of 40 think that the Weather Underground is the name of a website about the weather.
Wow! Turns out that Obama is a daggone red. Well, he can pack sand.
No not overstated. He has not moved to the center. He is just too smart and he knows the MSM will protect him.
He wrote about it in his own book. He calls him Frank.
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