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)
I always find myself at a lose when I look at the condition our country is in. I think there are only a hand full of sane people left in this country. The patients have overrun the asylum.
I turn to comfort food more and more. It’s taking it’s toll on my hips. lol
lol
I’m just eating ice cream. (And it’s still doing not a thing, lol : )
Oh, and another thing, if our food shortage gets out of hand what will I do, eat bugs and mud cookies as comfort food? ULK!!!
gak!
Not me.......no way, no how!
I'm tearing into a bag of cheetos.
golly........how do you manage that one??? : )
OMG........I can eat a whole bag of those!
And then there’s the sour patch kids....
and gummies....
and good and plenty....
and banana cream pie......
and.....
Neither will I. Isn’t that so gross. Bugs, maybe before too long they’ll start talking about a RUMP roast really being a RUMP roast. *gag*
How ‘bout pork rinds?
ewwwwww
I think the best thing is to start growing our own food!
Loss.
Doesn’t surprise me a bit that Obama is associating with these anti-American terrorists. Behind his outward congeniality is a hardcore leftist.
haaaaaaaa
I’m glad I’m munching or I’d be hungry. :)
But he only threw his ribbons over the white house fence. He didn’t throw the actual medals. Those, he kept for future political campaigns.
Left side of mouth: Throw something
Right side of mouth: Keep something
Doin’ the liberal shuffle:
You put your left foot in
Then you take it out
You put your right foot in,
Then you turn yourself about...
Pork rinds - the best.
Yeah......I only had, for dessert today, an ice cream sandwich after lunch....and then an apple for a snack later...then dinner. Oh, I had hostess chocolate donuts (the small ones) for breakfast....I *behaved* today, lol.
Pork rinds reminds me of a time at summer camp.......one night.
hehehe
The little bite size donuts in the white bag? Well, bite size for me.
One night huh? Sounds like a story behind that. ;)
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