Posted on 08/22/2008 4:31:09 AM PDT by Renfield
William Ayers, unrepentant terrorist and education professor, is once again being tied to Barack Obama in the public mind. Controversy builds over the withholding of the archives of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an expensive failed school reform effort headed by Obama and effectively run by Ayers, held by the library of the University of Illinois Chicago. Researchers who have gained access to a few documents recording the history of the project have found strong evidence of a very important working relationship between the two men on the project, Obama's sole claim to executive experience.
Oddly enough, even though the project produced no measurable improvement in student performance according to its own final report, educators and administrators -- participants and grantees of the CAC -- were reported by outside monitors to be often "ebullient," about the activities. For insiders, it was an excellent adventure. For the pupils stuck in the failing public schools of Chicago, an ongoing, unrelieved disaster.
Obama and his campaign long have gone out of their way to downplay, in fact distort, the long and evidently deep relationship between Ayers and Obama. In the Philadelphia Democratic debate last April, George Stephanopoulos asked Obama about his relationship with Ayers, and the candidate responded
"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. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.
"And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense, George. [....]
"So this kind of game, in which anybody who I know, regardless of how flimsy the relationship is, is somehow -- somehow their ideas could be attributed to me -- I think the American people are smarter than that. They're not going to suggest somehow that that is reflective of my views, because it obviously isn't."
Almost two months earlier, the "neighbor" talking point campaign manager David Axelrod introduced the notion that Obama and Ayers were mostly just neighbors, telling The Politico's Ben Smith,
"Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school," he said. "They're certainly friendly, they know each other, as anyone whose kids go to school together."
Ayers and his wife are in their sixties, while the Obamas are in the mid-forties. Ayers' children are all adults, while Obama's children are currently 10 and 7. Axelrod's prevarication is obvious and bespeaks confidence that nobody in the media will bother to dispute an obvious falsehood.
"Flimsy" turns out to be a completely misleading word when it comes to characterizing the Obama-Ayers relationship.
Notwithstanding the campaign's efforts to direct attention away from Ayers, a 527 group, American Issues Project, has just released the following ad tying Obama to Ayers, and says it is spending 2.8 million on television airtime in key states.
Despite the legally questionable embargo of the CAC archives, most of its tax returns and official evaluations of the CAC have already been made public. In the hands of intrepid bloggers such as Steve Diamond, Tom Maguire and Dan Riehl, there is already proof of Obama's extensive involvement with Ayers over the course of his chairmanship, and an emerging picture of Obama's indecisiveness and absence when serious problems needed leadership.
Barack Obama joined the CAC shortly after William Ayers and Anne C. Hallett received news that their letter of November 8, 1994 submitting a grant proposal to The Annenberg Challenge had been approved. They were to get as much as $49 million from Anennberg, plus tens of millions more dollars from other foundations. Obama's involvement predates by months the actual incorporation of the CAC and his appointment as founding chairman of the board. He came on board almlost as soon as the proposal was approved.
How on earth did a relatively unknown associate at a politically-connected but small Chicago law firm come to be entrusted with the heady task of handing out tens of millions of dollars of other people's money?
Keep in mind that Obama was at this point in his career very undistinguished considering his pedigree. It would be a kind understatement to say he had underperformed his academic resume. Three years out of Harvard Law and the Law Review Presidency, here is a short list of some of the things Obama had not done:
Clerked for a US Supreme Court Justice (or any Federal Judge);
worked in an important legal position at any level of serious responsibility;
written a law review article or note or published anything of legal substance.
As of 1995 Obama may have had the most professionally empty resume of any President of the Harvard Law Review three years gone from "The Law School."
And yet Ayers gave him a gig that would enable him to hand out large amounts of money to many people in Chicago, who could be expected to be grateful, once Obama ran for office -- as he was to do later that very year, in an event held at the home of Ayers and Dohrn.
Quite clearly, Obama was already well-enough known and trusted by Ayers to be offered the sensitive, prestigious and highly visible post of chairman of this important new undertaking. So we must ask, when did Obama and Ayers actually first get to know one another? And how did they come to trust one another?
One possible connection between Ayers and Obama was Sidley Austin, the prestigious Chicago law firm where Obama had a summer job after his first year at Harvard Law School, and where he met his future wife Michelle, assigned to him as a mentor. Also working at Sidley Austin was Bernadine Dohrn, wife of William Ayers, and a fellow Weather Underground terrorist. Given the shared "progressive" politics of the three, they probably knew one another and associated together at a firm known as a white shoe corporate practice.
Or Obama might have met Ayers even earlier, during his stint as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, in fact. Ayers was a well-known and very active figure in left wing Chicago politics, and might have encountered the young, articulate, Ivy League educated rookie black radical Obama, working in a Saul Alinksy spinoff.
We soon will know much more about the period of collaboration between Obama and Ayers following the start of the CAC. Even if the archives continue to be withheld from public scrutiny, the cat is out of the bag with the documents available to all. The formidable analytical engine of bloggers trading insights and new data is warming up.
But the period prior to 1995, the time when Bill and Barack, the terrorist and the presidential aspirant, got to know one another and build the relationship of trust, is one excellent adventure likely to remain obscure.
Hat tip: James Edward Pennington and Ed Lasky
It IS BRILLIANT!
And what is that crap about FOX News refusing to run it?
Well, they NEED to run it. What’s wrong with it? No LIE
in the ad ...
“Enquiring minds wanna know!”
Although Obama routinely denies a close relationship with the radical activist, describing him as a “neighbor,” it was Bill Ayers’ that funded Obama’s original community organizing project in Chicago. That was in 1985.
In 1989, Barack Obama worked at Sidley Austin as a summer intern, along with Ayres’ wife, the terrorist, Bernadine Dohrn, who helped bomb something like 25 targets, including the Capitol and the Pentagon, who was also an attorney at the firm.
In 1995, Obama’s political career was launched in Ayers’ home. A Chicago-based blogger named Maria Warren, whose writing suggested she was to the left of Obama, recalled watching the candidate give a “standard, innocuous little talk. They were launching him,” Warren wrote, “introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.”
Also, beginning in 1995, Obama, as an employee of Ayers, became the first Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. He served on the board for eight years until the Challenge ended in 2003. The “Challenge” raised and spent at least $110 million in an effort to bolster a “radical” (Ayers’ word) reform program in the Chicago Public Schools from 1994 to 2001.
In November 1997, Ayers and Obama participated in a panel at the University of Chicago entitled “Should a child ever be called a ‘super predator?’” to debate “the merits of the juvenile justice system.”
In April 2002, Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama, then an Illinois State Senator, participated together at a conference entitled “Intellectuals: Who Needs Them?” sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals and the University of Illinois-Chicago. Ayers and Obama were two of the six members of the “Intellectuals in Times of Crisis” panel.
Obama was a Board member and a director of Ayers’ Woods Fund board from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002, according to the fund’s website.
Obama and Ayers have been tight for over 20 years.
http://www.theobamafile.com/ObamaLatest.htm
I have read recent reports that both allowed their law licences to lapse.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2066421/posts
University of Illinois to Release Obama Records (Bill Ayers, Annenberg Challenge)
the 587’s are gonna bury Obama alive with this...
Good ad but Obama supporters are too stupid to be affected by it.
Yep.
But the Independents and fence sitters might be swayed...
Let’s hope so
BTTT!
....And his idiot convict wife thinking she should be entitled to practice law is just beyond the pale.
I think the McCain campaign, or at least its operatives, should tell voters where these domestic terrorists are now, AND what they are doing. After all, McVeigh is dead, and Nichols is serving life in prison. Fair is fair.
Who was the fool that pardoned these two anyway? I didn't realize they had received a formal pardon. Was it supposed to be a secret?
This whole diatribe, from the Obama campaign, sounded like a cheap labor union jingle or an old USSR work song, frantically attempting to rally the party faithful. Thoroughly laughable—and, of course, patently untrue.
I hear “Annenberg” every day on NPR. “NPR is supported in part by the Annenberg Foundation.” Probably why Obama is the lead story every day.
Oh, yeah. Let’s. :)
Great.
If you have a link, I’d like to see that one, too.
Thanks. :)
I always feel so foolish when I can't post links for folks.
Well, the immediate reason they were pardoned was that the FBI was found to have illegally broken into some of the Weather Underground safe houses. The more general reason: post-Watergate, Jimmy Carter and the Church Commission. (The latter had a profound effect in tying the hands of the intel community, as we learned after 9/11.)
Those were dark days for America, but they eventually propelled a great man, Ronald Reagan, into power.
It looks like we're heading into another dark period now, but this time a Leninist masquerading as a post-racial healer is pulling out all the stops to grab the reins of power.
I am for more cynical. I do not believe that the hierarchy of the dem party will care about this. The American public, at least half, have been so coerced into believing that Obama is pure and holy that they will still vote for him.
The only real possibility is that Hillary takes the nomination away. I think that would galvanize the liberal idiots of the U.S. and she would win.
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