Posted on 10/10/2008 1:28:38 AM PDT by markomalley
So how fair is it to bring up Bill Ayers and Barack Obama's ties to him?
After all, as a commenter on one of my previous posts put it, Obama merely "worked on a board of directors with Ayers to improve inner city education," an "effort was funded by the right wing Annenberg" foundation. Besides, Obama "has since repudiated both Mr. Ayers and the Rev. Wright."
Four points certainly worth looking at. Fortunately, there's been superb reporting on the matter from Stanley Kurtz of National Review. Let's look at what Kurtz found.
Was this, at bottom, just a project to improve inner city education? Depends what you mean by "improve." The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, or CAC, the organization that decided how to spend this money, was founded by Ayers, an unrepentant 1960s bomber who'd since become a radical education professor. He headed the part of the organization called the "Collaborative," which, Kurtz notes, shaped education policy. Obama was the first chairman of the organization's board and, so, in charge of the money.
Kurtz writes in the Wall Street Journal:
"The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.
"In works like ‘City Kids, City Teachers' and ‘Teaching the Personal and the Political,' Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? ‘I'm a radical, Leftist, small "c" communist,' Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, ‘Sixties Radicals,' at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
"CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with ‘external partners,' which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).
"Mr. Obama once conducted ‘leadership training' seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.
"CAC also funded programs designed to promote ‘leadership' among parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children's education. In practice, it meant funding Mr. Obama's alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents ‘organized' by community groups might be viewed by school principals ‘as a political threat.' Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber's objections."
This was not at all the arm's-length, scarcely-knew-him relationship that Obama is now saying he had with Ayers. The men worked together for a common goal, and that goal was to "improve" inner city schools only in the sense of politicizing their curriculum, provoking resistance, then, to what they saw as an American culture overrun by racism and oppression. Mind you, racism and oppression are terrible, but it takes a specially flawed view of America to see it as a nation dominated by racism and oppression, requiring this sort of a ground-upwards remake.
To be sure, the money for this came from a foundation left by Walter Annenberg, a man who was a friend of Nixon. But it's utterly nonsensical to say that the effort was funded by a "right-wing" foundation. Kurtz again:
"The story of modern philanthropy is largely the story of moderate and conservative donors finding their funds ‘captured' by far more liberal, often radical, beneficiaries. CAC's story is a classic of the genre. Ayers and Obama guided CAC money to community organizers, like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the Developing Communities Project (Part of the Gamaliel Foundation network), groups self-consciously working in the radical tradition of Saul Alinsky. Walter Annenberg's personal politics don't change that one iota."
This matters because it wasn't a anomaly or tangent. This was the work that Obama did as an adult, at the outset of his political career, and nothing he has done since suggests he no longer finds such views congenial. He belonged to a church where the pastor preached the same thing, he worked with ACORN, which sees the world through roughly the same lens, and he not merely learned but taught the ideas of Alinsky. What is more, to the extent he has thrown Wright and Ayers overboard, he has done so only when they became political liabilities. This is not the action of a man who suddenly grew disgusted with their views but, rather, of a man who suddenly found them inconvenient.
If the election is now about what should be done to reshape the economy and society, it's utterly germane to ask who has influenced Obama's views on that matter. That's why this is worth bringing up. It is not mud. It is, rather, among the few bits of insight we have into the influences forming the thinking of Obama. The answer appears to be, in part, William Ayers.
Meanwhile: According to Sykes, blogger and talk-show guy James Harris does a little from-the-crowd urging of McCain to please, please, please bring up Jeremiah Wright.
(Typo in the first paragraph...you’ll find Annenberg on your other right)
This book Bankruptcy 1995; the Coming Collapse of America and how to stop it.....
(I remember reading that now-obscure book back then.)
http://www.7gen.com/blog-entry/review-bankruptcy-1995/457
Thanx for the link to Sykes. Too bad the youtube linked there has gone poof.
I was thinking about some of those books my dad gave me back in the early 80’s “How to Survive the Coming Depression” or something was one of them. Dumb ol’ dad, Depression - bah. We have systems. We have controls. That can’t happen again.
Now, where did I put that....
(I sure miss my old man!)
Hi FlyVet, One can still get that book on Amazon.com I saw it listed for about $11.00. Sounds good. Thanks.
13 years isn't much, in context with history.
...This book Bankruptcy 1995; the Coming Collapse of America and how to stop it is about an event that never happened. Namely, the numbers presented in the book formed a prediction, that in 1995 America's income and expenditures would become unbalanced and head into an exponential debt spiral.....
Hmmmmm.....we're not quite there yet, but...just hmmmm.
“...not quite there yet...”
Give it a few more weeks. :(
Guess I better buy it before it becomes $1000. :(
LOL! Or before it’s banned!!!
Ssssshhhhhhh! Quiet!
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