Obama was ideal for Ayers’ “revolution,” because he had enough of a suntan to qualify as black and therefore he was automatically what the SDS and extreme radicals of the time described as the “revolutionary vanguard.”
However, Obama seems (by his account) to have been much more involved with the Middle Eastern/Muslim foreign students there than even with the domestic black radical movement. Furthermore, there is the fact that Obama is essentially a coward and it’s unlikely, IMO, that he would have done anything that presented any real risk to himself. He was always a hanger-on, seeking his identity in revolutionary rhetoric, but I’m not sure he would have done anything that might have been overtly criminal and certainly not anything physically risky.
Obama is a bully, but he is also a wimp. He might have been able to talk a few militant morons into violence, but he certainly didn’t get his hands dirty. He is more like a pimp.