Asked during the 2008 presidential campaign about his relationship with the left-wing radical Bill Ayers, Barack Obama replied that Ayers was just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood." He implied that to even bring that questionable relationship out of the shadows was a mean-spirited, guilt-by-association political tactic. Ayers, Obama went on, had done something deplorable "forty years ago when I was six or seven years old." Otherwise, Obama insisted, Ayers was a paragon of virtue: a respectable fixture in mainstream Chicago, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on a foundation board focused on education that included...