Sarah Palin has been calling attention to Barack Obama’s association with ’60’s radical, Bill Ayers. For those of us who have been following the election since the primaries, this relationship is one of which we are well aware. Steve Diamond, and others, in articles like this, discussed it, and Jake Tapper even made fun of it here. The examination of it began long before The New York Times article diminishing it. Primarily, Obama’s position on the boards of The Woods Fund and The Chicago Annenberg Challenge show a working relationship with Ayers, at the very least. Yet, it seems the mainstream media is up in arms that anyone would dare bring it up.
Obama’s association with ACORN has also been pooh-poohed by the media. However, this Chicago Reader article about Obama’s community organizing roots from 1995 mentions The Woods Fund, Annenberg, and ACORN:
He sits on the boards of two foundations with long histories of backing social and political reform, including his own community work–the Woods Fund and the Joyce Foundation. Recently he was appointed president of the board of the Annenberg Challenge Grant, which will distribute some $50 million in grants to public-school reform efforts.
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Obama continues his organizing work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons on the south side.
Stanley Kurtz examined Obama’s lost years through the use of newspaper archives and, of course, Ayers’ name came up:
Crime is also a key contact-point between Obama and his most celebrated radical associate, William Ayers. We’ve heard a good deal of late about Ayers’s Weatherman terrorism back in the 1960s and his lack of repentance. Ayers refuses to answer questions about his relationship with Obama, while Obama has dismissed Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” Yet several Obama-Ayers connections are known: Obama’s 1995 political debut at the home of Ayers and his wife (and fellow former terrorist) Bernardine Dohrn, Obama’s joint service with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a couple of appearances with Ayers on academic panels, and what the New York Times called Obama’s “rave review” (not actually a full review, but a warm endorsement) of Ayers’s book on juvenile justice, which Obama dubbed “a searing and timely account” in the Chicago Tribune.
Politico discussed the issue in February, admitting a working relationship, though not a close friendship:
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.
The article claims that the 1995 meeting was a chance to introduce Obama to the influential Hyde Park liberal crowd. The Chicago Reader, in 2000 related that those liberal associations have come back to haunt him before, in this instance, during his unsuccessful bid to unseat Congressman Bobby Rush:
There are whispers that Obama is being funded by a “Hyde Park mafia,” a cabal of University of Chicago types, and that there’s an “Obama Project” masterminded by whites who want to push him up the political ladder.
Sarah Palin’s characterization of “palling around with” seems fair to me; that statement doesn’t indicate bosom buddy-ness, it merely acknowledges that the two men are associates. That hardly seems worthy of debate. Therefore, the hair-splitting being done by media outlets like AP, is kinda silly:
But while Ayers and Obama are acquainted, the charge that they “pal around” is a stretch of any reading of the public record. And it’s simply wrong to suggest that they were associated while Ayers was committing terrorist acts. Obama was 8 years old at the time the Weather Underground claimed credit for numerous bombings and was blamed for a pipe bomb that killed a San Francisco policeman.
First of all, who cares how old Obama was when Ayers was setting bombs? In fact, since Obama was so young when it happened he had to be well aware of Ayers’ reputation and chose to work with him, anyway. Questioning his judgment in doing so is fair game, and to say it’s not, is again, just silly. But it’s not as silly as the charge that criticizing Obama’s associations is tantamount to racism, as another AP pooh-pooh story claims:
Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as “not like us” is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.
Any criticism of Obama is going to be a criticism of a black man. Duh. But to claim that any critique is racially tinged or motivated is to diminish the reality of racism to the point of irrelevance. Obama knows and worked with William Ayers. William Ayers is a self-admitted terrorist. How well Obama knows people like that is important to ascertain, and just because some members of the mainstream media don’t like it, is not good enough reason to ignore it. My advice to the MSM: grow up and do your freaking jobs.
NOTE: The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, as well as FactCheck.org, are funded by The Annenberg Foundation.
UPDATE: From a University of Chicago article, 1997, comes this report of a conference organized by Michelle Obama with a panel including William Ayers and Barack Obama.
Ayers, who spent a year observing the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center in Chicago, is one of four panelists who will speak on juvenile justice at 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20, in the C-Shop. The panel, which marks the 100th anniversary of the juvenile justice system in the United States, is part of the Community Service Center’s monthly discussion series on issues affecting the city of Chicago. The event is free and open to the public.
Ayers will be joined by Sen. Barack Obama, Senior Lecturer in the Law School, who is working to combat legislation that would put more juvenile offenders into the adult system; Randolph Stone, Director of the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic; Alex Correa, a reformed juvenile offender who spent seven years in Cook County Temporary Detention Center; Frank Tobin, a former priest and teacher at the Detention Center who helped Correa; and Willy Baldwin, who grew up in public housing and is currently a teacher at the Detention Center.
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Michelle Obama, Associate Dean of Student Services and Director of the University Community Service Center, hopes bringing issues like this to campus will open a dialogue between members of the University community and the broader community.
h/t: Sweetness & Light
