For over a year, Hannity’s concerns were met with ridicule as mere racist right-wing rantings. After Wright’s sermons ignited a firestorm in March 08, Barack Obama denounced him. From HuffPo’s transcript, dated the 14th:
The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign. I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments. But because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community, where I married my wife and where my daughters were baptized, I did not think it appropriate to leave the church.
Notice Obama doesn’t mention being baptized himself. On the 15th, Jake Tapper questioned Obama’s version of events:
But according to a New York Times story from a year ago, the Obama campaign dis-invited Wright from delivering a public invocation at Obama’s candidacy announcement.
“Fifteen minutes before Shabbos I get a call from Barack,” Wright told the Times. “One of his members had talked him into uninviting me.”
In a phone call with Wright, Obama cited a Rolling Stone story, “The Radical Roots of Barack Obama,” (the name of which has curiously been changed on the RS website) and told him, according to Wright, “You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.”
Three days later, Obama threw Wright under the bus:
After claiming Wright was not his spiritual adviser, and even if he was, Obama never heard him say any of those bad things, and even if he did, he didn’t agree with him, and even if he did, he couldn’t disown him, and even if he could, he couldn’t leave his church, the bottom line is he was, he did, and he could.
Now, the same thing is playing out in the Ayers case. Obama doesn’t know him, at least, not well. Months ago, the issue was raised in the infamous Philadelphia debate Obama fared so poorly in against Hillary Clinton. As McCain is being characterized as employing a desperate “Hail Mary” unfair tactic against St. Obama, Clinton was similarly lampooned in the media. That was the first time we heard the “just a guy in my neighborhood” excuse. Now, the right-wing guys are challenging Obama’s Ayers excuses as they did his Wright ones. Predictably, Obama has leaned on the “neighborhood guy” thing as far as it would take him, which was to the “I didn’t know about him” stage, then to the “we’re not that close,” phase of “Obama Denial, 101.”
If history is any sort of teacher, we won’t have to wait long for the “Greatest Really Important Ayers Speech Ever.”
According to Politico, Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, says Barack Obama is lying about his associations with William Ayers. Doggonit.
“Barack Obama hasn’t told the American people the total truth about that, about his association with Ayers,” Palin said on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show. “Doggonit, he fails to tell the American people with candor and with truthfulness what his associations are and we have to know.”
In the same article, Obama retaliated predictably:
“I’ll repeat again what I’ve said many times. This is a guy who engaged in some despicable acts 40 years ago when I was eight years old. By the time I met him, 10 or 15 years ago, he was a college professor of education at the University of Illinois,” Obama said.
I call bullshit, Barack. I believe Sarah. Here’s the thing; since neither Obama or Ayers is forthcoming with relevant information, one must dig. And that’s a problem right there. Why is it that trying find out the truth about simple things takes so much work? Like, when, exactly, did Barack Obama graduate from Columbia? This story in The Nation, says 1985:
In 1985, freshly graduated from Columbia University and working for a New York business consultant, Barack Obama decided to become a community organizer. Though he liked the idea, he didn’t understand what the job involved, and his inquiries turned up few opportunities.
Obama says he was two years out of college, though when he became a community organizer:
I was just two years out of college when I first moved to the South Side of Chicago to become a community organizer.
Okay, so as many sources attest, he graduated Columbia in 1983. What did he do for two years? The Nation says he didn’t know what a community organizer was, CBS News quotes his autobiography, Dreams From My Father:
Even Obama didn’t know when he first gave it a try back in 1985. “When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly,” Obama wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. “Instead, I’d pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.”
So, two years out of college, he doesn’t know what a community organizer is, but he knows he wants to be one? Right. How does he know “change” comes from “grassroots?” Maybe the year he spent community organizing in Harlem might have something to do with it. From the New York Times:
Mr. Obama graduated in 1983. In his memoir, he says he had decided to become a community organizer but could not persuade anyone to hire him. So he found “more conventional work for a year” to pay off his student loans.
edit
After about a year, he was hired by the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit organization that promotes consumer, environmental and government reform. He became a full-time organizer at City College in Harlem, paid slightly less than $10,000 a year to mobilize student volunteers.
Mr. Obama says he spent three months “trying to convince minority students at City College about the importance of recycling” — a description that surprised some former colleagues. They said that more “bread-and-butter issues” like mass transit, higher education, tuition and financial aid were more likely the emphasis at City College.
So, he spent a few months doing a job he wanted, but didn’t know anything about, doing something no one can remember him doing the way he says he did it. This article chronicles Obama’s journey this way:
A year after graduating from Columbia, Obama spotted an intriguing help-wanted ad in The New York Times. The Calumet Community Religious Conference (ccrc), a group that aimed to convert the black churches of Chicago’s South Side into agents of social change, was looking for a community organizer to run the group’s inner-city arm, the Developing Communities Project (DCP). Obama soon arranged to meet in New York with the organizer heading up the job search.
Obama had spent the previous year on a fruitless quest. He worked briefly for a Ralph Nader outfit in Harlem teaching college kids about recycling and then on a losing assemblyman’s race in Brooklyn.
Now, the meeting was in New York, after he worked on somebody’s political campaign. Obama’s webpage bio doesn’t mention anything between Columbia and Chicago:
Barack’s father eventually returned to Kenya, and Barack grew up with his mother in Hawaii, and for a few years in Indonesia. Later, he moved to New York, where he graduated from Columbia University in 1983.
The College Years
Remembering the values of empathy and service that his mother taught him, Barack put law school and corporate life on hold after college and moved to Chicago in 1985, where he became a community organizer with a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued with crime and high unemployment.
Why are the two years between 1983 and 1985 so glossed over that even national magazines make the leap from college to community organizing in Chicago as though they were contemporaneous? A UAW.org profile mentions Harlem, but says community organizing came in Chicago:
After graduating from Columbia University, Obama worked for a Harlem environmental and consumer advocacy organization in New York City. In 1985 he was hired in Chicago as a community organizer for $10,000 and a used car.
Obama’s links to local school councils began more than 20 years ago, when they were first being created. His South Side community organizing group, the Developing Communities Project, supported the 1988 reform act that created the councils.
DCP was part of the Alliance for Better Schools, or ABC Coalition in 1988, which, at some point was chaired by, if not founded by William Ayers. From Wikipedia:
Ayers is also listed by name in the last column of the graphic above. While there are no straight lines here, to anything, there’s enough missing to raise questions, which to this point, are unanswered. So when Sarah Palin says Obama is not telling the truth about his association with Ayers, she’s right.
