William Ayers and Barack Obama were closely linked in radical politics in Chicago for years.
Ayers is the unrepentant terrorist bomber of the Capitol, the Pentagon and police stations who escaped prison time because of prosecutorial error. One of his compatriots who was separately investigated was sentenced to 58 years in prison for the same things Ayers did as a member of the Weather Underground. (He has claimed he only meant to blow up property and never intended to hurt anyone. This lie has been exposed: three of his people assembling a nail bomb according to his design were killed. The bomb was intended to be set off at a dance at Fort Dix to kill soldiers and their dates.)
When Obama first ran for public office in Illinois, his kickoff event in 1995 was hosted by Ayers in the home he shared with fellow terrorist bomber Bernadine Dohrn. Over the next six years Obama and Ayers worked closely together seeking to instill radicalism into the Chicago school system, not seeking to improve education, but to turn teachers and the kids into community agitators. The project ran through $160 million in charitable contributions and a study found it had no discernible effect.
Ayers and Obama worked as paid directors on the small board of another charity funding radical groups in the Chicago area, including one Arab American group that funneled money to a known Palestinian terrorist organization.
In 2001, while they were still actively collaborating, Ayers published a book glorifying his days as a terrorist bomber in the 1970s, expressing no regret except he hadn't done enough. In a newspaper interview, also in 2001, he showed his continuing hatred of America, saying the very thought of it made him "want to puke." For a Chicago magazine that same year he was shown on the cover standing on the American flag.
Obama has tried repeatedly to downplay his relationship with Ayers and the mainstream media have shown no interest in looking into it. It fell to a researcher at the respected Washington Ethics and Public Policy Center Stanley Kurtz to do the leg work. He has been harrassed by Obama supporters every step of the way and for a time public records in Chicago to which he sought access -- for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge --were blocked.
What Kurtz found is illuminating.
What drew Ayers and Obama together was "community organizing." That's what the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was all about. Teachers were to be taught to become dedicated to provoking (the kids they're teaching, presumably) resistance to "American racism and oppression." Ayers has said in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," his goal is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.
Does this sound like what Obama was fixated on during his high school and college days when he "hung out" with black power advocates and Marxist socialists and then went on to live the real thing in Chicago as a community organizer before going off to get a law degree?
Ayers describes himself much like Obama thought about himself, as recounted in "Dreams From My Father." Ayers says: "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist."
Together, Obama and Ayers tried to advance their Marxist socialist goals by making teachers and children in the schools into radicals like themselves. Fortunately, they seemed to have failed in their mission. Hopefully, providing a good education for the kids is still the priority of the Chicago school system.
So Ayers is not only an unrepentant terrorist he is still a radical seeking to change the system. Obama has gone underground with his radicalism, seeking to achieve his goals from the inside of the system rather than from without. There is no indication that his Marxist socialist goals have changed at all.
Clearly, a distaste, a hatred of America still powers Ayers. There is much in Obama's rhetoric that exhibits the same distaste.
SEPTEMBER 23, 2008 Wall Street JournalObama and Ayers
Pushed Radicalism
On SchoolsBy STANLEY KURTZ
Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.
The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them.
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago's public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the "Collaborative," which shaped education policy.
The CAC's basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.
One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.
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.
The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.
The Obama campaign notes that Mr. Ayers attended only six board meetings, and stresses that the Collaborative lost its "operational role" at CAC after the first year. Yet the Collaborative was demoted to a strictly advisory role largely because of ethical concerns, since the projects of Collaborative members were receiving grants. CAC's own evaluators noted that project accountability was hampered by the board's reluctance to break away from grant decisions made in 1995. So even after Mr. Ayers's formal sway declined, the board largely adhered to the grant program he had put in place.
Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.
Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.
The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.
Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
