Obama’s partnership with William Ayers

When accused earlier this year of having close ties with former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, Barack Obama said that Ayers is just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis.” In fact, as Stanley Kurtz brings out in today’s Wall Street Journal, Obama was approved by Ayers to be the first chairman of the board of the radical educational foundation that Ayers started in 1995, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge; Obama served as chairman from 1995 to 1999 and remained on the board until 2001; and Obama and Ayers—who at the time he founded CAC described himself to an interviewer as a “radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist”—worked closely together during that period.

Supported financially by Reagan friend Ambassador Walter Annenberg (yet another rich conservative who allowed his money to serve liberal and radical causes), the Chicago Annenberg Challenge funded partnerships between radical community organizing groups, such as ACORN, and Chicago public schools. Under the programs that were financed and directed by CAC, individual schools were organized around specific political themes, with pupils being encouraged to “confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.” In brief, CAC’s mission was to gain influence over public schools in order to turn their pupils into leftist activists.

Ironically, as Kurtz points out, despite Obama’s crying need to show that he has had executive experience, his chairmanship of CAC was the major executive experience of his life, but he has never mentioned it.

Which is of a piece with the fact that Obama’s entire life is a lie. He spent 20 years as a devoted follower of the white-hating, Farrakhanite-style pastor Jeremiah Wright, then claimed he knew nothing about Wright’s preachings and teachings. He was picked by and worked for years with the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers as the chairman of a radical foundation of which Ayers was the founder and guiding spirit, then claimed that Ayers was nothing more than a neighbor. Even his claim that he has no substantive relationship with Ayers contains a Clintonian escape hatch, since the statement that Ayers is “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis” implies that Ayers is someone he exchanges ideas with on an occasional basis.

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Mark Jaws writes:

If we could just put your razor sharp mind and my good looks and sex appeal into one conservative candidate, think of what we could do. Instead we are stuck with this bozo McCain.

LA writes:

Obama has said that he bears no connection to Ayer’s career as a terrorist because he was eight years old at the time. First, that’s an idiotic comment that only a conscienceless liar would make, since the issue is not what Obama was doing when he was eight, but Obama’s adult connections with Ayers in the 1990s. Second, Obama has also said, in early 2008, that Ayers is “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis.” Which clearly suggests that he does exchange ideas with Ayers on an occasional basis. Meaning that Obama, in 2008, has an ongoing intellectual relationship with William Ayers—i.e., after Ayer’s statement of a year or two ago that he wishes he had carried out more terrorism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 23, 2008 08:29 AM | Send