Barack Obama and Weather Underground member William G. Ayers. Is there anything there? Does it matter? Senator Obama says it doesn’t. In his debate with Hillary Clinton on April 16, Senator Obama said this about the Bill Ayers connection:
"This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.
And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense, George [i.e., George Stephanopolous]."
Here is what Senator Obama said about Ayers on FOX News Sunday on April 27:
"Now, Mr. Ayres [sic] is a 60 plus year old individual who lives in my neighborhood, who did something that I deplore 40 years ago when I was six or seven years old. By the time I met him, he was a professor of education at the University of Illinois.
We served on a board together that had Republicans, bankers, lawyers, focused on education, who worked for Mayor Daley. Mayor Daley, the same Mayor Daley probably who when he was a state attorney prosecuted Mr. Ayres’s wife for those activities, I (INAUDIBLE) the point is that to somehow suggest that in any way I endorse his deplorable acts 40 years ago, because I serve on a board with him."
A few thoughts. First, how does a private citizen "officially endorse" you? I’m not sure. That sounds like something you say when you can’t think of anything good to say.
Senator Obama says he shouldn’t be associated with what Bill Ayers was doing 40 years ago because he was only eight years old at the time and he doesn’t endorse "the detestable acts" that Ayers did back then. I wasn’t eight years old in the late 60s and early 1970s. I was in my early 20’s, and I remember what the Weather Underground was doing. They were setting bombs. They were blowing up buildings. They were trying to kill people.
Bill Ayers tries to downplay this last part, about trying to kill people, saying that the only people the Weather Underground ever killed were some of their own members. (Three Weather Underground members were killed in an explosion in a Greenwich Village townhouse while they were trying to build bombs – to kill people). It’s nice story, but John Murtaugh doesn’t appreciate it. You see, in 1970, John Murtaugh was nine years old when the Weather Underground set off three bombs outside his house. The Weather Underground was trying to kill his father, a New York judge who was presiding over a trial of Black Panther Party members accused of plotting to bomb sites in New York.
I do not know if Bill Ayers was in the Weather Underground cell that set off those bombs, but he was in the Weather Underground at that time. In an interview published in The New York Times on September 11, 2001 (bad timing from Ayers’s viewpoint), Ayers was quoted as saying: "I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough." When asked if he would do it again, Mr. Ayers said, "I don’t want to discount the possibility."
Some people have commented on the fact that Ayers and Senator Obama both served on the board of the Woods Fund for a period back in the 1990s. I’m not going to complain about that. The Woods Fund might have been the kind of a group that Senator Obama felt he wanted to help even though there were other people on the board that he did not care for. I have been in groups where I didn’t particularly like a few people in the group, but I stayed because it was a good group.
On the other hand, when it comes to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the story is a little different. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was part of an attempt to reform the Chicago public schools. Here the Ayers-Obama connection is a little closer. Ayers co-wrote the initial grant proposal for the Challenge and, on his own website, lists himself as a co-founder of the group. Barack Obama was the Chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Fund in its early years.
In 1995, when Obama was starting his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate, his predecessor introduced Obama as her preferred successor in a meeting in Hyde Park – in Bill Ayers’ house. (See here.) To me, that is a problem. Obama shouldn’t have been using somebody’s house to start his political campaign unless he knew something about them and felt comfortable with them. Even if Obama didn’t know them, somebody did. Clearly, Bill Ayers’s house was considered an acceptable place to start a state Senate campaign. The political activists, the liberal Democrats, in Barack Obama’s neighborhood apparently felt at home in Bill Ayers’s house.
Some commentators have claimed that the criticisms of Senator Obama becaue of his connections with Bill Ayers are "McCarthyism." I am sure they would say that about my comments. Well, I don’t think they are. Let me explain.
Barack Obama has a more limited public record than John McCain. He even has a more limited public record than Hillary Clinton. That makes it harder to judge him. With John McCain, we don’t need to look at his associates to know who John McCain is or what he is all about. John McCain was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982 and to the United States Senate in 1986. That’s over 25 years in Congress. There is a huge public record to tell us about John McCain. Senator Clinton has only been in the United States Senate since 2000, but that is twice as long as Senator Obama. Also, half the time Senator Obama has been in the Senate, he has been running for President, so he doesn’t really have a Senate record of much more than two years.
Therefore, in Senator Obama’s case, we need to learn about him in ways other than his public record; we need to check other sources. One of those ways to do this is by seeing who he associates with, by seeing what kind of community he comes from and feels comfortable in. Well, Bill Ayers is part of Barack Obama’s community. Barack Obama’s political career started at Bill Ayers’ house. It’s pretty clear the people in Barack Obama’s community feel that Bill Ayers fits into their community. Bill Ayers, with his unrepentant, bomb-setting, Weather Underground background, apparently fits in with the liberal Democrats in Chicago. That tells me something about the liberal Democrats in Chicago, and that tells me something about Barack Obama.
One of William F. Buckley, Jr.'s last published articles described his role in getting the John Birchers kicked out of the conservative movement. Buckley knew that who you associate with politically says something about who you are politically, and he didn’t want conservativism to be associated with those kinds of people.
I think the same test can be applied to Barack Obama. If liberal Democrats in Chicago think Bill Ayers, with his past and what he apparently still thinks today, fits into their community and what they are trying to do, then I think that says something about liberal Democrats from Chicago. And that is why I do not want Barack Obama, a liberal Democrat from Chicago, to be President.
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* Bill Ayers has written that between 1970 and 1974 the Weather Underground took responsibility for twelve bombings. (See here.)
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