Tornado Alley (PROG)

[ieddyi]

Obama And Ayers - What's The Story?

Marc Ambinder wonders, what is the point of the Obama-Ayers connection?

What "radical" ideas did Obama and Bill Ayres come up with to foist on the Chicago school system?

What specific projects -- "radical" projects -- did Obama work on with Ayres? Is there evidence that they collaborated and schemed to ... do anything "radical" together? Ever?

...

Is the real story here that Obama once served on the board of a liberal education charity?

Silent Running wonders whether Google has canceled Marc Ambinder's subscription:

WTF Ambinder? Google blocked at your place? | September 23rd, 2008

CY points out a classic lefty response - toss out a bunch of simple questions already answered in the material they don’t like, avoid the (repeat of the just as simple) answers, then hope something else comes along to change the subject.

My guess is that Google probably is blocked, since Ambinder resolutely misspells "Ayers" as "Ayres".

Steve Diamond, who has been advancing this story for months, has a summary here and a full paper devoted to the Ayers education agenda. From the summary:

Rather, I think there was a more pressing purpose at the heart of the award and the support it engendered among certain elite institutions and individuals in Chicago. Ironically, while Kurtz wants to tar Obama with the red paint brush of the 60s "radical" Ayers, an understanding of the real purpose of the CAC indicates a much closer political alliance between Obama and Ayers.
The grant application itself and much of what the CAC was up to emerged in the heated "Chicago School Wars" underway in that city from the late 1980s until the late 1990s. This war was for the control of Chicago's public schools.
One side in this war was controlled by Mayor Richard M. Daley, Jr., son of the legendary Mayor Daley.
And the other side was led by Ayers and a small group of reformers that had emerged several years earlier in 1988 during a battle to create a new power center in the Chicago schools, the so-called Local School Councils, or LSCs. The LSCs were an effort to rein in the power of unionized teachers, school principals and school administrators, in the wake of an unpopular teachers' strike in 1987.
This milieu around Ayers also included, as far back as the late 80s, Barack Obama and the Developing Communities Project (DCP) that had hired Obama as its Executive Director in 1985. The DCP was a leading participant in the campaign to establish the LSCs.
Thus, in fact, the "radical" Bill Ayers and his ally Barack Obama, a Democratic political activist and lawyer on the rise in Chicago, were engaged in an anti-union effort to influence the direction and nature of the entire Chicago public school system. It would lead them into a battle with Mayor Daley himself.

I don't know why the real story can't be the ongoing Obama cover-up of his once-close relationship with an unrepentant domestic terrorist. Isn't the cover-up worse than the crime? Obama and his campaign (including David Axelrod) have been providing false and misleading answers to questions about the Obama-Ayers relationship since February.

And this cover-up is continuing - there is an excellent chance that Obama and Ayers first allied in 1988 but the campaign has not admitted this and the press is not exactly pushing hard for answers.

We will see where Ambinder takes this. At a minimum, we hope he can figure out how to spell "Ayres".

AHH, YES: If you remember without looking that Fox News also mis-spelled "Ayres" you have been following this story too closely. But you will also remember that this is the only time Obama came close to describing his relationship with Ayers (it was a few days after the Philadelphia debate, in which Ayers was just a guy from the neighborhood. Here is Obama with Chris Wallace of Fox:

OBAMA: ...Now, Mr. Ayres 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.

Well, it is hard to characterize the Chicago Annenberg Challenge as having "worked for Mayor Daley" given its role in the Chicago school wars. And the suggestion is not that Obama endorses Ayers' domestic terrorism; the suggestion is that Obama and Ayers share a hard-left educational philosophy, that Obama has an odd taste in friends, and that Obama has been lying about his past.


http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2008/09/obama-and-ayers.html