What Change Will Obama Make?

William Ayers

William Ayers, the son of the chairman of Commonwealth Edison CEO Thomas Ayers, was born in Glen Elyn, IL in 1944. In the late 1960s, as a student at the University of Michigan, he was a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) which protested American involvement in Vietnam and participated in riots in Chicago’s Grant Park during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In 1969, after his graduation from the University of Michigan, he co-founded the Weather Underground, a radical and violent offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society. Ayers and other lunatic members of this fringe splinter group became enamored of street fighting and other direct forms of violent action to advance their objectives.

In a 1995 magazine interview, Ayers described his political beliefs as "radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist…” “Maybe I'm the last communist who is willing to admit it,” he said. “We have always been small 'c' communists in the sense that we were never in the [Communist] party and never Stalinists. The ethics of Communism still appeal to me. I don't like Lenin as much as the early Marx. I also like Henry David Thoreau, Mother Jones and Jane Addams…” In 1970, Ayers was called "a national leader" of the Weatherman organization and "one of the chief theoreticians of the Weathermen." When you see the word, “theoretician,” you will invariably see at the other end of it the name of some loopy leftist trying to pad his resume.

Never far from their days in diapers, or, as in the case of Ayers, their family wealth, these spoiled and guilt-ridden radicals were consumed by a grossly inflated sense of self-importance. Yet, no sooner had they organized, than they began splintering into smaller and smaller fringe groups reflecting the anarchic nature of their ideas and their own highly unstable personalities. The Weathermen were initially part of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) of the SDS, whose aim was to build a vanguard party with which to promote societal revolution. Some, like Ayers, who wished to hasten the overthrow of capitalism and the U.S. government, broke from the more “moderate” RYM's Maoists to organize a “white fighting force” allied with the "Black Liberation Movement.” Their aim: "the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism."

In June 1969, the Weathermen took control of the SDS at its national convention, where Ayers was elected “Education Secretary.“ Later that year, Ayers participated in planting a bomb at a statue dedicated to the police killed in the 1886 Chicago Haymarket Riot between police and labor supporters. In October 1969, he took part in the Days of Rage riot in Chicago and, in December, was at the "War Council" meeting in Flint, Michigan. It was during his days in the Weather Underground that Ayers met his future wife, Bernadine Dohrn, who shared his passion for violent action.

Following the explosion of a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970, Ayers and several of his co-conspirators went underground. Ayers’ friends Ted Gold, Terry Robbins, and girlfriend Diana Oughton were killed when a nail bomb they were assembling exploded prematurely. A few weeks earlier, the group targeted the home of New York State Supreme Court Justice Murtaugh, whose family narrowly escaped death. Judge Murtaugh was targeted because he was presiding over the trial of the “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Ayers also took part in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the United States Capitol in 1971, and The Pentagon in 1972, all of which he admits in his 2001 book Fugitive Days. Ayers fanaticizes that the Pentagon blast caused a water leak which halted aerial bombardments for several days during the Vietnam War.

Ayers married Bernardine Dohrn while the two were underground, and concealed their identities by changing names, jobs and residences. By 1976 or 1977, by which time federal charges against both fugitives had been dropped due to prosecutorial misconduct (illegal wiretaps), Ayers was ready to turn himself in. Dohrn, however, remained reluctant to do so until after the birth of two sons in 1977 and 1980. Finally, in 1980, the two turned themselves in to the authorities. The following year, they became legal guardians to the son of former Weathermen David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin after the boy's parents were convicted and sent to prison for their part in the Brinks Robbery of 1981.

Ayers is currently a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education where he is actively involved in promoting his radical ideology to future teachers in the form of classes in “social justice,” and “urban educational reform.” [Those who wish to explore the broader context of teacher education in the United States are urged to read Rita Kramer’s Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's Teachers, which lays bare the decline of teacher education in the United States under such politicization. Though not specifically aimed at Ayers, or the Chicago experience, Kramer’s commentary reveals why urban public schools, in particular, are in such a sorry state.]

Ayers actually began his career in primary education while still an undergraduate, teaching at the Children’s Community School (CCS), a project founded by a group of students and based on the radical Summerhill method of education. After leaving the underground, he earned an M.Ed from Bank Street College in Early Childhood Education (1984), an M.Ed from Teachers College, Columbia University in Early Childhood Education (1987) and an Ed.D from Teachers College, Columbia University in Curriculum and Instruction (1987).

The Obama Connection

Barack Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers goes back nearly twenty years, probably to the period when Obama’s wife, Michelle, and Ayers’ wife, Bernadine Dohrn, worked at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin. Dohrn, who worked as a paralegal at the firm, was not allowed to take the bar exam because of her felony conviction. It is not clear if Barack Obama, who had a summer clerkship at Sidley following his first year at Harvard Law School, and Dohrn worked at Sidley at the same time. However, it is quite likely that Obama and William Ayers were well acquainted after Obama graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991 and returned to Chicago to become director of Project Vote, a national political effort designed to register “disenfranchised” minorities. Obama was also recruited to serve on the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Education Fund, together with Ayers’ father, Thomas, and brother, John.

In 1995, Bill Ayers applied to the Annenberg Foundation for a grant to improve public education in Chicago, and co-founded the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to administer $50 million in grant monies. He selected Barack Obama as the first chairman of the board, a position Obama held until 2003.

In 1995, when Obama announced for an Illinois state senate seat, his introductory political event was held in the Hyde Park townhouse of William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, an event arranged by Alice Palmer, the incumbent and a hard leftist with decided sympathies for the former Soviet Union. As editor of the Black Press Review, Palmer was the only African-American to cover the 27th Congress of the Communist Party to the Soviet Union, which she did in glowing terms.

Not only was Obama’s political career launched in the living room of William Ayers, but, beginning in 1999, Obama served three years with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund, a foundation whose mission “seeks to enable policy and social justice organizations to better understand that the political realities for system change are grounded in the context of the affected community, so that they might develop effective change strategies rooted in these understandings and increase their skills in translating local issues into systemic solutions.” Behind all the jargon, it is clear that the Woods Fund finances the kind of community organizing efforts dear to the hearts of radical reformers, such as Saul Alinsky, whose efforts were directed less at self-improvement among the underclass than in working to ratchet up government handouts and transform the current capitalist system.

Obama tries to distance himself from Ayers on the grounds that he was only eight years old when the bombs were ignited. This attempt at an explanation takes the American electorate for fools, and reflects Obama’s inability to tell the truth. Both Obama and his campaign manager David Axelrod have claimed that Obama and Ayers were merely neighbors, and that their children attended school together. The latter claim is, in itself, laughable. Ayers children are roughly twenty years older than Obama’s, and both had completed high school before Obama’s children were born. Later, when pressed, Obama admitted that he and Ayers had served on a board together which dealt with educational issues.

The problem with Obama’s explanation is that (1) as late as 2001 Ayers defended his bombings by saying "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough;” (2) Ayers continues his radical activities in other, primarily educational, venues; and (3) Obama engaged in an active relationship with Ayers when, for eight years, they both served on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Foundation, much of it not innocent attempts to improve public education, but highly politicized attempts to inject radical left-wing indoctrination into K-12 student instruction. And, as a footnote, no measurable improvements in student achievement resulted from the infusion of the millions received from Annenberg Foundation. Their experience in promoting Afro-centric education, peace and social justice studies turned out to be a monumental waste of private funds, as well as an improper attempt to inject left-wing ideological indoctrination into public instruction.

Ayers' educational views are so radical that they have even found a sympathetic ear in the person of Hugo Chavez to whom, in 2006, Ayers expressed the view “we share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution.” For a graduate of Harvard Law School to contend that he was not aware of Ayers’ views and activities is simply beyond belief. To the contrary, with the exception of Ayers’ bomb-setting activities which Obama properly finds reprehensible, the two share a similar ideological worldview that continues to the present day, as evidenced by their joint attempts to inject far-left politics into Chicago school curricula.

Sadly, Ayers has been able to exert his influence on Chicago’s corrupt political establishment and its current mayor, Richard J. Daley, who, amazingly, has employed Ayers as a trainer for Chicago’s public schools and consulted him on matters of education “reform.” In consulting William Ayers on matters of school reform, Mayor Daley reveals just how out-of-touch he is to the needs and aspirations of Chicago’s schoolchildren. It’s sort of like “Wrong-Way” Corrigan meets Karl Marx.

Ayers is just one of the far-left extremists with whom Obama has chosen to associate.

More on Ayers:

Obama - Ayers connection
Evidence Mounts: Ayers Co-Wrote Obama's Dreams
CNN: Obama's relationship with Ayers "much deeper than Obama said"
American Thinker blog
LA Times article
Bill Ayers Stomping the American Flag
Wikipedia