The controversy over an Obama–Ayers connection arose during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign of the significance and details of Presidential candidate Barack Obama's contacts with his constituent Bill Ayers, a former leader of the Weather Underground Organization who later became a professor of national reputation at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a "very respected and prominent" member of local society."^[1] Obama served on two nonprofit boards with Ayers and lived near him, and both Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn had hosted a small campaign meeting for Obama at their home.^[2] The matter was covered by news organizations and brought up by the campaign of competing candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton in February 2008, revisited during a debate between Clinton and Obama in April 2008, then subsequently picked up by Republican presidential candidate John McCain as an issue in the general election campaign. Obama condemned Ayers' past through a spokesman,^[3] and indicated he does not have a close association with Ayers.^[2]

Underlying circumstances

William Ayers

Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn have been controversial because in the 1960s and 1970s they were members of the five-member central committee that ran^[4] the violent,^[5] left-wing radical^[6] Weatherman organization which has often been characterized as terrorist.^[7][8][9] The group placed bombs at a number of government institutions, and Ayers has said he was involved in some of the bombings.^[10] The husband and wife are fixtures of their Chicago neighborhood, "embraced, by and large, in the liberal circles dominating Hyde Park politics", according to Ben Smith, a reporter for The Politico.^[11] Ayers has been described as "very respected and prominent in Chicago [with] a national reputation as an educator."^[1] Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, some alumni of the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Ayers is a tenured professor of education, and Northwestern University, where Dohrn is a law professor, have protested their presence, though colleagues believe their achievements since overshadow those actions. "This is a community that has regularly elected former Black Panther Bobby Rush (D) to Congress and mostly sees Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., as the onetime heart of an established African American church with thousands of members," according to an article in The Washington Post. ^[12]

Interaction between Obama and Ayers

Ayers and Dohrn hosted a "meet-and-greet" political meeting for Obama at their home in the Hyde Park section of Chicago, where the Ayers and the Obamas lived. (The meeting has also been called a fundraising event.^[13]) It was at this meeting that then State Senator Alice Palmer introduced Barack Obama as her chosen candidate for the 1996 Democratic primary.^[14] Although the exact date of the meeting is not known, it was sometime in the second half of 1995, according to Ben Smith, a reporter for The Politico.^[11] Chicagoan Maria Warren wrote in 2005 on her Musings & Migraines blog: "When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the livingroom of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. They were launching him — introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread."^[11]

Obama served as president of the board of directors for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a large education-related nonprofit organization Ayers was instrumental in starting. The board disbursed grants to schools and raised private matching funds while Ayers worked with the operational arm of the effort. Both attended some board meetings in common starting in 1995,^[15][16] retreats, and at least one news conference together as the education program started. They continued to attend meetings together during the 1995-2001 period when the program was operating.^[16]

Obama and Ayers served together for three years on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, an anti-poverty foundation established in 1941. Obama had joined the nine-member board in 1993, and had attended a dozen of the quarterly meetings together with Ayers in the three years up to 2002, when Obama left his position on the board,^[1] which Ayers chaired for two years.^[17] Laura S. Washington, chairwoman of the Woods Fund, said the small board had a collegial "friendly but businesslike" atmosphere, and met four times a year for a half-day, mostly to approve grants.^[2] The two also appeared together on academic panel discussions, including a 1997 University of Chicago discussion on juvenile justice. They again appeared in 2002 at an academic panel co-sponsored by the Chicago Public Library.^[1] One panel discussion in which they both appeared was organized by Obama's wife, Michelle.^[18] Ayers donated $200 to Obama's 2001 state senate campaign.^[19]

In 2008, a spokesman for the Obama campaign said the last time Obama and Ayers had seen each other was when Obama was biking in the neighborhood in 2007 and crossed paths with Ayers. "The suggestion that Ayers was a political adviser to Obama or someone who shaped his political views is patently false," the spokesman said.^[10]

Presidential campaign issue

News organisations began covering Obama's association with Ayers during the 2008 Presidential campaign. According to research by the Washington Post, the first coverage in the mainstream media occured in the British press in February 2008.^[20] In a February 15, 2008 article, a Bloomberg L.P. reporter quoted Obama's rival, Hillary Clinton, who stated that the Republican Party might use the supposed connection with Ayers to discredit Obama if he were chosen as the nominee of the Democratic Party.^[21]

The connection was picked up by a number of blogs, including the Huffington Post.^[22] However, Howard Kurtz has written that the connection between the two Chicagoans was "all but ignored by the news media, other than Fox" until it was raised in a presidential debate.^[23]

Primary debates

At the Democratic Party primary debate in Philadelphia on April 16, 2008, moderator George Stephanopoulos (after Sean Hannity suggested the question the day before ^[24]) questioned Obama about his association with Ayers, asking the candidate: "Can you explain that relationship for the voters, and explain to Democrats why it won't be a problem?"^[17] Obama responded as follows:

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 eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense, George.^[25][2]

Obama's response led to an exchange between him and Clinton, in which Clinton said, "Senator Obama served on a board with Mr. Ayers for a period of time, the Woods Fund, which was a paid directorship position." ^[17] Obama then referred to President Bill Clinton's pardoning of Linda Sue Evans and Susan Rosenberg,^[26] two former Weather Underground members convicted for their actions after joining the splinter group May 19 Communist Organization. The following Sunday, Stephanopoulos asked Republican presidential candidate John McCain about Obama's patriotism, and McCain responded: "I'm sure he's very patriotic", then added, "But his relationship with Mr. Ayers is open to question."^[17]

General election campaign

In April, 2008 John McCain began to question Obama's interactions with Ayers^[27] and it became an issue later in the general election campaign. In August, 2008, the Republican Party created website, barackbook.com, as a spoof of Facebook, on which Ayers is listed as one of Obama's "friends", and that contains a mocked-up user profile for Bill Ayers, which describes the controversy and Obama's alleged connections with Ayers.^[28]

Also in August The American Issues Project began running an ad that said in part, "Barack Obama is friends with Ayers, defending him as, quote, 'Respectable' and 'Mainstream.' Obama's political career was launched in Ayers' home. And the two served together on a left-wing board. Why would Barack Obama be friends with someone who bombed the Capitol and is proud of it? Do you know enough to elect Barack Obama?" In response, the Obama campaign's attorney Robert Bauer wrote TV stations running the ad, saying, "Your station is committed to operating in the public interest, an objective that cannot be satisfied by accepting for compensation material of such malicious falsity," and wrote Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General John C. Keeney, describing the ad as a "willful attempt to evade the strictures of federal election law."^[29] The same month, the Obama campaign ran a TV ad in selected market that said in part, "With all our problems, why is John McCain talking about the 60s, trying to link Barack Obama to radical Bill Ayers? McCain knows Obama denounced Ayers' crimes, committed when Obama was just 8 years old."^[30]

Reaction to the controversy

Obama has condemned Ayers' past through a spokesman.^[3] After the controversy arose Ayers was defended by officials and others in Chicago. Mayor Richard M. Daley issued a statement in support of Bill Ayers the next day (April 17), as did the Chicago Tribune in an editorial.^[31][32] Ayers remains on the Board of Directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago^[33] Washington said it was "ridiculous to suggest there's anything inappropriate" about the two men serving on the foundation board.^[1]

Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Post opinion columnist, wrote that, "Obama's defense is that he was 8 when Ayers and his Weather Underground comrades were planting bombs at the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol and other buildings. True. But Obama was 40 when Ayers said publicly that he doesn't regret setting bombs. Indeed, he said, "I feel we didn't do enough."^[34]

Michael Kinsley, a longtime critic of Ayers,^[35] argued in Time that Obama's relationship with Ayers should not be a campaign issue: "If Obama's relationship with Ayers, however tangential, exposes Obama as a radical himself, or at least as a man with terrible judgment, he shares that radicalism or terrible judgment with a comically respectable list of Chicagoans and others — including Republicans and conservatives — who have embraced Ayers and Dohrn as good company, good citizens, even experts on children's issues."^[36]

In August, when the controversy again became more prominent when it was mentioned in two bestselling books: author Jerome Corsi mentioned it in The Obama Nation, a book intended to defeat Obama's election campaign, and conservative author David Freddoso wrote in The Case Against Barack Obama that the situation raised questions about Obama's judgment and influences.^[37] Chicago Tribune columnist and editorial board member Steve Chapman suggested that while Obama was "justly criticized for his ties" to Ayers, the coverage of that connection should be matched by equal coverage of John McCain's associating with convicted Watergate burglar Gordon Liddy.^[38][39]

References

External links

• Barack Obama campaign statement on Ayers, April 17, 2008