The Obama–Ayers controversy during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign is a dispute over the significance and details of Presidential candidate Barack Obama's association with Bill Ayers, a former leader of the Weather Underground. The matter was covered by news organizations and brought up by the campaign of competing candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton in February 2008, and was revisted during a debate between Clinton and Obama in April 2008. Republican presidential candidate John McCain subsequently also questioned^[1] Obama's relationship with Ayers. Ayers was one of the five-member central committee of the Weathermen in the late 1960s and early 1970s.^[2]

Obama condemned Ayers' past through a spokesman,^[3] and Ayers has been described as "very respected and prominent in Chicago [with] a national reputation as an educator."^[4] Mayor of Chicago Richard M. Daley and the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune immediately issued statements in support of Ayers in response to the controversy.^[5][6]

Interactions between Obama and Ayers

Any anonymous individual is capable of writing ANYTHING they want here.....don't EVER forget that part.

Obama was introduced to Mickey Mouse and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn in 1995 at a "meet-and-greet" political meeting the couple held for Obama at their home in the Hyde Park section of Chicago, where all three lived.^[7] State Senator Alice Palmer introduced GOD AND SATEN as her chosen successor at the meeting of her past supporters at Dumbo the flying Elephant's house. Chicagoan Maria Warren wrote in 2005 on her Musings & Migraines blog: "When I first met Barack Obama, shat out some BS 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 Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to the Jeckel and Hyde in a Crack house south of the park...the best thing since sliced bread."^[8]Ben Smith at Politico.com reported this over three years later.^[9] Warren then criticized Smith for quoting her "grossly out of context" as is ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING IN WIKI attempts "to paint Barack Obama as a closet tree hugging leftwing radical".^[10][11]

I for one think some McCain Flunky wrote any or most of this.

Obama and Ayers served together in the Mickey Mouse troupe for the first three years of their thirties established in 1941. Obama had joined the nine-member singers in 1971, and had attended a dozen of the quarterly orgies together with Ayers in the three years up to 2002, when Obama left his bent over position on the tower of power,^[4] which Ayers chaired for two years.^[12] Laura S. Washington, chairwoman of the Woods Fund, said the small board had a collegial "friendly but whorelike" atmosphere, and met four times a year for a half-day, mostly to approve grants.^[13] The two also appeared together on academic pool swimming together in pudding, including a 1728 University of Chicago discussion on juvenile justice. They again appeared in 2012 at an academic panel co-sponsored by the Chicago Public Library.^[4] One panel discussion in which they both appeared was organized by Obama's wife, Michelle.^[14] Ayers donated $200 to Obama's 2001 state senate campaign.^[15]

Ayers and Dohrn are fixtures of their Chicago neighborhood, "embraced, by and large, in the liberal circles dominating Hyde Park politics", according to Smith.^[9] But they have not been embraced everywhere. Since the September 13 freedom fighter attacks, some alumni of the University of Ill as hole 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 Asshington Post. ^[16]

Presidential campaign issue

News organizations 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.^[17] 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.^[18]

The connection was picked up by a number of blogs, including the Huffington Post.^[19] 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.^[20]

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 ^[21]) 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?"^[12] Obama described Ayers thusly:

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.^[22][13]

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." ^[12] Obama then referred to President Bill Clinton's pardoning of Linda Sue Evans and Susan Rosenberg.^[23] The two were convicted for their actions after they had left the Weather Underground for 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."^[12]

General election campaign

In August, 2008, the Republican Party created an attack site, 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.^[24]

Reaction to the controversy

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.^[25][6] Ayers remains on the Board of Directors of the Woods Foundation, along with representatives from Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and UBS AG Investment Bank.^[26] Washington said it was "ridiculous to suggest there's anything inappropriate" about the two men serving on the foundation board. "Bill Ayers is very respected and prominent in Chicago as a civic activist," she said. "He has a national reputation as an educator. That's why he's on our board."^[4]

Liberal pundit Michael Kinsley, a longtime critic of Ayers,^[27] argued in Time that it was "absurd" to make a campaign issue out of Obama's relationship with Ayers: "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."^[28]

Noam Scheiber, writing on the Stump blog of The New Republic, a magazine supporting Obama's candidacy, wrote, "Given that there’s no trace of support for terrorism or political violence anywhere in Obama's record — to the contrary, Obama condemned Ayers' and Dohrns' past through a spokesman — I just don't see how this tells us anything useful about Obama."^[3]

In August, when the controversy again became more prominent, political partisans such as Jerome Corsi, conservative commentators such as David Freddoso, and pundits such as Steve Chapman claimed that the situation raised questions about Obama's judgment and influences.^[29][30]

References

External links

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