The Wall Street Journal has a killer piece on Barack Obama’s ties to Weather Underground bomb-setter William Ayers, and his efforts on behalf of Ayers and his group (the Chicago Annenberg Challenge) to radicalize public education in the Chicago area.
An excerpt:
The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis.” Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I’ve recently spent days looking through them.
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago’s public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation’s other key body, the “Collaborative,” which shaped education policy.
The CAC’s basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.
One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama’s “recruitment” to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.
So, basically, Obama lied about his associations with Ayers. And he has tried to bury his employment with the CAC so that nobody can dig it up.
Why? Because Obama has created a persona for his national campaign that consists of his being a post-partisan leader, but the CAC was founded and guided by the radical Ayers who has said that he wants to turn public school teachers into liberal activists. The two versions of Obama don’t jive, and so Obama must hide one from public scrutiny.
And to date he’s been a lot more successful in that than he’s been in hiding other radical elements in his life, such as his pastor and spiritual mentor Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright. But even so, it’s shocking to know that we can sit down and watch CNN broadcast special reports about whether or not Sarah Palin knew rape victims were being charged for evidence kits in Alaska but almost nobody is looking into Obama’s ties to Ayers. Or wondering why Obama has gone to such great lengths to keep those ties quiet.