cant we easily prove this?
wouldnt there have been a press release?
There is a clip when Obama used his time as chairman for Ayer’s group in Chicago as justification of his executive experience. It’s somewhere out there.
Ayers was one of the original grantees of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school reform organization in the 1990s, and was cochairman of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, one the two operational arms of the CAC. Obama, then not yet a state senator, became chairman of the CAC in 1995. Later in that year, the first organizing meeting for Obama’s state Senate campaign was held in Ayers’s apartment. Ayers later wrote a memoir, and an article about him appeared in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” Ayers is quoted as saying. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Ayers was a terrorist in the late 1960s and 1970s whose radical group set bombs at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.
You might wonder what Obama was doing working with a character like this. And you might wonder how an unrepentant terrorist got a huge grant and cooperation from the Chicago public school system. You might wonder—if you don’t know Chicago. For this is a city with a civic culture in which politicians, in the words of a story often told by former congressman, federal judge, and Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva, “don’t want nobody nobody sent.” That’s what Mikva remembers being told when he went to a Democratic ward headquarters to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, and it rings true. And it’s a civic culture in which there’s nobody better to send you than your parents.
That’s how William Ayers got where he was. When he came out of hiding because the federal government was unable to prosecute him (because of government misconduct), he got a degree in education from Columbia and then moved to Chicago and got a job on the education faculty of the University of Illinois-Chicago Circle. How did he get that job? Well, it can’t have hurt that his father, Thomas Ayers, was chairman of Commonwealth Edison (now Exelon) and a charter member of the Chicago establishment. As Mayor Richard M. Daley said recently, in arguing that the Ayers association should not be held against Obama, “His father was a great friend of my father.”
The current Mayor Daley is, of course, the son of the late Mayor Daley; the two Daleys have been mayors, and effective and competent mayors, of Chicago for 40 of the last 53 years. The attorney general of Illinois is the daughter of the speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives. The governor of Illinois is the son-in-law of the Democratic ward committeeman in the 33rd Ward. The congressman from the 2nd Congressional District is Jesse Jackson Jr. Jackson’s predecessor-but-one in the district was Morgan Murphy Jr., whose father was chairman of (get this) Commonwealth Edison.
How did this outsider from Hawaii and Columbia and Harvard become somebody somebody sent? His wife, Michelle Robinson Obama, had some connections: Her father was (I believe) a Democratic precinct committeeman, she baby-sat for Jesse Jackson’s children, and she worked as a staffer for the current Mayor Daley. Obama made connections on the all-black South Side by joining the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church.
THE AYERS/OBAMA TIMELINE: (Version 2.0; a work in progress; dates are approximate)
1981-1983 [William Ayers and Barack Obama meet at Columbia?]
1987 William Ayers links up with Barack Obama in Chicago
1988 Ayers solicits Khalid Al-Mansour to raise money for Obama’s Harvard law School education
1989 Tom Ayers and William Ayers get Obama a summer job at Sidley & Austin (where he meets Michelle Obama); Ayers’ wife Bernadine Dohrn also worked at Sidley at about the same time as Barack and Michelle.
1993 Ayers places Obama on Woods Foundation
1995 Ayers makes Obama Chairman of Annenberg Challenge
1995 Ayers hosts a coffee klatch for Obama’s political debut (Obama falsely claims this is when he met Ayers)
2007-2008 The structure of Obama’s presidential campaign increasingly comes to resemble an Ayers-designed national “community organizer matrix” straight out of Maoist theory. This is not merely a presidential “campaign.” Obama’s organization is the first installment of an ongoing movement being paid for with tax-exempt contributions to his campaign, approaching half a billion dollars.
2008 Obama In response to ABC News, Obama tells a national TV audience he was “six years old” when Ayers bombed federal buildings, and they are only casual neighborhood acquaintances. A lie.