Stanley Kurtz, who is at present probably the foremost expert on the Obama-Ayers relationship, called the Times' article a "white-wash":
... as New York Times reporter Scott Shane puts it ... since an initial lunchtime meeting in 1995, "their paths have crossed sporadically ... at a coffee Mr. Ayers hosted for Mr. Obama’s first run for office, on the schools project (i.e. the Chicago Annenberg Challenge) and a charitable board, and in casual encounters as Hyde Park neighbors."The Obama-Ayers connection is so damaging that the Obama campaign launched totalitarian efforts to suppress discussion of the evidence, for example, by issuing "Obama Action Wire" reports ordering supporters to shut down Chicago-area radio stations that had scheduled interviews with Kurtz and David Freddosso; and by attempting a cover-up of the intimacies of the Annenberg Challenge program.There is nothing "sporadic" about Barack Obama delivering hundreds of thousands of dollars over a period of many years to fund Bill Ayers’ radical education projects, not to mention many millions more to benefit Ayers’ radical education allies. We are talking about a substantial and lengthy working relationship here, one that does not depend on the quality of personal friendship or number of hours spent in the same room together (although the article greatly underestimates that as well).
Shane’s article buys the spin on Ayers’ supposed rehabilitation offered by the Obama campaign and Ayers’ supporters in Chicago. In this view, whatever Ayers did in the 1960's has somehow been redeemed by Ayers’ later turn to education work. As the Times quotes Mayor Daley saying, "People make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life." The trouble with this is that Ayers doesn’t view his terrorism as a mistake. How can he be forgiven when he’s not repentant? Nor does Ayers see his education work as a repudiation of his early radicalism. On the contrary, Ayers sees his education work as carrying on his radicalism in a new guise. The point of Ayers’ education theory is that the United States is a fundamentally racist and oppressive nation. Students, Ayers believes, ought to be encouraged to resist this oppression. Obama was funding Ayers’ "small schools" project, built around this philosophy. Ayers’ radicalism isn’t something in the past. It’s something to which Obama gave moral and financial support as an adult. So when Shane says that Obama has never expressed sympathy for Ayers’ radicalism, he’s flat wrong. Obama’s funded it.
Obama was perfectly aware of Ayers’ radical views, since he read and publically endorsed, without qualification, Ayers’ book on juvenile crime. That book is quite radical, expressing doubts about whether we ought to have a prison system at all, comparing America to South Africa’s apartheid system, and contemptuously dismissing the idea of the United States as a kind or just country. Shane mentions the book endorsement, yet says nothing about the book’s actual content. Nor does Shane mention the panel about Ayers’ book, on which Obama spoke as part of a joint Ayers-Obama effort to sink the 1998 Illinois juvenile crime bill. Again, we have unmistakable evidence of a substantial political working relationship. (I’ve described it in detail here in "Barack Obama’s Lost Years.")
The left's dismissal of the relationship as "guilt-by-association" is ludicrous. Over and over again, throughout the campaign, Barack Obama has had to defend his patriotism while simultaneously cutting ties to controversial America-bashers such as Jeremiah Wright. As Professor David Demming noted recently:
Obama is a vapid demagogue, a hollow man that despises American culture. He is ill-suited to be president of the United States.The McCain campaign has now indicated that it will begin an aggressive push against Obama's past terrorist connections. In the meantime, here's an encore for these campaign videos, from The American Issues Project and DemocratsHateTheUS:
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