...I stopped by Larry Johnson's No Quarter and found his latest post on Barack Obama and Bill Ayers. We've both written about Ayers before, but we have different views of Ayers and his wife. As I've said many times, I admire the work the Ayers' have done for children and education and in trying to keep them on the right track rather than go down the wrong one. Larry tends to view Ayers as a terrorist. I don't. I also like what I know about Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dorn for how they took in Chesa Boudin and raised him while his parents were in jail for many, many years over their activities.
So Larry and I disagree a bit on which aspect of Ayers' connection to Obama is or is not a problem.
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I also wrote about Ayers and Obama's connections to controversial Palestinian Professor (and some say Palestinean Activist) Rashid Khalidi. That's the relationship that caused me to question how strong Obama's ties to Isreal really are.
Now Larry has a post documenting that Bill Ayers was the head of the Annenberg Challenge Grants in the mid-90's and that Barack Obama was appointed to head the Board of Directors for several years.
And, of course, they served together on the board of the Woods Funds, approving large grants to the American Arab Action Network, a project of Mrs. Khalidi.
Considering how Ayers was always an Education professor, and Obama worked with him in that regard for years on the Annenberg Challenge, it's odd that he referred to Ayers as an "English Professor" during the Philly Debate.
To make a long story short, I spent the last several hours devouring everything I could find on Ayers, the Annenberg Challenge and Obama. I only found speculation about how Obama got on that board. Was it through Ayers and Ayers' father, as Larry and others suggest, or through some other route? I found lots more on how Obama didn't do much for the board.
The Annenberg challenge was "Ayers' baby" in the sense he was in charge and Obama was picked to head the Board of Directors. And Michelle Obama and Ayers' wife, Bernadine Dorhn, were law associates at the same firm back then, Sidley Austin, a firm with ties to Bill Ayers' father Tom.
All that said, I ended up reading way more than I should have about the fight going on in Chicago in those years over the best way to run early childhood education. Ayers was on the side of small local and autonomous councils. Keep the big boys off our school plans. Obama, according to many of the articles I read, stayed above the fray and didn't get his hands dirty. So he ends up with not much of a record on his board work.
It is pretty curious that Obama called Ayers an English professor at the ABC debate when he knew from their work together at Annenberg that he was an Education Professor. Did he not want to be further connected to Ayers so he changed the name of his field from Education to English? Or did he really forget? That doesn't bother me much either.
The relevant point here is that Obama seems to be minimizing his legitimate ties to Ayers for some reason. He's spoken about being on the Annenberg Challenge Board and lists it on his resume, but he didn't mention it at the debate -- or that Ayers was intimately involved in it He also, according to many articles I've read that appeared in mainstream and professional publications, didn't do much for education while he served on them.
With No Child Left Behind being an issue in the campaign, Obama should be asked some more questions about what he did for this $50 million board?
I'd also like a journalist to research more about Obama's ties to Khalidi. There seems to be a bit of hypocrisy there where he continues to tell Jewish voters no one but him has done more to fight against anti-semitism than he has when years preceding his presidential run he was a friend to Rashid Khalidi and even gave him a testimonial at his going away dinner. Both Ayers and Khalidi held fundraisers for Obama.
In the meantime, since I don't have the answers, I'm posting Johnny Can't Read, a song off of Don Henley's first solo album (check out how young he looks.)
And vote for Obama.
