Barack Obama & William Ayers: Why Should We Care?

In the prologue to his second book Barack Obama wrote what would become the conceptual foundation of his Presidential campaign.

…I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.

Senator Obama went on to exploit this blank screen concept for maximum political gain. He built a cult of personality around himself, with huge audience events where he delivered soaring but largely meaningless rhetoric about “change.”

Obama presented himself as the ultimate statesman whose messianic presence would “bring America together for change,” without encountering dissent or partisan acrimony. People whose visions of change were vague, purely emotional, impossible to implement, Unconstitutional, or different from the vision of the person next to them, all stood together cheering.  Obama encouraged supporters to project their own visions of desirable change onto his blank screen by telling the cheering throngs that the campaign was about them, not him, and by talking about “change from the bottom up.”

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William Ayers

Barack Obama’s latest rebuttal to the argument that his association with far left radical and former terrorist William Ayers is problematic was to taunt John McCain for not mentioning it during Tuesday’s debate. In an exclusive interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson he said,

“I am surprised that, you know, we’ve been seeing some pretty over-the-top attacks coming out of the McCain campaign over the last several days, that he wasn’t willing to say it to my face. But I guess we’ve got one last debate. So presumably, if he ends up feeling that he needs to, he will raise it during the debate.”

This appears to be another, in a continuous series of diversionary responses to questions regarding William Ayers.

This photo of Mr. Ayers is from a 2001 Chicago Magazine profile of the Sixties radical and leader of the domestic terrorist group, Weather Underground. This wasn’t a candid, unplanned shot of an unintended accident. Mr. Ayers posed for this photo. He wanted readers to see him standing on the wadded up American flag.

Ayers and his convicted terrorist wife, Bernardine Dohrn, are folk heroes to the far left. Association with Ayers is an indication of Obama’s political comfort zone, contradicting his claim to be a unifier who is above radical politics.

The day this photo was taken Ayers and Obama served together on the board of the Woods Fund, of Chicago. The Woods fund claims to be trying to reduce poverty, but not by helping the poor. Here’s an excerpt from the Woods Fund website:

The Woods Fund is particularly interested in supporting those organizations and initiatives that focus on enabling work and reducing poverty within Chicago’s less advantaged communities. Grants are given exclusively to organizations with agendas to benefit metropolitan Chicago and are concentrated in three program areas: Community Organizing Public Policy, [and the] Intersection of Community Organizing and Public Policy.

In other words, The Woods fund gives money not to the poor or to charities or to churches, but to political activists who then hound government to use its power to extract more resources from taxpayers.

This approach to “helping” the poor is consistent with the Leftist view that malevolent political forces who prevent government from intervening enough into the lives of The People cause poverty.

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Obama was only eight years old

In the past 48 hours the Obama campaign has been in a frenzy of repetition of another of it’s diversionary chants, that Obama was only eight years old when Ayers and his wife went on their bombing spree.  Since nobody has accused Obama of throwing the bombs himself, this fact is irrelevant.  What is relevant is that, as an adult, Barack Obama chose to participate with William Ayers in radical leftist political action in Chicago.

Recently, Liberty Works and a blog from the political Left, Global Labor and Politics, and Dr. Stanley Kurtz, Social Anthropoligist and investigative researcher with the prestigious Ethics and Public Policy Center have  disclosed information on one of Mr. Ayers more recent projects, The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a privately funded foundation whose purported mission was to improve Chicago schools. Mr. Ayers appointed Barack Obama Chairman of the Board of Annenberg Challenge, a position he held from 1995 to 1999.

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This Obama experience is relevant to the Presidential campaign because:

1. It is further evidence that Obama and his campaign attempted to deceive us with claims that Ayers is not an Obama associate and was nothing more than a guy who happened to live in the neighborhood. Records of Annenberg Challenge meetings and activities show Obama and Ayers interacting regularly for several years.
2. The Annenberg Challenge was a failure. It spent hundreds of millions of dollars and achieved no academic improvement in Chicago schoos, reflecting negatively on Barack Obama’s self proclaimed talent for making wonderful things happen, just by “bringing people together.”
3. The funding mechanism for the Annenberg Challenge was convoluted, with vague standards that permitted funds to be distributed not only to schools but to radical political groups, called “External Partners” that were favored by William Ayers.
4. Mr. Ayers’ publicly stated goal is to attempt to achieve through indoctrination of school children the same radical transformation of the culture he was trying to achieve by bombing the pentagon, the capital and several police stations.  Barack Obama must have shared those goals as he was distributing Annenberg grants to local groups engaged in radical politics.
   
5. The Annenberg Challenge experience has been omitted from fawning, national media biographies of Senator Obama.
   

Here is an excerpt from one of several reports that are available at the University of Illinois at Chicago website about the Annenberg Challenge:

Its primary strategy was to create networks of schools with common interests and needs and to link them to individuals and organizations that would serve as External Partners. This strategy followed a logic that schools would find more direction and support for improvement if they worked together and with an External Partner than if they worked alone.

The organizations that became “External Partners” served as funding agents of Annenberg grants. Each External Partner had three or more schools in its “network.” Annenberg gave cash grants to the External Partners who were then supposed to distribute funds to the schools.

Here’s another excerpt from one of the Annenberg reports:

It is difficult without detailed analysis of network budgets to determine how much money was used by External Partners to cover their own costs, to purchase goods and services for schools, or to give directly to schools. Initial budget requirements set by the Challenge limited partners to spend only 10 percent of any total grant to cover their own expenses. Later, however, the challenged recognized that some partners required more money to be effective and it altered this requirement to permit larger percentages of grants to be used by partners to cover their own expenses.

One of the external partners, a group called “South Shore African Village Collaborative” received a grant to teach students about celebrating “Juneteenth,” slang for June 19, a holiday commemorating the abolition of slavery in Texas. In the words of the grant application, “Negroes celebrate Juneteenth instead of 4th of July,” as their national independence day.

From another of the reports at the University of Illinois at Chicago is this excerpt describing the final results of this the Annenberg Challenge program, led by Barack Obama:

Achievement trends in Annenberg schools did not differ from those in demographically similiar non-Annenberg schools. there were no statistically significant differences in reading or math at any grade level in any year between 1995 and 2001. Although Annenberg schools appeared to outperform non-Annenberg schools in some years at particular grade levels, the reverse appeared to occur in other years. None of those differences were statistically significant.

Obama’s association with William Ayers is important because it sheds much needed light on the Senator’s true political philosophy and indicates what sort of policies he would pursue as President.  Obama tries his best to maintain that blank screen, but little by little, the truth begins to appear.