Inspired by a query on a left-wing blog, this post is an attempt to exhaustively catalog and source the connections between presidential candidate Barack Obama and the radical activists and terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. There are no rumors, plausible but unproven scenarios, or tangential connections listed here. This list is of proven, established, factual connections. It may be possible to dispute the relevance or importance of these connections; that is a matter of opinion. However, the intention of this post is for the existence and extent of each connection to be indisputable.
If you have further information about any of these connections (particularly, responsible cites of supporting evidence) or have information on a verifiable connection that this list has not yet cataloged, then please send an e-mail to the post author at docrocket@gmail.com, or post a comment. Corrections and clarifications are very welcome, but please provide a citation or a source for any factual issues corrected to facilitate my research.
This post is a work in progress and will be updated regularly as time and new information allow.
Connections Between Bill Ayers and Barack Obama
1. Bill Ayers and Barack Obama worked together on the the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was founded by Bill Ayers in 1995. Barack Obama served as chair of the Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 1999. Together the two men raised and disbursed more than $100 million in funding. Best source: CNN, Retrieved October 21, 2008.
2. Bill Ayers and Barack Obama served together on the board of the Woods Fund. Obama served from 1993 to 2002. Ayers joined the board in 1999 and continues to serve to the present day. Their tenures overlapped from December 1999 to December 2002. Best source: Chicago Sun-Times, Retrieved October 20, 2008.
3. Barack Obama published a positive review of Bill Ayers’ book, which you can read in its entirety at Google Books, in 1997 in the Chicago Tribune. The book was entitled “A Kind and Just Parent”, and Obama is mentioned briefly. (Best source to date: Fox News, Retrieved October 20, 2008.)
4. Barack Obama and Bill Ayers appeared together on a panel discussion of Ayers’ book, organized by Michelle Obama, in Chicago in November of 1997, in a joint effort to block proposed legislation regarding juvenile justice issues. Best source: Zombie Time, Retrieved October 20, 2008.
5. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn hosted a campaign event for Barack Obama’s state Senate campaign in their Chicago home in the fall of 1995. At the event, retiring state Senator Alice Palmer introduced Obama to her friends in Chicago’s liberal/left-wing community, in effect designating him as her heir apparent. Attendees at the event told CNN that there was also a solicitation of funds for Obama’s campaign effort. Best source: CNN, Retrieved October 21, 2008.
6. Bill Ayers contributed $200 to Barack Obama’s state Senate election campaign in 2001. Best source: Chicago Sun-Times, Retrieved October 20, 2008.
7. Longtime Ayers associate Mike Klonsky, a self-avowed Maoist who was a member of SDS alongside Ayers and Dohrn in the 1960s, and who Bill Ayers made the head of his Small Schools Workshop in 1991, blogged for the Obama campaign in 2008. When Klonsky’s communist affiliations and association with Ayers became news in the conservative blogosphere, the Obama campaign quietly dropped his blog and removed his postings from their site. I have removed this entry because, while any Obama-Klonsky association might be very interesting and politically relevant, it is not the focus of this list.
8. From 1991 to 1995, Ayers and Obama both had offices on the same floor of a University of Chicago office building. (Longtime Ayers associate Mike Klonsky, a self-avowed Maoist and the head of Ayers’ Small School Workshop, also had an office in the same location.) Best source to date: Verum Serum (original reporting), Retrieved October 20, 2008.
Note: Comments on this post are limited to substantive discussion of connections between Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama. Off-topic comments, whether pro- or anti-Obama, will be deleted or ruthlessly edited without warning. This post is intended as a resource and information source, not as a focal point for partisan bickering. Argue the facts, or do not post. Thank you.
(9 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)
Loading ...
8 users commented in " The Obama-Ayers Connection: A Comprehensive List "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackI think it was a mistake of you to publish this unsourced.
That said, the Wikipedia entry on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge doesn’t support your claim that Ayers was ever a chair of the CAC, or that he was even on the board of directors. Ayers was the chair of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, which was a separate sub-committee with dozens of members (Obama was not a member).
It’s certainly true that Obama and Ayers attended meetings together with many other people as part of CAC. But your phrasing is technically inaccurate, and could readers into inferring a closer relationship there that actually existed.
Using the one-word “radical” to summarize the purposes of the CAC is taking a word taken out of context in an unfair and partisan manner.
Mr. Hayes,
Excellent work! Via Michelle Malkin’s site ( http://michellemalkin.com/2008/10/19/oh-these-are-the-people-in-your-neighborhood/) we have discovered this posting which gives credible evidence to the fact that Obama and Ayers actually shared an office, subsequent, we believe, to the office you cite above. His case is made at http://www.verumserum.com/?p=2907. Carry on my good man!
Cheers,
Charlie
http://www.churchillsparrot.com
[Deleted - Please see note above for what comments are allowed here.]
Ampersand - Thank you for the correction, it has been noted. I’m going to disagree on the characterization, but have removed it as it could be construed as opinion.
[Deleted - Please see note above for what comments are allowed here.]
I would like to see what the curriculum of the Bill Ayers/Barack Obama re-education program in Chicago looks like and what exactly is being taught to the unsuspecting youth of the inner cities as part of “helping the undertrodden” with the Bill Ayers educational program. Hopefully this can be published also.
[Edited to be on-topic.]
[Edited to be on-topic and non-speculative - a reminder, folks, this is not a speculative thread. Facts and facts only.]
To point 8: I think you’ve misread the evidence. Obama and Ayers had offices on the same floor from 1995 to 1998. There is, however, circumstantial evidence that may place Obama and Ayers in contact MUCH earlier.
Three years later (Fall 1988) Obama entered Harvard Law School. In any case, he would return to Chicago for the summers and in that first year (1989) worked as a summer associate at, you guessed it, the law firm of Sidley & Austin. That’s where he met his wife, Michelle, who had become an associate at the firm in 1987, a year before Bernardine Dohrn left to eventually take an adjunct professorship (no faculty approval required!) at Northwestern Law School (remember Bill’s dad!).
We certainly know that his future wife, Michelle, and Ayers’ wife, Bernardine, were employed by the same law firm in 1987. That was the year Ayers completed his Ed. D. at Columbia and was asked by Mayor Richard M. Daley (!) to assist him in the Chicago School Reform Project (their fathers, mayor Richard J. Daley, Sr. and Thomas Ayers were good friends!).
In 1991 Michelle left Sidley & Austin to work as Assistant to Mayor Daley. The Obamas were married in 1992. Three years later Obama was chairman of Ayers’ Chicago Annenberg Project and poised to launch his political career.
So we have a possible connection in New York during the Columbia years (1981 - 1985).
We have a definite connection between Michelle Obama and Ayers’ wife in 1987.
We have definite cooperation between Ayers and mayor Daley’s office in 1987.
We have Michelle Obama in the mayor’s office from 1991.
[This comment has been stripped of a bunch of anti-Ayers material and reduced what seem to be the factual assertions. They are uncited but I haven’t found anything to contradict them so far.]
[Deleted - Rich, don’t post on this thread any more. Thank you.]
Leave A Reply