It is unfortunate that Barack Obama’s much-touted “community experience,” through which he claims grassroots management background in his quest for the presidency, is beginning to sound like little more than the organizational work he did for Weathermen leader Bill Ayers. As Dick Morris reports, the Ayers/Obama collaborative experience “led to the only executive or administrative experience in Obama’s life.” It doesn’t make it any better that as Morris reports, Obama lied about his relationship with the notorious radical Ayers, who Morris calls “a terrorist who was a domestic Osama bin Laden in his youth.”
“Barack Obama should have run screaming at the sight of William Ayers and his wife, Bernadette Dohrn,” writes Morris. “Ayers has admitted bombing the U.S. Capitol building and the Pentagon, and his wife was sent to prison for failing to cooperate in solving the robbery of a Brink’s armored car in which two police officers were killed. Far from remorse, Ayers told The New York Times in September 2001 that he ‘wished he could have done more.’ ”
The agenda of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the Ayers brainchild Obama administered, flowed from Ayers’s educational philosophy, says Stanley Kurtz, a lecturer at Harvard and the University of Chicago and Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who recently went through the records under a Freedom of Information Act request. It called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. The records were revealed to the public last week.
“CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice,” said Kurtz. “Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with ‘external partners,’ which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).”
According to Kurtz, Obama once conducted “leadership training” seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Obama’s early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC’s in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.
This should have been reported at the very beginning, because it is beginning to sound very much like the educational and political polemic which advanced rapidly during the war in Vietnam on college campuses all over the country, frequently by student radicals “on acid and armed,” as they were once described.
Radical students and professors transformed education and sociology departments in the ’60s and ’70s but most of their ideas were later fully repudiated not only by the country but by the Democratic Party. Millions of federal dollars were sent into poor communities in northern cities back then, with few positive results but much negative impact. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) came about specifically due to the public renunciation of the general philosophy behind the idea of following radical ideology with millions upon millions in federal cash because it contributed to a culture of dependency and a welfare state that keep the poor reliant on the feds for generation upon generation. Which may be why Hillary Clinton first brought up the Ayers connection in her primary campaign against Obama.
Several years ago I wrote that John Edwards, too young to have been there at the time, appeared to have rediscovered this same set of ideas as if they were brand new; they were only sleeping in exile in the university. But now it is beginning to dawn that Obama has adopted the same set of ideas.
These were bad ideas not only because they created a material dependency culture; an anomalous and virtually autonomous urban welfare class in an otherwise free economy, and because they nurtured a national culture of incompetence by providing visible support for an army of second-rate sociologists and educators — but because they created an oppositional subculture in America to mainstream values for America’s poor.
Obama says he doesn’t know about this because he was only 8 years old when Ayers was in The Weather Underground. Here is a brief review for 8-year-olds, from Wiki:
Weatherman, known colloquially as the Weathermen and later the Weather Underground Organization, was an American radical left organization founded in 1969 by leaders and members who split from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The group is most famous for a campaign consisting of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots from 1969 through the middle 1970s. The “Days of Rage,” the group’s first public demonstration on October 8, 1969, was a riot in Chicago coordinated with the trial of the Chicago Eight. In 1970 the group issued a “Declaration of a State of War” against the United States government, under the name “Weather Underground Organization” (WUO). The bombing attacks were mostly against government buildings, along with several banks.
These students were the society’s elite at the best universities. The phrase Weatherman changed to Weather Underground so as to provide the equal-opportunity disclaimer, as many of the members were women who came to resent the signs held up during the Days of Rage saying, “Chicks up Front.” It took a bad turn after Kent State. Jerry Rubin, the original yippie leader, who once advised these same students to go home and kill their parents, said that after Kent State, “you couldn’t get a girl to type your term paper for you anymore.” In hindsight, the violence at Kent State, where national guardsmen shot and killed four university students and wounded nine others at an anti-war rally on May 4, 1970, may well be attributed to the rise of violent tactics initiated by the Weather Underground the previous year.
The phrase “Weatherman” came from a song by Bob Dylan — “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” — a buoyant and lyrical tune that suggested the poetic phrasing in the work of Arthur Rimbaud and had nothing whatsoever to do with politics and war.
But cultural revolution was in the air, and not only the rich kids at the elite colleges were hearing things. Earlier in 1969 Charlie Manson, listening to Paul McCartney sing “Helter Skelter,” felt it was a call from God to him in particular to send his cult out to murder in the valley. Soon groups with indeterminable purpose and inscrutable demands like the Symbionese Liberation Army were robbing banks, blowing things up and killing people. The age virtually disintegrated when a new wave of assassination began, seemingly random and idiosyncratic as ideology descended into public squalor and madness, taking the life of John Lennon and seriously wounding Pope John Paul and President Ronald Reagan.
It was a time, as H. Rap Brown, justice minister of the Black Panther Party, who could turn a phrase better than most, said, when violence was as American as apple pie.
Visit Mr. Quigley’s website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.