Just Fact-Checking

Barack Obama has a new entanglement with unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers which I detail below.  The gist is this - back in the mid-90's Bill Ayers was instrumental in the creation and early operation of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an effort committed to the reform of Chicago's public schools.  Barack Obama was Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which suggests he worked closely with Ayers for several years.

Yet in his recent nationally televised appearances and at his website, Obama fails to mention this Ayers entanglement.  Why so coy?  It's hard to believe he actually forgot his executive role in this important foray into public policy; that said, the Chicago Challenge foundered on the hard rocks of Chicago politics and was widely viewed as ineffective, so perhaps he would prefer not to highlight his failure to bring people together and produce real change.

Or maybe Obama was a do-nothing figurehead who honestly forgot that Bill Ayers was running the show.  Awkward spin, that.  In any case, there is also a question of shared values.  Ayers brings a highly progressive approach to education - dare we ask whether Obama shares his values?

Details and plenty of background links after the break.

With Ayers, two themes are emerging:

(1) It's not the crime, it's the cover-up - why can't Obama manage to deliver a clear answer about his relationship with Ayers?   It has long been reported that they both sat on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago.  We now also know that Ayers helped found the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Fund, with Obama as the first Chairman of the Board.  We also know that Obama, Thomas Ayers (Bill Ayers father) and John Ayers (Bill's brother) all served on the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Schools Education Fund (described here as "the successor" to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge project).

That is a lot more of a connection than Obama has admitted in two recent appearances on national television or at his websites "Fact Check".  At the Philadelphia debate, Ayers was described as

... a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from.  He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.   

In Philadelphia, it was left to Hillary to mention the Woods Fund board overlap.

And on Fox News, Obama seemed utterly hazy as to what board he was on with Ayers, offering this:       

Now, Mr. Ayres [Ayers] is a 60 plus year old individual who lives in my neighborhood, who did something that I deplore 40 years ago when I was six or seven years old. By the time I met him, he was a professor of education at the University of Illinois.

We served on a board together that had Republicans, bankers, lawyers, focused on education, who worked for Mayor Daley. Mayor Daley, the same Mayor Daley probably who when he was a state attorney prosecuted Mr. Ayres’s wife for those activities, I (INAUDIBLE) the point is that to somehow suggest that in any way I endorse his deplorable acts 40 years ago, because I serve on a board with him.

Baffling - neither the Woods Fund of Chicago nor the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Fund could reasonably be described as working for Mayor Daley; the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Schools Education Fund fits that description, but it was the elder Ayers and the other Ayers who served with Obama on that board.  There is a theory that Obama is pretty tight with the Ayers family, so maybe that caused his confusion.

Finally, the Obama website presents a "Fact Check on Clinton Attacks on Obama and Ayers" which makes no mention of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Fund.  OK, given the fame of Annenberg's FactCheck organization, maybe this was a subconscious cry for recognition.  But where is the transparency?

(2) The second emerging theme in this Ayers drama is, what about shared values?  OK, so Barack was eight years old when Ayers was blowing things up.  But Ayers brings a very, hmm, progressive mindset to his educational agenda, or so I glean from the Ayers website (or this panel presentation).  So, does Barack share these views?  Seems like a fair question, since Ayers helped found a group Barack promptly chaired.

We have moved a long way past the notion that Ayers was just some guy from Barack's neighborhood who happened to host a fundraiser for him in 1995 and later overlapped with him on a charity board.  How much farther this story will move, and how much assistance Barack will provide in moving it, remains to be seen.

C'MON - I enjoy this drollery from the hardworking and surely underpaid chaps at Hot Air:

The obvious exit question: How closely did Obama and Ayers work together at the Challenge? It may be that they had little contact, that Ayers’s role ended in setting the thing up and he was sufficiently uninvolved in day to day operations that Obama sincerely forgot he was associated with the program.

Obama is a bit young to be having memory problems; surely he anticipated an Ayers question and gave the topic some thought.  And in fact, he did describe an education-related board, not the Woods Fund board.

DIG IN:  Background on the Annenberg Challenge; a final report on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge experience (271 page .pdf).

THIS WILL BECOME IMPORTANT:  Some history of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge:

Having secured Annenberg funding for Chicago, the working group would soon evolve into a more formal organization, albeit with strong ties to the groups that wrote the grant proposal. Initially run out of shared space in the offices of the Cross-City Campaign and administered through an existing philanthropic organization called the Donors Forum, the Chicago Challenge soon became its own new foundation with status as an independent fiscal agent. By late 1995, Ken Rolling had been named executive director, a board of directors had been established, and the first round of grants had been awarded. Rolling lacked experience in education but came from the foundation world and was well-versed in community organizing. The board, which was intended to set policy, raise matching funds, and hire an executive director, included prominent educators and business leaders. A second entity, the newly-created Chicago School Reform Collaborative, was also established. Its twenty-plus members were elected from the group of educators and advocates who had helped shape the grant proposal. Initially, at least, this offshoot of the working group functioned as the operations arm of the Chicago Challenge. However, this situation created procedural and ethical concerns and in time the Collaborative was transformed into an advisory body.

Ayers was one of the three original leaders of the working group and eventually co-chaired the Chicago School Reform Collaborative (see his resume).  His early involvement:

When three of Chicago's most prominent education reform leaders met for lunch at a Thai restaurant six years ago to discuss the just-announced $500 million Annenberg Challenge, their main goal was to figure out how to ensure that any Annenberg money awarded to Chicago "didn't go down the drain," said William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Ayers, who was at that lunch table in late 1993, helped write the successful Chicago grant application.

The point is that Ayers led the way in securing the Annenberg grant, then co-chaired the Collaborative, which was instrumental in the operation of the Chicago Challenge.  It is not likely Barack Obama, as chair of the Board of Directors of the Challenge, was not working closely with the co-chair of the collaborative.  At any rate, it is not at all plausible that he could have been unaware of Ayers' role and later forgotten it.

I see trouble in paradise as "Hope and change" morphs to "Hope we can change the subject."

Comments

[narciso]

Well besides the fact that the El Shifah plant was a partnership between the two
Saudi-Hadramauti family businesses;(Mahfouz
& AlAmoudi; who have been tied to funding
AQ through the Golden Chain netwrk. What about the hundreds of people who went to work in and around the embassies of Nairobi and Dar a Salaam; and never returned that
day. Interestingly, that piece of work, was
partly due to Fitzie's mishandling of Ali Salameh, after the 1st WTC trial.

[Danube of Thought]

Come, let us watch the wheels fall off together.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Ah, hell, Tom. In the NAACP sermon today, he didn't even manage to get his facts right on what music is in 6/8 time.

[GnuCarSmell]

Moving from a moral question to a technical one, I'm curious if Obama's association with a known terrorist would disqualify him from getting a security clearance. Imagine a wannabe commander-in-chief who would get a rejection notice if applying for an entry level government job. Not sure if this issue has been raised.

[Soylent Red]

disqualify him from getting a security clearance

If he were anyone but a Senator, such a relationship would likely preclude him from getting one, or maintaining one. Well at least one at the level he currently holds or would hold as POTUS anyway.

But then so would any of a number of highly suspect activities we see every day from Senators, like...

Criminal records

Alcohol problems

Financial problems

Known history of leaking classified information

[Certainty is evil]

But clearly Wright is talking about people who were killed that day.

Why is that clear? There is a comma, not a semi-colon.

[Cecil Turner]

Unless he was suggesting they were leaving on vacation or some such, the "they would never get back home" bit does seem to imply killed that day.

[lonetown]

Funny thing about Democrat politics is that its not the LIE that gets you, its the lie that your friends are too busy to look up themselves that gets you.

[Paul Zrimsek]

Never distrust anyone over 60!

[Veeshir]

surely he anticipated an Ayers question

When you're so immersed in lefty-land, (nobody I know voted for Nixon), you can have no idea what people who aren't as far left as you think.
He's probably still surprised that anybody got upset about his "bitter" comments.

[Dennis D]

The Aspirin factory was a tie between Al Qaida and Iraqi Intelligence.

[Tom Maguire]

I moved the Wright bit to a new thread; sorry for the Obamaesque indecision and confusion.

[bgates]

TM, could you move the comments pertaining to that thread too? As it stands they are just a distraction from the real issues.

[MarkJ]

Good news: like police informers in those old TV cop shows, Obama will "conveniently remember" everything and anything...as long as you grease his palm first with silver.

"Annenberg Challenge? Don't quite remember what that was all about. Bill Ayers? Am I supposed to know him? Not sure...I think I might have met him once at a party. My mind's going hazy, y'know, with all these 'distractions' coming my way...."

[edh]

"Ayers brings a highly progressive approach to education..."

Progressive? I take it you've read Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism?

[M. Simon]

To even bring this subject up is on its face racist.

Leave Barack ALONE.

Preferably stranded in a snow storm in the mountains of Colorado. Did I mention Recreate '68? They are going to be in Colorado too.

[TomInStL]

Can you please stop with the silliness of Ayers, and even Wright to a lesser ectent? How can conservatives get back to our roots of standing on principles, when we slander by association at everychance we get. We should stop talking of the speck in their eye, and start addressing the log in our own! Get back to the Issues already.

[Billy Beck]

Principles are the issue. Wake up.

[amr]

Mr. Obama reminds me of a child that you have to almost pull the truth out of him. I always said to my children that the punishment will more severe if you lie. We'll see if the American people really, really believe in the old American standards for judging character. After President Clinton, I somehow doubt it

[Denny, Alaska]

I'm sure Sen. Obama (D-Steve Urkel) will forthwith issue a strong statement condemning Mr. Ayers. Sen. Obama is, after all, a man of hope and change who's promised all that he will no longer do things as they have been done in Washington.

He'll issue such a statement soon.

Won't he?

[Bill Teller]

The way for Obama to shut Wright up is to get him run wth him as his vice president canidate,that would fix several problems.

[pagar]

Let's start a movement, Wright for Vice.

[Jake]

Since nonprofit board members have to be elected and reelected by other board members, did Obama vote to have Ayers on the relatively small Woods’ board knowing Ayers’ terrorist background and his unrepentant stance on his terrorist background? And since Obama was on the board before Ayers and knew Ayers previously, was it Obama who nominated or recommended Ayres for the board?

While Ayers may not have directly killed anyone, he says he was involved in bombings. Thus, he likely knew of and helped with the bomb making or at least probably conspired with the bomb makers at the townhouse in NY that blew up killing three people, including his girlfriend. Wouldn’t that make him criminally libel for manslaughter or murder? Is there any statue of limitations on this kind of crime?

At the time of 9/11, Obama’s guru, the Reverend Wright, blames America. Obama’s terrorist friend, Ayers, says his bombs weren’t big enough, maybe implying he felt outdone by Osama. Obama intentionally chooses not to ware an American flag lapel pin, which at the time was meant to show support and respect for America under attack and the thousands murdered on 9/11.

Yes, it’s true. Obama would be a different kind of American President.