If a certain segment of society in this country gets its way, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama will be tainted by the fact he lives in the same South Side neighborhood as Bill Ayers.
To listen to the questioning that came up during this week’s presidential debate in Philadelphia, it becomes obvious that some people paid no attention during history class and have little to no clue as to what the social turmoil of the 1960s was all about.
TOO MANY PEOPLE seem to want to put that era into some sort of 1980s context by which the spirit of Ronald Reagan would have us believe that any association with the less conservative elements of our society during that era taints one for life.
Even when one takes into account that Obama was only a child at the time (he turned 10 in 1971), some people would have us believe the fact that he knows people who were not “hawks” when it came to the Vietnam War is enough reason to hold him suspect.
Obama got hit with questions about his support for Ayers, even though as best as I can tell, they have only met because they literally both live in the Hyde Park neighborhood, just a few blocks from each other.
Of course, nearly 30,000 people live in that neighborhood on the Lake Michigan shorefront. Do we hold them all suspect?
Barack Obama was all of 7 years old when Bill Ayers was posed by the Chicago Police Department for this "mug shot" in 1968.NOW FOR THE bulk of his adult life, Ayers has devoted himself to academia. He currently is on the education faculty (a “distinguished professor of education” is his exact title) at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
But Ayers suffers from Jane Fonda Syndrome.
The social conservative elements of this country do not want us to forget the fact that Ayers (along with his partner Bernardine Dohrn) were a part of The Weatherman – that ‘60s collective of largely privileged white youths who believed they were waging war against the corrupt establishment that had the United States in a war in Vietnam.
Now admittedly, the Weatherman (named for a line in the old Bob Dylan song, “Subterranean Homesick Blues”), were considered by many people to be a bit extreme – even for those who fondly remember their liberal activities of that era. That’s what messing around with explosives will get for you – a reputation as a kook.
CONSERVATIVES ALSO TAKE into account the fact that Ayers, on many occasions, has said he is not apologetic for his belief that the United States should never have got involved in a war in Vietnam.
To listen to questions concerning Ayers during the debate (and the way Hillary Clinton piled on during her responses to Obama’s answers), Obama is friends with a man who is the moral equivalent of the people in the Middle East who commit acts of violence in the name of Allah.
They would have you believe that Obama is friends with a man who attacked the Pentagon and other public facilities and who also planted bombs that killed people. They also would want you to think this is the man who, on Sept. 11, 2001, while airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, told the New York Times “I don’t regret setting bombs,” and “I feel we didn’t do enough” to undermine the U.S. military.
By Clinton’s logic, the Weatherman attack on the Pentagon was identical in stature to the airplane three decades later that religious extremists piloted directly into the same building.
HERE’S A DOSE of “fact,” as it relates to those Weatherman bombs. The only people they ever managed to kill were themselves.
Property damage was what they were after, such as the “Days of Rage” protests of 1969 where members ran through the Rush Street nightclub district and shattered store windows and parked cars in a lame attempt to simulate the disruptiveness of war to the people of Chicago.
Explosives are tricky, particularly if one doesn't really know what they are doing. That's what caused a March 6, 1970 explosion at a Greenwich Village townhouse where Weatherman members were holed up. This “terrorist” group (as some on the far right are determined to label them, even though they’d dispute the same label being applied to the Ku Klux Klan) only managed to kill themselves off – no one else.
Another fact – the Weatherman attack on the Pentagon may very well be one of the most pathetic attempts by anyone to attack a military installation.
AS I UNDERSTAND it, the group placed an explosive in a men’s rest room at the Pentagon. When it went off, it caused some pipe damage and serious water overflow in part of the building. That water resulted in damage to computers that were processing information related to the Vietnam war effort.
The spin by Weatherman members was that the disrupted the Vietnam War – bringing it to a half for a couple of hours. Reality says they were more an annoyance than a threat, behaving in a manner like the kid in high school who thinks he’s cute because he lights a cherry bomb and drops it down the toilet.
Looking at it factually, it makes Clinton look ridiculous for comparing the Weatherman to Islamic radicals.
I can't help but wonder if she now seriously believes that the Pentagon was levitated (remember when Abbie Hoffman and his Yippie allies protested outside the building, then later told people they caused the building to float in the air as a sign of protest against the war?)
AND AS FAR as Ayers being the guy who badmouthed the United States on the day of the New York and Pentagon attacks? He had just published a book (semi-autobiographical, with some details changed to protect others) and was trying to promote it. The fact that a Times feature appeared on the same day, hours before the attacks, is coincidental.
His belief that he wanted to do more to oppose the military was NOT a response to the activity of Sept. 11, which is how Clinton tried to spin it during the debate.
Now for those who are going to accuse me of being an Ayers apologist, I’m not. I’ve never met the man, although I’m sure that if I were older (I was only 4 at the time of the Days of Rage), I would not have had the nerve to mess with explosives, no matter how negatively I might have perceived Vietnam (I have two uncles who served in the military – army and marine corps – and saw combat in that war. This is something we disagree on).
But I believe we need to quit thinking about the 1960s as some sort of litmus test by which everyone who opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam or looks down on J. Edgar Hoover’s use of the FBI to harass civil rights dissidents is somehow tainted for life.
NOW IT IS true that some of The Weatherman people went on to commit crimes of violence separate from their activist protests. They have either done their prison time, or may be serving time still.
But Obama’s ties are only that he knows Ayers, who doesn’t have any criminal convictions of his own (in part because the FBI’s investigations into “radical” activity were so overzealous that all their evidence against him was ruled inadmissible in court).
Trying to tar Obama because Ayers wasn’t a “hawk” during the Vietnam War is absurd.
THIS RIDICULOUS MENTALITY belongs to the people who were behind much of the right’s disgust with the presidency of Bill Clinton (and for that matter, Hillary herself). The only people who are going to accept such a premise are the ones who would never vote for Clinton to begin with.
In short, it plays right into reinforcing the campaign of Republican opponent John McCain. It makes me wonder if those Democrats who suspect Hillary would secretly be comfortable with a McCain victory in 2008 (so she could try again in ’12) are not just being paranoid.
Actually, all she’s doing is taking down the reputation of the Clinton years among Democratic activists and ensuring that she herself could never get the party’s nomination to serve in the Oval Office.
If that’s the case, we might have to wait for Chelsea to become “of age” before we see another Clinton in the White House.
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EDITOR’S NOTES: Bill Ayers’ website (
http://www.billayers.org/) is devoted to his educational credentials, but does not shy away from his activist days.
Rick Ayers is disgusted with Hillary Clinton’s comments about his brother, Bill (
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-ayers-/clintons-mccarthyism-and_b_97220.html), seeing them as evidence that Hillary will say anything to try to chip away at Barack Obama’s lead.
The Weather Underground’s “declaration of war” on Amerika (
http://marathonpundit.blogspot.com/2008/03/weather-undergrounds-1970-declaration.html) can be found here.
Was President Bill Clinton wrong to give pardons to people with ties to the Weather Underground (
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/04/17/clinton-campaign-gets-weather-underground-questions/) movement of the 1960s?
