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September 23, 2008

The Truth Finally Begins To Emerge On Obama And Ayers

Topics: Political News and commentaries

Three takeaways:

• Obama had a long-term working relationship with William Ayers.
  
• The Chicago Annenberg Challenge ("CAC"), the only executive experience on Obama's resume, was an objective failure despite the expenditure of millions of dollars.
  
• Through the CAC, Ayers and Obama financed radical organizations, including one with a history of engaging in voter fraud.
  

In what must be emphasized as only a "beginning" - with a clarification of ever so slowly and bit by bit, today Stanley Kurtz finally gets at least some of the story out on Obama's relationship with terrorist Bill Ayers in an article for The Wall Street Journal, and as Gateway Pundit notes, now we know why for weeks the Obama has been trying to silence Stanley Kurtz:

Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools

Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.

The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them.

...The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.

CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. 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). (edit: Link inserted)

Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. 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.

Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.

Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation...

In other words, it's crystal clear that Obama's and Ayer's brand of community organizing had very little to do with academics (this point made clear by they're turning down math and science curriculums and gave the money instead to far-left community organizers) and everything to do with furthering their agenda promoting a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to the poor (hence their focus on ACORN).

Posted by Richard at September 23, 2008 9:18 AM

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