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October 9, 2008

New McCain ad: 'Ayers'

Topics: Political News and commentaries

This is going to cause things to become very interesting, to put it mildly:

Moe Lane over at RedState suggests that the web ad isn't going to stay one. It's actually 90 seconds and has the McCain "I approved this message" added on, which means that we should expect to see it in TV ads very soon.

Ed Morrissey (via RedState) notes that this is going to guarantee that we're going to hear about it in the debate: Obama rather publicly challenged McCain to say it to his face, and I think that McCain will be rather happy to oblige him. As for the McCain camp being "rather happy to oblige Obama, Moe Lane offers this:

I understand that certain Obama activists have been programmed to squawk "Keating Five!" whenever the word "Ayers" comes up. Anyone who chooses to do so in this thread must include this sentence, word for word, with the link, and with no attempts to warp the meaning:

"Of course, this attack is hypocritical of both me and Senator Obama, since the Senator is happy to let fellow Keating Five member John Glenn campaign for him in Ohio."

In other words, checkmate!

Related: Bill Ayers: I've been saying for 40 years, you can't separate 'the concept of progressive education from the concept of politics and political
change':

... this very interesting October 2006 interview of Bill Ayers in Revolution (the self-styled "Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA").

Some context:  Ayers explains that he returned from summer vacation to his post as a professor of education at the University of Illinois only to find an apologetic letter from colleagues with whom he had been working for decades.  The colleagues were writing to explain why they were not inviting Ayers to a conference on "progressive education" being planned for the following spring.  Ayers tells Revolution (all italics in this post are mine):

The people who wrote the letter were an administrator at a university, a dean, and then a couple of people I knew pretty well, actually. I think I was stunned to get it because what it said in effect was we're having an important progressive education conference, we count you as one of the important progressive educators in our era. Therefore we feel we owe you an explanation of why you're not invited....  [A]s I thought about it I thought ... here's one of the dismal signs of the times. These guys aren't just progressive, they're socialists, and they think of themselves as activists. And yet they feel that in order to have a meeting that will be legitimate, they have to make a decision who to exclude, and they excluded me. And I decided it wasn't an issue about me in particular.... But I did feel increasingly agitated about the thinking that went into it....

They said in the body of the letter: we want to position progressive education not as radical, but as familiar and good. Now that just steamed up my ears because if you're saying you're a progressive educator... That's one of the things that's actually annoyed me for about 40 years of being a progressive educator: the separation of the concept of progressive education from the concept of politics and political change. You can't separate them...and this is a contradiction, incidentally, that goes all the way back to the beginning of progressive education and really the beginning of the conversations about the relationship between school and society. But John Dewey was one of the brilliant, brilliant writers about what democratic education would look like and was himself an independent socialist. But he never resolved a central contradiction in our work, the contradiction between trying to change the school and being embedded in society that has the exact opposite values culturally and politically and socially from the values you're trying to build in a classroom. This contradiction is something progressive educators should address, not dodge. So this is what got me going. That's a short version.

Ayers goes on to complain that the presentation of progressive education "as something nice and familiar" is "just saying, I'm giving you progressive education-lite. I don't see the point in that."

Related: Bill Ayers On How To Educate Good Little Progressive Commies

Posted by Abdul at October 9, 2008 7:29 AM

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• New McCain ad: 'Ayers' - Oct 09, 2008