What Ben Smith Forgot to Ask About Obama’s Ties to Ayers
By Larry Johnson on September 23, 2008 at 8:45 PM in Annenberg Chicago Challenge, Barack Obama, Current Affairs, William Ayers
(bumped up by SusanUnPC from 2 a.m. today, because it fits so well with Steve Diamond’s piece)
Ben Smith is a dishonest, sloppy excuse for a journalist. He accuses the McCain campaign in his posting at Politico of misrepresenting the case against Bill Ayers and is too damn lazy to do rudimentary research. The only one guilty of misrepresentation and lying is Smith. According to Smith:
Schmidt attacked Obama for his ties to William Ayers, who has spoken of his role in 1960s anti-war bombings committed by the Weather Underground.
“What we know for sure, and is beyond debate and argumentation is this: Senator Obama said that William Ayers is a guy that lives in his neighborhood. We know that that is a disingenuous and untruthful answer,” Schmidt said.
“Senator Obama began his political career in its early stages raising money at Ayers’ house,” he said.
Obama did hold a 1995 campaign event at Ayers’ house. It was not, however, a fundraiser, and Ayers did not contribute money to Obama’s first campaign, according to Illinois records.
Let’s ignore for the moment trying to define what is and is not a “fundraiser.” The more important point is what kind of relationship existed between Obama and Ayers. Obama is on the record claiming Ayers is just some guy from the neighborhood. That is a lie. Smith conveniently ignores the fact that 1995 also was the year that Bill Ayers gave Barack Obama his first big job. Stanley Kurtz is out today with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. According to Kurtz:
One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama’s “recruitment” to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.
The only problem I have with the Stanley Kurtz piece is that he is still underplaying the critical, instrumental role that William Ayers played in the creation and management of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. How do I know?
For starters I believe what Bill Ayers says about his role. His curriculum vitae contains the following declaration:
Co-Founder and Co-Chair, Chicago School Reform Collaborative (The Annenberg Challenge), 1995-2000
We also have contemporary documentary evidence to substantiate this. According to the Chicago Tribune Sunday edition, 23 October 1994 piece written by Charles Storch and V. Dion Haynes the co-founders explain:
“We don’t want there to be a couple of schools that are shining lights and the rest a mess,” said Anne Hallett, executive director of the Chicago-based Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform and a longtime force in the local reform movement.
Hallett and William Ayers, an associate professor of education at University of Illinois at Chicago, began the campaign here for an Annenberg grant last December.
Ayers would like to see plans “addressing the huge number of kids in factory-like environments. We need to see creative ways of scheduling kids so they can learn in a smaller (classroom) environment and so teachers can have fewer students.”
The centrality of Ayers and Hallett was reaffirmed in a Chicago Tribune piece dated 23 January 1995, which was also penned by Charles Storch. Storch reported:
Last January, Ayers and Anne Hallett, executive director of the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform, began contacting local educators, school-system officials, politicians, foundation executives, teachers union leaders and community activists about the Annenberg Challenge. With Warren Chapman, a program officer for the Joyce Foundation, Ayers and Hallett assembled a group of about 30 people to write a proposal, with 70 more providing counsel.
After months of revisions and meetings with other interested parties, the group submitted its proposal to Annenberg’s advisers in November. The proposal was approved this month.
Chicago Tribune
Ayers and Hallett were not just passive observers in this process. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was their baby. They played a direct role in the selection of the board to run their brain child. And they did not walk away from this outfit. As Ayers notes in his c.v. he was co-founder and co-chair. In fact, when the Jim Lehrer News Hour sought out someone to talk about the Annenberg Challenge in April 1995 guess who they interviewed? Yep, William Ayers.
On April 19, 1995–ironically the day of the terrorist bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City–the Jim Lehrer Newshour unwittingly interviewed Ayers, an unrepentant bomber of Federal buildings:
MS. BRACKETT: After hearing the announcement, university professor and reform activist William Ayers moved quickly. How long did it take you to decide to go after the money for Chicago?
WILLIAM AYERS, University of Illinois: Thirty seconds.
MS. BRACKETT: And what did you need to know about it, and how did you start?
WILLIAM AYERS: Well, what I knew about it the first day, what I read in the newspaper is the same thing that everyone else read in the newspaper, which was that Amb. Annenberg was going to give $1/2 billion to reform urban schools. And at that moment, I knew that Chicago had to be at the top of the list and if it wasn’t at the top of his list or his advisers’ list, we had to put it there.
MS. BRACKETT: Ayers and other reformers spent the next year putting together a grant application. They thought they had a good chance at the money because they could point to reform efforts already underway in Chicago schools. Over the past five years, Chicago has undergone the most extensive restructuring of any urban school system in the country. A 1988 School Reform Act brought about decentralization of the school bureaucracy, increased local control by parents, and the use of innovative teaching methods. Private money has played a critical role in reform from the beginning says Warren Chapman of the Joyce Foundation, a foundation that has made $13.6 million in grants for reform over the last five years.
Given the central role that Ayers played in the launch of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge does it make sense that he had no role or thought in seeing that Barack Obama was named Chairman of the Board to oversee the activities of the Ayers/Hallett created foundation? And we are asked to believe that he had no contact of any consequence with William Ayers? That Ayers, according to Obama, was just some guy in the neighborhood? It is nothing more than a bald faced lie.
Here is what V. Dion Haynes reported on 23 June 1995 in the Tribune:
Barack Obama, a Chicago lawyer and chairman of the Annenberg Challenge board, added, “If we’re really going to change things in this city, it’s going to start at the grass-roots level and with our children.”
Barack was interviewed again in December 1995 by Sabrina L. Miller who wrote:
There were more than 400 applications for grants this year, and those selected best addressed three problems Annenberg sees as the biggest obstacles to educational reform: lack of networking among schools, better time management and smaller class size, said Barack Obama, president of the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
So William Ayers works his heart out to get this money, Barack Obama is named President/Chairman of the Board, and the two barely know each other? Horseshit!
Too bad Ben Smith is too damn busy to ask the Obama a very simple quesiton–why does the Senator decline to speak about his time as President of a $100 million dollar foundation.? You would think that a guy who is so challenged on the question of experience would trot this out as one of his chief exhibits. But he does not. Why? Because a full examination of this period of his life will reveal that Barack is lying about his ties to Ayers. This is not guilt by association. This is guilt by a long term working relationship. What is he hiding?
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