What Really Concerns Me About Obama and Ayers

In the comments section of his post, She Doesn’t Speak For Me, BryanL says:

"My opinion on Ayers is that what he did was a long time ago during a pretty crazy time of our country (the Vietnam war). He has his reasons for trying to cause property damage to government buildings (what he said his aim was) in response to what he saw as atrocities the government was committing against Vietnamese people. I think he was wrong but again I understand he was young and it was a cray time in our history.

"The point for me though is that everybody who does not sequester themselves off from the world is going to have people they know and even associate who have done shady things or have skeletons in their past. We’re not expected to do a full background check of the everybody we know and work with as well as finding out whether they have renounced or made atonement for all their wrongs. Ayers was a college professor as was his wife who collaborated with him when Obama met them. At this point when Obama had met him, whether he knew of his past or not this guy seemed like a different guy now and like he was trying to make a positive difference in society and his community. Heck even the mayor of Chicago knows this guy and even gets education advice from him.

"Was Obama supposed to find everything out about everyone he met or had any association with and then wash his hands of the ones who he found had shady pasts? No, of course not or else he wouldn’t have been able to work with anyone. The world is messy and you can’t just easily separate the goats from the sheep. And if we took that same approach in church then we would have to shut ourselves off too or just have a group of the truly holy people who who’ve never done anything wrong (I wouldn’t be allowed in that meeting)."

I can see his point on that. I know my side has fallen victim to the guilt-by-association charge!

But what concerns me is not so much that Obama worked with a terrorist who may not have remorse about his bad actions. I'm more concerned about what the two of them actually worked together on!

Here are some quotes from Stanley Kurtz's article in the September 23 Wall Street Journal, entitled 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."

"The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism."

"In works like 'City Kids, City Teachers' and 'Teaching the Personal and the Political,' Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? 'I’m a radical, Leftist, small ’c’ communist,' Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, 'Sixties Radicals,' at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

"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).

"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."

I'm not sure if there are liberal sites that try to debunk this. In my post, Obama on Sex Education, I talked about a SIECUS report that the Obama campaign endorsed, and it advocated that public schools present homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle--to kindergartners. So I wouldn't be surprised if Obama worked with Ayers to indoctrinate kids with extreme leftist ideology. I find that offensive! What would a President Obama do?