Ayers and Obama
by Jeffrey Folks
Issue 118 - October 22, 2008

As I write in early October, Sarah Palin is reminding America of Barack Obama’s long association with William Ayers, a Chicago professor with a long and unabashed allegiance to radical causes. Obama has denied knowing of his friend’s involvement in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weatherman Underground. What he knew, and who he knew it, should be the crucial issue of this presidential campaign.

The facts about William Ayers are there for anyone to read in Destructive Generation, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, in which there are over a hundred references to Ayers and Dohrn. Ayers and Dohrn, pursued by the FBI, were on the run for a decade. The record is there of their involvement in bombings, violent demonstrations, political support of murder and robbery, campaigns designed to “smash monogamy” through the imposition of communal sex, and unstinting praise for other violent organizations including the Black Liberation Army.

Not only was William Ayers involved in violent radical causes in the past, it would appear that he remains unrepentant. In an interview published on September 11, 2001—a remarkable irony, given his connection with past acts of terrorism—Ayers stated that he did not regret his actions in the past and wished he could have done more. As Collier and Horowitz assert, “More than anyone else, Ayers and Dohrn embody the odd mix of characters and politics that propelled the Weatherman onto the center stage of the American scene in the late Sixties.”

One can get a good sense of what Ayers stood for by reading the “Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society,” a forty-page document published by the SDS in 1962. The Port Huron Statement is replete with boilerplate leftwing positions, including a very troubling communist-inspired insistence on collectivization of possessions and “public groupings” of all sort. It hints at the future violence of the SDS with its assertion that “human brotherhood must be willed” and with its fondness for the word “smash.” Members of the SDS are encouraged to “smash” the “invisible framework that seems to hold back chaos.” The SDS aims at the elimination of private property and “privilege.” It attacks America as what it views as a complacent, hypocritical, criminal nation.

Most important in relation to the candidacy of Barack Obama, however, is the urgency with which the Port Huron Statement calls for “change.” From its first paragraph on, the Statement propounds the need to “organize for change.” America “fears change,” we are told. America is too wealthy and complacent to wish for “change.” Yet “something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government.” The SDS appeals to the “engine of change,” that is, a growing anxiety about America’s role in the world, an unease regarding its future direction. The Port Huron Statement is dedicated, in sum, to “changing the conditions of humanity.”

Did Barack Obama lift his call for change from the Port Huron Statement? He did not need to do so. The SDS platform was no different from every other credo of the radical left. Was Obama schooled by William Ayers in the political rhetoric of the left? Perhaps he was, but again he did not need to be so schooled. Ayers and Obama share common goals, and, though no one imagines Obama running about setting off bombs, their political rhetoric and tactics have all too much in common. Intimidation, group action, mass meetings, direct democracy: these are Weatherman tactics that have found their way into the hearts of many Obama supporters.

Still, there remains the pressing question of Obama’s actual dealings with William Ayers. If Obama did know of Ayers’s radical past while carrying on a decade-long association with him, this fact in and of itself should disqualify Obama for the presidency. If Obama did not know of Ayers’s past and present radicalism, his naiveté should disqualify him as well. I am quite certain that every other well-informed member of Obama’s social circle knew of it: how could Obama fail to know. Perhaps it is like attending Rev. Wright’s Unity Church for twenty years and failing to comprehend his pastor’s sermons. It suggests an extraordinary capacity for incomprehension, enough to raise doubts not only about Obama’s qualifications for the presidency but even about his sanity. Obama has surrounded himself with individuals who engage in acts of terrorism, who do not regret what they have done, who continue to deride and ridicule their own country, and yet he does not find these individuals objectionable. Just the opposite: he has been eager to benefit from their counsel and political support.

I find it impossible to believe that Obama was unaware of Ayers’s radical past, given the fact that Ayers’s story has been told and retold in best-sellers such as Destructive Generation and even featured in a documentary film, Underground. As if this were not enough, Ayers’s wife, another person well known to the Obamas, is Bernadine Dohrn, the most famous (and infamous) of all female radicals of the 1960s.

These revelations about Obama’s friendships with admitted terrorists and anti-American pastors are deeply disturbing. This is not what we want or need as president of the United States.

Jeffrey Folks