Bill Ayers 2008 presidential election controversy
During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, controversy broke out [1] regarding Barack Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a former leader of the Weather Underground, a radical left organization in the 1970s.
[3][4][5] Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, hosted a gathering at their home in 1995,[6] where Alice Palmer introduced Obama as her chosen successor in the Illinois State Senate.
[4][6][7] The matter was first raised by the British and American press, then by conservative blogs and talk radio programs,[8][9] and then by moderator George Stephanopoulos during a debate between Hillary Clinton and Obama in April 2008.
Larry Grathwohl, an FBI informant who was with the Weathermen from autumn 1969 through spring 1970, considered Ayers and Dohrn the two top leaders of the organization.
The group intentionally chose its targets to avoid human injury;[15] however, a bomb previously being designed in March 1970, for use at an NCO dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey, had claimed the lives of three members of the Weathermen who died during an accidental explosion while assembling it.
Dohrn received three years' probation and was fined $1,500 for the Illinois state charges, but later served seven months in jail for refusal to testify to a grand jury about their former colleagues in the Weathermen.
[21] The following week newspapers reported that Palmer-supporter Obama, whose memoir Dreams from My Father would be published on July 18, 1995, would announce he was running and would be a front-runner for Palmer's state Senate seat.
[30] Laura S. Washington,[31] chairwoman of the Woods Fund, said the small board had a collegial "friendly but businesslike" atmosphere, and met four times a year for a half-day, mostly to approve grants.
[24] An August 2008 USA Today article reported "The last time Obama saw Ayers was about a year ago when he crossed paths with him while biking in the neighborhood," says Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman.
"[38] Obama then referred to President Bill Clinton's pardoning of Linda Sue Evans and Susan Rosenberg,[40] two former Weather Underground members convicted for their actions after joining the splinter group May 19 Communist Organization.
[44] That month, the American Issues Project began running an ad that emphasized the relationship between the two, which contained the following text: "Barack Obama is friends with Ayers, defending him as, quote, 'Respectable' and 'Mainstream.'
"[45] In October 2008, after the McCain campaign announced that it would step up attacks on the Democratic presidential candidate,[46] Sarah Palin delivered speeches saying that Obama was "palling around with terrorists."
The article stated that other "publications, including The Washington Post, Time magazine, The Chicago Sun-Times, The New Yorker and The New Republic, have said that their reporting doesn't support the idea that Obama and Ayers had a close relationship.
"[5] CNN has independently deemed Palin's allegations false, saying: "There is no indication that Ayers and Obama are now 'palling around,' or that they have had an ongoing relationship in the past three years.
"[4] The Republican National Committee[47] and the McCain campaign each launched additional attack ads, calling Obama "too dangerous for America.
[53] In August 2008, the Obama campaign's attorney Robert Bauer wrote TV stations running the American Issues Project ad, saying, "Your station is committed to operating in the public interest, an objective that cannot be satisfied by accepting for compensation material of such malicious falsity," and wrote Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General John C. Keeney, describing the ad as a "willful attempt to evade the strictures of federal election law.
"[54] That month, Obama began responding to Palin's speeches on October 5, 2008, at an event in Asheville, North Carolina: "Senator McCain and his operatives are gambling that they can distract you with smears rather than talk to you about substance.
In a series of articles in American Thinker and WorldNetDaily, author Jack Cashill claimed that his own analysis of the book showed Ayers' writing style.
In late October, US Congressman Chris Cannon and his brother-in-law attempted to hire an Oxford University professor, Peter Millican, to prove Ayers' authorship using computer analysis.
After the election, he wrote an op-ed piece in which he explained: With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion.
Mayor Richard M. Daley issued a statement in support of Bill Ayers the next day (April 17, 2008), as did the Chicago Tribune in an editorial.
[65][66] On April 18, John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei of Politico wrote that questions "about Obama's association with 1960s radical William Ayers ... were entirely in-bounds.
