Both served together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an organization founded by Ayers, and where Obama was its first chairman. How and why exactly would Ayers pick Obama to be the first chairman of an organization despite the fact that Obama had no practical experience other than as a community organizer at the time? Why would Obama work for Ayers?
A commercial put together American Issues Project, which is funded in part by Harold Simmons, who was a backer of the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, highlights those ties and raises the questions I've been raising here for some time. It's that ad that the Obama camp is trying to silence.
Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said Obama supporters have inundated stations that are airing the ad, many of them owned by Sinclair Communications, with 93,000 e-mails. He called the ad false, despicable and outrageous.Just how close is Ayers to Obama, and why exactly did Obama seek out those ties to Ayers? It's not exactly unknown that Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground, and that terrorist group carried out multiple terrorist attacks, and plotted to overthrow the government.
"Other stations that follow Sinclair's lead should expect a similar response from people who don't want the political discourse cheapened with these false, negative attacks," Vietor said.
Sinclair offices were closed late Monday and officials there could not be immediately contacted.
"It seems they protest a bit too much," American Issues Project spokesman Christian Pinkston said. "They're going all of these routes—through threats, intimation—to try to thwart the First Amendment here because they don't have an argument on merit."
Ayers is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He and Obama live in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood and served together on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based charity that develops community groups to help the poor. Obama left the board in December 2002.
In fact, Ayers is unrepentant and wistful about those days and wouldn't mind seeing the government overthrown. Yet, it would be easier to handpick a candidate that hews closely to his own ideology to carry out those changes than to actually overthrow the government.
Tom Maguire has more on Obama's efforts to silence the Ayers ad. The problem, of course, is that there's a paper trail, and Obama has yet to offer up a plausible explanation as to why and how he associated with Ayers. There's no way you could ever claim that Ayers was mainstream.
Yet, there are questions over just how successful the Annenberg Challenge was in Chicago. You could make the argument that it was a flop, which further undermines Obama's withering credibility.
We'll see today what the University of Illinois at Chicago releases from its archives about the Annenberg Challenge, including papers that should provide more insight about the Obama-Ayers relationship.
UPDATE:
This is the ad they don't want you to see:
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