From Community Organizer to CEO
Perhaps Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama was just being shy.
While millions of Americans still believe that he has no executive experience, it turns out that “from 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). . . The group poured more than $1 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists,” wrote Stanley Kurtz in the Wall Street Journal.
Kurtz’s article, “Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism in Schools,” explains how Ayers, of Weather Underground fame, spearheaded the idea for the CAC, and tells how Barack Obama “was appointed the first chairman of the board in 1995.”
This was the same year that Obama’s Illinois State Senate campaign was launched at Ayers’ house.
After examining the CAC archives in Chicago, Kurtz concluded that Obama’s statements referring to Ayers as “just a guy in my neighborhood” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis,” were false. In fact, he said, the documents “make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC.”
While the CAC’s goal was ostensibly to improve the quality of Chicago’s schools, it was clear that Ayers’ educational philosophy governed the agenda. Is it any wonder that radical activism trumped the goal of improved scores on the achievement tests?
Ayers, whose career included teaching at a radical alternative school, and bombing the Pentagon in the 1960s, once wrote that “teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression.”
“I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” said Ayers in an interview for “Sixties Radicals.”
Kurtz noted that while “the Obama campaign has cried foul when [the name of] Bill Ayers comes up, claiming ‘guilt by association,’ . . . the issue here isn’t guilt by association; it’s guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.”
Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.
Deborah Lambert
