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One of the oft-mentioned points about the Obama-Ayers connection isn’t that they were somehow in collusion over Ayer’s violent activities, rather, it is a connection of like political-mindedness. Ayers is emblematic of a radically liberal agenda, and both he and Obama have worked with CAC to promote an ideology that most Americans (indeed, most of those Obama supporters) don’t actually agree with. I point once again to the writings of Stanley Kurtz, who summarizes Obama and Kurtz’s work in schools thus:

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. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama’s first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers’s home. The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis.” Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I’ve recently spent days looking through them.Mr. Ayers is the founder of the “small schools” movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to “confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.” He believes teacher education programs should serve as “sites of resistance” to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his “Teaching Toward Freedom,” is to “teach against oppression,” against America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation. The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming “guilt by association.” Yet 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.

The fact is, of course, that Ayers did plant bombs 40 years ago. This, despite the Obama campaign’s continued assurances otherwise, is a hugely salient factor in this election. With little Senatorial experience to rely on, Obama’s record prior to his time is very important, and very telling about what he is likely to do in the future: or at the very least, what viewpoints he is likely to be sympathetic to. Given Ayer’s extreme views, this does not bode well for an Obama administration.