Obama/Ayers, 4

The link between Obama and William Ayers is only recently become a topic of conversation in the broader debate over the Presidential election, a fact that is as mysterious as it is suspicious, however, in an interview leaked at the Politico, we are given a picture of exactly what Obama (who has been nothing if not coldly calculating in his political career) was thinking when he allowed himself to be associated with the 60′s domestic terrorist:

Obama “had assumed” from Bill Ayers’ stature in Chicago, he told the Philadelphia-based Michael Smerconish, that Ayers had been “rehabilitated” since his 1960s crimes. In the interview, which was taped this afternoon and will air tomorrow, and which you can listen to above,  Obama recalled moving back to Chicago after law school, and becoming involved in civic life there. “The gentleman in question, Bill Ayers, is a college professor, teaches education at the University of Illinois,” he said. “That’s how I met him — working on a school reform project that was funded by an ambassador and very close friend of Ronald Reagan’s” along with “a bunch of conservative businessmen and civic leaders.”

Note here that Obama is attempting to hide the real controversy in the Ayers affair: which in reality has nothing to do with Ayer’s terrorist activities at all, but rather his extreme leftist positions on a huge range of issues, from education (where his founding of “peace schools” shows an hugely leftist bent) to his work on the CAC with Obama. On education:

With Chavez at his side, Ayers voiced his support for “the political educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how . . . all of you continue to overcome the failures of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.” Ayers told the great humanitarian Chavez: “Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions large and small. La educacion es revolucion.” It is that form of socialist revolution that Ayers, and Obama, have worked to bring to America.

This is not the agenda of a mere “reformer”, nor is it soemthing that conservatives of any stripe would ever support. Perhaps one of the biggest accidental “coverups” in this whole affair has been that not of what Ayers bombed but rather the agenda that he (and Obama) persued.

There is another relevant factor here: namely, the spin that Obama has attempted to put on the Ayers association. In addition to downplaying his terrorist activities, Obama has also been remarkably silent on why he was every working with Ayers in the first place. The answer, of course, isn’t that Obama was ever complicit in any terrorist activity: after all, as he has pointed out (many times), Obama was a mere child living half a world away during the time that Ayers was bombing the Pentagon; rather, it is a question of what sort of agenda Obama and Ayers persued together, and how out of touch it was with mainstream American political opinion.

Obama’s critics have long pointed out that he has, objectively, the most liberal record in the United States Senate of any politician. Even the short time he has spent in national government, Obama has shown that he has a decided bent outside the opinions of mainstream America: moreover, although he tends to move “toward the center” during elections (read: he tends to abandon his principles in order to dupe potential voters). This isn’t “post-partisan”: it isn’t even bi-partisan: its just plain partisanship of the worst kind.

One could contrast this with McCain’s longtime record of working with members of both parties on compromises that have actaully gotten things done; from immigration reform to campagin finance reform to the judge confirmations during the Bush years, McCain has constantly been willing to work with members of the opposite party in order to do what the American government was designed to: to get things done via compromise.

This is the choice that we have in this election: between a politician who has hid his largely radical past (and associations thereof) with little or no record to speak of in national politics (and what small record there is is decidedly extreme) and one with decades in the Senate working toward not only an attitude of bipartisanship, but also simply getting things done through it.

It is, I think, a stunning contrast.