I45owl
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Obama/Ayers revisited
Hudson Institute > David Remnick Revisits Obama and Bill Ayers
http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseacti...e=HI_opeds Wrote:When writing about this when I began my blog two years back, I somehow missed Diamond’s previous contributions to the effort. They are important for two reasons. The first is that Diamond is no supporter of the simplistic theory that Obama was a friend of the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers and therefore a secret communist. Rather Diamond concentrated on their joint activity on behalf of a radical educational curriculum that often led to conflict with the traditional teachers’ unions.
When the Ayers/Obama connection became a major issue, The New York Times ran what became an influential investigative report on their relationship. Bloggers, including Diamond, had written that the appointment of Obama to the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge had been engineered for Obama by Bill Ayers. The Times reporters concluded, however, that “Mr. Ayers played no role in Mr. Obama’s appointment.” (my emphasis)
Stephen Diamond, who had been interviewed by different Times reporters more than once, responded with a long reply that the paper’s editors did not print. It is worth revisiting his answer now. Published on his blog on Oct. 8, 2009, Diamond notes that the real story is not “the narrow minded approach of the Republican party to attack Obama by attempting to link him to Ayers history as a terrorist.” Rather, it was that “the fundamental political world view of Ayers, not his tactical foray into bombings for a few years, is influencing the Obama candidacy.” Diamond bases his case on Ayers and Obama’s shared belief in a so-called “ ‘social justice’ approach to education.”
Like Sol Stern, whose writings for City Journal emphasized these same points, Diamond itemized the program, and then concluded that “the purpose of these entities is to create a political base for Ayers and his band of fellow traveling authoritarians to push their wider political agenda.” The four basic ideas Ayers and Obama believed in, he wrote, are these:
the creation of “local school councils” (LSCs) like those that Ayers has promoted in Chicago for the last 20 years;
“small schools” which Ayers has also promoted since the early 1990s in Chicago and elsewhere;
the advocacy of what Ayers and others call “social justice” teaching; and
the payment of reparations through education spending to correct what he has seen for 40 years as the fundamentally racist nature of American society.
While Obama did not offer any support for “the foray into violence by Ayers from 1969-1980,” Diamond wrote, while he was a community organizer from 1985 to 1988 he led the Developing Communities Project, and was “was a leading player in the lobbying campaign for ‘local school councils’ in Chicago in the wake of a strike by the Chicago Teachers Union.” In that lobbying effort, Obama worked alongside Ayers. Obama faced opposition from both the union and mainstream black organizations. Yet he did not step aside from his lobbying, and as Diamond wrote, The New York Times “did not explain that among the most important projects of the [Annenberg] Challenge were the very same four policies so critical to Ayers political strategy.”
Most important, Diamond pointed out, the paper “ignored the written evidence I provided them that demonstrated that Obama was appointed to the chairmanship of the Challenge board by Bill Ayers, who conceived, founded, secured $50 million to support and led the Challenge from 1993 to 2002.” They also “ignored the hundreds of thousands of dollars funneled by the Challenge to the Small Schools Workshop which was founded by Ayers and then directed by Mike Klonsky who continues to head it up still.” Klonsky, for those who do not know of him, was a founder of a new Maoist Communist organization in that era who had also been a comrade of Ayers in The Weather Underground.
Let us skip to the present. In his blog yesterday, Stephen Diamond was stunned when he picked up a copy of David Remnick’s new biography of Barack Obama, The Bridge: The Life and Times of Barack Obama. There he found, in a chapter titled “Somebody Nobody Sent,” the following words: Ayers, Remnick writes, “helped bring Obama onto the Annenberg Board.” (my emphasis.) That statement of fact, one can immediately see, is precisely the opposite of the New York Times’ bold claim that “Mr. Ayers played no role in Mr. Obama’s appointment.”
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Ayers, he explains, “would never have helped engineer the Obama appointment if he were not dead certain that Obama would lead the CAC in the right direction. During its seven year existence the foundation was in a pitched battle with the Daley Administration which wanted to centralize school management and even tried to convince the Annenberg Foundation to not fund the Ayers proposal. That implies, of course, that Ayers and Obama had a closer and longer term relationship.” Diamond adds that his own investigation has recently revealed that “a senior Obama campaign activist and long time Democratic Party supporter confirmed the relationship went back to the 1980s.”
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Diamond, as blogger Brenda J. Elliott wrote, “is a dyed-in-the wool leftist, albeit one who’s grounded in the view that the American labor union movement can be the savior of American democracy.” His credentials are on the political Left, and he evidently considers himself a social-democrat and a supporter of trade unionism. He is obviously a fierce opponent of the cultural identity politics of a good portion of today’s left-wing, and he sees these people as major Obama supporters.
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