PrintOctober 28, 2009
What Bill Ayers Saw in Barack Obama
In 1994, while Barack Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father was being polished off, Bill Ayers co-authored an essay whose title befits a former merchant seaman: "Navigating a restless sea: The continuing struggle to achieve a decent education for African American youngsters in Chicago."In "Navigating," Ayers and his nominal co-author, former New Communist Movement leader Michael Klonsky, offer a detailed analysis of the Chicago school system and a discussion of potential reforms. Curiously, so too does Obama in Dreams. What makes Obama's educational digression notable is that he had spent only two months working on education issues as a community organizer -- and that seven years earlier, while his mind was admittedly "elsewhere." Unlike Obama, Bill Ayers has a genuine, career-long interest in education. In the mid-1990s he was sufficiently serious about reform to invest considerable time and energy in his protégé. As shall be seen, the...(Read Full Article)
