Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Times Online:

A PAST association with a former terrorist has returned to haunt Barack Obama as the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination nears its end game.

Republicans are turning on Obama for his connection with William Ayers, once a member of the Weather Underground, a terrorist group that bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon and the State Department in the 1970s.

Ayers was loosely involved in Obama’s election as an Illinois state senator in the late 1990s, when he was introduced to local activists at a meeting in his house. He also donated $200 to Obama’s reelection campaign in 2001.

Obama served with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund, a philanthropic foundation, for three years and shared a platform with him at two academic conferences.

Republicans believe they have found new evidence that Obama lacks judgment and patriotism just as the controversy over the Rev Jeremiah Wright, his pastor, who said, “God damn America”, is dying down.

The Weathermen, a small band of extreme leftists who got their name from lines in a Bob Dylan song - “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” - conducted a bombing campaign against targets such as police headquarters, prisons and courthouses for three years to “bring the [Viet-nam] war home”.

Two police officers were killed in 1981, when members of the Weathermen and Black Liberation Army stole $1m from an armoured car. It was their last action.

Ayers, 63, turned himself in to police that year, when charges against him were dropped because of mishandled FBI surveillance. He is now a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago and is admired in progressive political and educational circles.

He wisely remained silent as stories about his connection with the 46-year-old presidential candidate began to circulate - until he was goaded into the open last week by repeated taunts from Sean Hannity, the conservative Fox News television host, who described him as an “unrepentant terrorist”.

Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, joined in the controversy on Hannity’s show. “It’s part of a general pattern in which Senator Obama is very comfortable with the hard left and the people who are in many ways fundamentally antiAmerican and certainly anti-American-government,” he said.

Karl Rove, President George W Bush’s former election guru, said the connection with Ayers was troubling. “There’s been talk in the past about friendship,” he said. “They made speeches together. He was a supporter of him in his race for the state senate. It would be interesting to know how close the links are.”

John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, was asked what he thought about Ayers and declined to offer an opinion. It was Hannity’s questioning of McCain, though, that provoked Ayers to respond.

In a lecture to college students in North Dakota last week, Ayers said: “I was trying to go to sleep, flipping through the channels real quick, and Hannity said, ‘Stay tuned. John McCain and I will talk about William Ayers.’ And I said, damn, I will have to stay tuned for an hour.”

Ayers went on to tell the students: “People ask, ‘Do you regret anything you did against the government in those days?’ And my answer is: no, I don’t.”

In an interview in The New York Times on the day of the September 11 attacks, when he was promoting Fugitive Days, his book on the Weathermen, Ayers said: “I don’t regret setting bombs,” and added: “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

He defended the comments on his blog www.billayers.org last week by claiming: “I’m sometimes asked if I regret anything I did to oppose the war in Vietnam and I say: no, I don’t regret anything I did to stop the slaughter of millions of human beings by my own government.

“Sometimes I add: I don’t think I did enough. This is then elided: he has no regrets for setting bombs and thinks there should be more bombings.”

The Obama campaign believes a very slender connection with Ayers is being used to smear their candidate.

Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman, said: “Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of criminal violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect him with events of almost 40 years ago is patently ridiculous.”

Sam Ackerman, a Chicago political activist and neighbour of Ayers, said: “The whole thing is preposterous. I held the first fundraiser for Obama, when he ran for the state senate, in my house. A lot of people held little coffee meetings. It wasn’t a big deal.”

He added: “In the past 20 years Bill Ayers has become a nationally renowned educator and is a highly respected professor at the University of Illinois. I think Barack Obama should tell people, ‘I’m not in the renouncing business’.”

The controversy comes at a sensitive time for Obama. Joe Klein, writing in Time magazine, described patriotism as “sadly, a crucial challenge for Obama now” and advised him to be “corny” about America.

Obama has just finished a four-day swing through Indiana, a conservative-leaning state, which will hold its primary on May 6. Prayers and the pledge of allegiance were said. As the son of a Kenyan father and a mother from Kansas, Obama has emphasised: “I owe what I can to this country, this country that I love, and I will never forget it.”

Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism official at the CIA said: “They’re going to kill him with this. The guy is an unrepentant terrorist, so please, Barack Obama, explain why you aligned yourself with him. It is a fundamental question of judgment. By the time he [Obama] was hanging around with Ayers, his position was well known. He [Ayers] was not a freedom fighter; he belonged to a violent terrorist group.”

David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, said earlier this year that the two were “friendly” but in the sense that “their kids attend the same school”, but Ayers’ children left long ago. A campaign aide later clarified that the connection was with Bernadine Dohrn, Ayers’s wife, who was still involved with the school.

Dohrn is another former leader of the Weather Underground, who also went on the run in the 1970s and served just under a year in jail.