Stanley Kurtz has pored through archived documents and has written an explosive piece today on Barack Obama's only executive experience. But first, here is a short video to place this in context:
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.
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago's public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the "Collaborative," which shaped education policy.
The CAC's basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.
One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.
The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.
In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
Law professor Stephen Diamond also went through the document archive and claims to disagree with Kurtz's conclusions. He wholeheartedly agrees that Obama and Ayers were "comrades in arms" for years, but that their organization was "authoritarian," not only "radical." Here is how Diamond puts it:
Thus, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was far more than just a chance for Ayers to engage in "radical" efforts to raise the political consciousness of young students. It was that but it was much more - it was a front in an important battle for control of the Chicago Public School system. In fact, according to the Ken Rolling, Daley himself tried to wrest control of the Annenberg grant money away from Ayers and Obama.
The Challenge was radical, but not the right wing's simplistic view of "radicalism." Rather it represented an authoritarian and bureaucratic agenda - a desperate attempt to use parents to control teachers through a politically correct curriculum, yes, but more importantly to use them as canon fodder in the battle to control teachers and administrators. This authoritarian approach is entirely consistent with Ayers' long held political views as he has consistently sided politically with the most undemocratic regimes available, including most recently that of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
And at Ayers' side the entire time during this battle was his comrade-in-arms, Barack Obama, who served as President and Chairman of the board of directors of the Challenge.
