Bill Ayers election controversy

The Bill Ayers election controversy followed Hillary Rodham Clinton's discussion during the US 2008 Presidential election campaign, of the relationship between rival candidate Barack Obama and his constituent Bill Ayers, a former leader in the radical Weather Underground organization. Republican presidential candidate John McCain also questioned Obama's relationship with Ayers.

Interactions between Obama and Ayers

Obama was introduced to Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn in 1995 at a "meet-and-greet" political meeting the couple held for Obama at their home in the Hyde Park section of Chicago, where all three lived. State Senator Alice Palmer introduced Obama as her chosen successor at the meeting of her past supporters at Ayer's house. Chicagoan Maria Warren flippantly wrote in 2005 on her Musings & Migraines blog: "When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the livingroom of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. They were launching him — introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread."Ben Smith at Politico.com reported this over three years later. Warren then criticized Smith for quoting her "grossly out of context" in his attempt "to paint Barack Obama as a closet leftwing radical".

Obama and Ayers served together for three years on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, an anti-poverty foundation established in 1941. Obama had joined the nine-member board in 1993, and had attended a dozen of the quarterly meetings together with Ayers in the three years up to 2002, when Obama left his position on the board, which Ayers chaired for two years. donated $200 to Obama's 2001 state senate campaign.

Ayers and Dohrn are fixtures of their Chicago neighborhood, "embraced, by and large, in the liberal circles dominating Hyde Park politics", according to Smith.

Rise of the controversy

Little attention to Obama's association with Ayers was given in news organizations until February 2008, when a couple of reports were published in the British press. Howard Kurtz later wrote that the connection between the two Chicagoans was "all but ignored by the news media, other than Fox" until it was raised in a presidential debate.

Obama's rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, also brought up Ayers. In a February 15, 2008 article, a Bloomberg L.P. reporter quoted Clinton, who stated that the Republican Party might use the supposed connection with Ayers to discredit Obama if he were chosen as the nominee of the Democratic Party.

At the Democratic Party primary debate in Philadelphia on April 16, 2008, moderator George Stephanopoulos questioned Obama about his association with Ayers, asking the candidate: "Can you explain that relationship for the voters, and explain to Democrats why it won't be a problem?" Obama described Ayers thusly:

Obama's response led to an exchange between him and Clinton, in which Clinton said, "Senator Obama served on a board with Mr. Ayers for a period of time, the Woods Fund, which was a paid directorship position." The two were convicted for their actions after they had left the Weather Underground for the splinter group May 19 Communist Organization. The following Sunday, Stephanopoulos asked Republican presidential candidate John McCain about Obama's patriotism, and McCain responded: "I'm sure he's very patriotic", then added, "But his relationship with Mr. Ayers is open to question." Ayers remains on the Board of Directors of the Woods Foundation, along with representatives from Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and UBS AG Investment Bank. Washington said it was "ridiculous to suggest there's anything inappropriate" about the two men serving on the foundation board. "Bill Ayers is very respected and prominent in Chicago as a civic activist," she said. "He has a national reputation as an educator. That's why he's on our board." argued in Time that it was "absurd" to make a campaign issue out of Obama's relationship with Ayers: "If Obama's relationship with Ayers, however tangential, exposes Obama as a radical himself, or at least as a man with terrible judgment, he shares that radicalism or terrible judgment with a comically respectable list of Chicagoans and others — including Republicans and conservatives — who have embraced Ayers and Dohrn as good company, good citizens, even experts on children's issues."

Noam Scheiber, writing on the Stump blog of The New Republic, a magazine supporting Obama's candidacy, wrote, "Given that there’s no trace of support for terrorism or political violence anywhere in Obama's record — to the contrary, Obama condemned Ayers' and Dohrns' past through a spokesman — I just don't see how this tells us anything useful about Obama."

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