Batchelor: Questions about Ayers, Dohrn, Obama

John Batchelor wrote today on his blog:

Scott Shane’s Version

The New York Times assigned its first Bill Ayers profile since September 11, 2001 to veteran political reporter Scott Shane, and the article published October 3, 2008 provides no new information about the mysterious relationship between Bill Ayers and his colleague of at least over a dozen years Barack Obama. In Scott Shane’s version, the two met by chance in Chicago in 1995 in a conversation about education, served briefly together on two Chicago foundation boards, lived in the same neighborhood, and have fallen out of meaningful conversation since 2002.

The Cutting Room Floor

There is evidence that Scott Shane and his colleagues worked carefully on this story and perhaps were obliged to leave out a deal of material that did not fit concisely in the most innocuous version. There remain many unanswered questions from the puzzle pieces of the story over many years. Below are some of these questions in chronological order when possible.

1. Most importantly, when and where did Barack Obama first meet Bill Ayers? Neither Bill Ayers or Barack Obama would speak to Scott Shane for this piece, and Scott Shane mentions a “lunchtime meeting in a Chicago skyscraper” in 1995 but does not say this was the first meeting. Campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt does assert, without further explanation, that the 1995 meeting was their first meeting. There exists no other published record of this meeting being the first meeting.

2. Is it coincidence or significant that both Columbia College student Barack Obama (1981-1983) and Columbia Teacher’s College student Bill Ayers were in New York City in the same time frame of the early 1980s, and that they both attended wool-gathering events about socialism at the Cooper Union? And that Mr. Obama, after two indifferent post-collage years working for a trade newsletter in New York, left for Chicago in 1985, while Mr. Ayers followed his wife to Chicago after receiving his doctorate at Teachers College in 1987?

3. Is it coincidence or significant that Barack Obama travelled to Chicago to work for Mike Kruglik in a Saul Alinsky-inspired organization because of a $12,000 grant from the Chicago based Woods Fund? Is it significant that a member of the Woods board at the time was Ken Rolling, who would later serve as the executive director of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) grant alongside Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama?

4. Is it coincidence or significant that Bernardine Dohrn (left, with Bill Ayers, 1981), after serving seven months in jail on a felony for refusing to cooperate with the 1981 Brinks robbery investigation, was employed from 1984-1988 at the prominent Chicago law firm, Sidley Austin, where both Michelle Robinson in 1988 and Barack Obama in 1989 would serve as summer interns, and where Barack Obama met his future wife? Is it coincidence or significant that Bernardine Dohrn supervised the interns at Sidley Austin and that this duty passed to Michelle Robinson after Bernardine Dohrn left to an associate professorship at Northwestern University? Is it coincidence or significant that Bill Ayers’s father Tom Ayers (1915-2007) was a major client of Sidley Austin and long a significant proponent of progressive causes in Chicago?

5. Is it coincidence or significant that Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were known to be part of a Hyde Park support group for Mayor Harold Washington, and that this group included other prominent South Siders such as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Father William Pfleger? Is it coincidence or significant that Barack Obama has written that he was attracted to Chicago in 1985 because of the achievement of Harold Washington?

6. Is it coincidence or significant that, after graduating Harvard Law School in 1991, Barack Obama was offered his first law job in 1993 by Judson Miner (left), of Davis Miner Galand, who was a 1967 University of Chicago Law School classmate of Bernardine Dohrn?

7. Is it coincidence or signficant that Bill Ayers began his well-publicized pursuit of the $49.2 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge Grant with a sizeable grant from the Joyce Foundation in 1993-1994, and that the junior lawyer Barack Obama was named to the Joyce Foundation board in November 1994 by Joyce Foundation (since 1992) President Deborah Leff?

8. Is it coincidence or significant that Deborah Leff (left) asserts that she alone suggested Barack Obama as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant board beginning March 1995 — despite the puzzling fact that Barack Obama had no education or teaching experience and, then 33, was serving at the head of a board that included two university presidents?

9. Is it coincidence or significant that a major recipient in the first year of CAC grants was a radical education enterprise headed by Bill Ayers and his education colleague, the self-proclaimed revolutionary communist education Professor Mike Klonsky? And that Mr. Ayers’s employer, the University of Illinois, contributed a free room to serve as the CAC headquarters?

10. Is it coincidence or significant that not only was Mr. Obama’s first introduction as a political candidate made in the Hyde Park home of Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn, but also, while Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers continued to serve on the CAC together, they also participated in public policy panels together? In 1997, they were on a panel at the University of Chicago, purportedly organized by Michelle Obama, entitled, “Should a child ever be called a super predator?” In 2002, they were on a panel at the University of Illinois entitled, “Intellectuals, who needs them?” This cooperation was in addition to the enthusiasm that Mr. Obama expressed in print in 1997 for Mr. Ayers’s book, “A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenille Court.” The unusual loss of all of Mr. Obama’s Illinois State Senate records prevents additional discoveries of their policy conversations.

11. Is it coincidence or significant that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers served on the Woods Fund board together 1999, 2000, 2001, and through mid-December 2002, during which time they together approved grants to many progressive enterprises, including Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church and a Chicago organization closely associated with the prominent radical Palestinian booster and confrontational Professor Rashid Khalidi (right), then of the University of Chicago and now of Columbia University? Is it coincidence or significant that there is no pubic record of the politician Barack Obama rebuking the author Bill Ayers (right, in a book promoting photograph) for his unacceptable remark, published in the New York Times on September 11, 2001, promoting Mr. Ayers’s book, “Fugitive Days” (Beacon Press), that “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”?

12. Is it coincidence or significant that Barack Obama and his spokespersons have changed the explanations about the nature of the relationship between Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama several times since the fact of it was first introduced to the presidential campaign this year? In February, campaign strategist David Axelrod said the men knew each other because their children attended the same private school — despite the generational age difference between the grown Ayers children and very young Obama children. In April, Mr. Obama, when asked during the Philadelphia debate by George Stephanopoulos, said that Ayers was a “guy who lived in the neighborhood” and a “professor of English” — a strange evasion give the facts of their work together on CAC and Woods. In September, Mr. Obama told Bill O’Reilly that he had not “seen” Ayers in a year and a half. In the Scott Shane piece, we are told by the campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt that the two met on the street a little more than a year ago and that there have been no phone conversations or text messages between the two since Mr. Obama began serving in the Senate in January 2005. Unfortunately, this sort of non-denial denial does not speak to the repeated, credible reports of communication between Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama via interlocutors such as Mr. Axelrod.

13. Finally, is it coincidence or significant that despite all the heated attention that the Ayers-Dohrn-Obama acquaintance has attracted at least since February that Mr. Ayers has refused to end the questions? Mr. Ayers has not been silent in this period. He writes a regular blog, appears at many public events and most recently published a bizarre four-panel cartoon (right) of his Vietnam war resistance thoughts. His colleagues Mike Klonsky and the radical politician Tom Hayden are equally outspoken and are the energy behind Progressives for Obama, a sentimental collection of 1960s radicals now in their autumnal years. One brief message from Mr. Ayers would end the speculation about the unusual coincidences that put both he and Mr. Obama so often in the same cities at the same time with the same activities, and yet they remain unsympathetic and unresolved.

Note: Supporting article links here.