From all of Obama’s radical associates from the past, few have received more attention or are as shocking as the president’s connection to Ayers. That relationship plagued Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and could resurface during this year’s election as many questions still remain.
Among the possible avenues of inquiry: How did the duo originally meet? Did Obama have a larger relationship with Ayers’ parents? Did Ayers play a larger-than-known role in mentoring Obama or in aiding his political career? Are there more projects on which Ayers and Obama worked together? Is there more to discover regarding the work of the nonprofits on which the two served together?
Obama has never fully addressed the many known aspects of his relationship with Ayers. During an April 16, 2008 presidential debate, Obama described his relationship with Ayers as follows: “This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.”
Until now, it has been known that Obama launched his political career at a 1995 fundraiser in Ayers’s Chicago apartment and that the two served alongside each other from 1995 to 2000 on a hundred-million-dollar education foundation, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, or CAC. According to documentary evidence, it was Ayers that helped hire Obama at the CAC. Obama would later cite his CAC position as evidence of his qualification for public office.
Also, Obama and Ayers served as paid directors of the Woods Fund, a nonprofit that channeled money to leftist causes.
However, those probing Obama have been left speculating as to how exactly Ayers was so familiar with him that he hired the future politician for the CAC and hosted the 1995 fundraiser. This reporter’s book, Manchurian President, revealed that Obama worked directly with Ayers in 1988 and that the two were brought together by a radical Saul Alinsky acolyte who was trained by Alinsky himself and whose name was obscured in Obama’s autobiography Dreams from My Father.
Aaron Klein is Jerusalem bureau chief and senior reporter for WorldNetDaily.com. He is also host of an investigative radio program on New York’s 770-WABC Radio, the largest talk radio station in the U.S., every Sunday between 7-9 p.m. His website is KleinOnline.com.
