Wednesday, October 08, 2008

All's Fair   [Andy McCarthy]

Until now, I hadn't been able to catch up with today's editorial on the shady company Obama keeps.  While I substantially agree with the editors, two observations are in order:

1.  The editorial says: 

The New Republic has reported that Obama joined Trinity around this time because he “was taken with Wright’s worldview.” The reporting of NR’s Stanley Kurtz has revealed that in the late 1980s, Wright’s worldview entailed a burning hatred of Western capitalism and a belief that black assimilation into the middle class was a form of self-enslavement to an irredeemably racist system. Obama claims he wasn’t in church when Wright delivered some of his most inflammatory sermons  ...

As I noted back in April in this article about Obama's associations: 

[Obama's] wife Michelle, is notoriously less circumspect than her careful husband about where she’s coming from. Her college thesis, which Princeton tried to keep under lock and key, testifies to a race-obsessed worldview....  Michelle recoiled at the thought of “further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.”

ME:  Obama hardly needed to be in Wright's church to be exposed to the view that black assimilation was a form of self-enslavement to an irredeemably racist system.  His wife evidently held that view before he ever met her or Wright.

2.  The editorial asserts:  "Obama and Ayers first met in 1995."  As I observed in this article yesterday, that is the version of events posited by the New York Times, and it is highly suspect. 

The Obama campaign has already lied about the timing once:  i.e., staffers preposterously told the Times that the first meeting was at the Ayers home for the launch of Obama's career, and, after running with that, the Times had to concede in a second story that Obama and Ayers had met earlier — albeit purportedly still in 1995 — in connection with education reform (the Chicago Annenberg Challenge having gone unmentioned in the Times's earlier account).

I suggested in yesterday's article that Obama and Ayers probably met when Obama was at Columbia and Ayers was at the nearby Bank Street College.  (They had Edward Said as a common connection.)  Even if my hypothesis is not right, Obama and Ayers were both involved in a hotly contested education reform controversy in Chicago in 1987-88.  And as Ed Whelan has noted, from 1984-88, Ayers wife, Bernadine Dohrn, was an intern at the Sidley Austin law firm, where Michelle Obama was an intern in 1987 and became an associate in 1988 (the year before she met Obama — when he became an intern at Sidley).

Obama was given very weighty responsibility in 1995 over what was a $150M+ education reform project that Ayers masterminded.  At the time, Obama was only a third-year associate at a small law firm, with no executive experience.  It is highly, highly unlikely that Ayers would have permitted such an arrangement unless he knew and trusted Obama.  Given the common places and people in their past, it is a virtual certainty that they met before 1995.

10/08 09:09 PMShare