Squaring the Culture

Journalist Stanley Kurtz fought for and won access to review the archives of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) at the Richard M Daley Library at the University of Illinois. Today, he reports in the Wall Street Journal regarding what he found, and supplements it with his reply to the rebuttal by the Obama campaign at his home turf, the National Review Online. What he found was that Ayers and Obama collaborated in directing $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical activists to teach radicalism to elementary students in Chicago.

The CAC, if you recall, was the education reform effort in Chicago that was masterminded by unrepentant terrorist William Ayers and chaired by Barack Obama from 1995-1999. It constitutes the only significant executive experience on Obama’s resume. Conceived and funded by Nixon-appointed ambassador Walter Annenberg for the sake of improving the achievement of inner-city school students, the CAC project was hijacked by radicals to serve their political ends instead. Several reviews of the CAC noted that it was a failure when evaluated for its impact on the performance of students in school (Kurtz provides the links in his NRO article, on page 2). However, from the standpoint of Ayers’ own educational foundation and those of various other radical activists, it was a success, in that it forced elementary schools into partnership with political radical organizations in such a way that students were exposed to radical political content.

I won’t review the details: you should read Kurtz’s pair of articles. I also recommend a visit to Power Line and Classical Values where they discuss today’s articles, and also a visit to Classical Values’ review of Ayers as mainstream educator from last month.

My take from Kurtz’s project is as follows:

• As predicted, Obama lied about his past associations with Ayers. The man is simply not capable of telling the truth about his past; that he badly desires to keep his past covered up is beyond dispute. Recall that Obama unleashed his lawyers and Action Line subscribers in an attempt to bully local TV stations into refusing to air the American Issues Project ad concerning the connection between Ayers and Obama. He tried to get the Department of Justice to investigate the donor who funded the ad, unsuccessfully. This lying about his past has become so routine that we should expect any statement he makes about his past to have been altered to hide relevant detail; we should expect him to lie, by default, because he’s been caught doing it so many times.
• The Annenberg Challenge was granted hundreds of millions of dollars to improve educational achievement. It appears that the money was spent, under Chairman Obama’s guidance, for a very different purpose. This gives us a sense of how much we can trust Obama to carry out the will of the people who elected him — to wit, not at all. His stewardship of the CAC constitutes either gross incompetence, or worse, dereliction of his obligation to the stakeholders in the project, diverting money placed in his trust into the furtherance of his own political agenda. Barack Obama cannot be trusted.
• The connection settles the question regarding Obama’s radical leanings. He did not simply seek and accept support from radicals for his campaigns, he participated with them in an attempt to radicalize education in the inner city, as recently as the turn of the millennium. As Kurtz puts it, this is not guilt by association, but rather guilt by participation. Obama does not just know radicals and hang with them, he acts with them.
• The Chicago Annenberg Challenge permits a reasonable projection of what an Obama educational policy might look like. If you connect this project with Obama’s proposals for school-based citizen corps, it becomes immediately obvious that actual intellectual achievement of students is not nearly so important to Obama as is their participation in radical activism. It’s not illegal to be a leftist radical, but we need to ask, is this what we want for our children from our public schools?
• The central characteristic of Ayers’ radical ideology posits the United States philosophy and culture as the source of significant evil, a bastion of racism, sexism, homophobia, and repression of the poor. Ayers literally, vocally, and explicitly hates America as most of us recognize America. Obama’s collaboration with Ayers makes it clear either that he shares his ideology, or that he feels comfortable aligning himself with that ideology in order to further his career. Either way, this makes plausible the accusation that Obama hates traditional America. As John Hinderaker at Power Line points out, there is a straight line from “fight American repression” Ayers to “God Damn America” Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It’s clear that Obama, at the very least, tolerates this ideology, and very likely shares it.

This will not receive anywhere near the press attention that it deserves; the press collaborates in Obama’s efforts to lie about his past. Please be sure to forward links to this article and others like it to folks you know who are considering what to do in the present election.

It is not illegal for neo-Marxist radicals to run for office in the United States, it is their inherent right. However, it is morally incumbent on them to tell the truth about who they are; the attempt to gain power by fooling the nation into thinking they are centrists is wholeheartedly dishonest, and fundamentally evil. We have every right to reject their ideology because we disagree with it. We have no way to evaluate whether we agree or not if they lie about who they are.