Every once in a while, someone, in this case a candidate, makes a catastrophic decision, an “unforced error.” This seems to be one such occasion.
The ad is here. It says, “Barack Obama denounced William Ayres crimes.” The trouble is that he didn’t. Mayor Daley says Bill Ayres is a member of the “mainstream community.” In fact, he was Citizen of the Year in Chicago.
Ayers is still looking for that new symbol of hope to replace his old flags and signs. He could do a lot worse than to start with a photograph of him taken in 1997. It shows Ayers accepting Chicago’s Citizen of the Year award after securing the city a $49.2 million Annenberg Award for school reform.
“Makes you Citizen of the Year just like that,” Ayers says of the hefty grant, laughing. Shaking his hand in the photo is Mayor Daley — the new one, whose dad’s police treated Ayers so inhospitably all those years ago.
What did Bill Ayres’ father, a powerful and rich Democrat with connections to the Daley regime, want?
Of course, Tom Ayers was never going to run for mayor himself and clearly that was not possible for his son Bill. But what about the young charismatic Barack Obama? As I have suggested in earlier posts here it is possible that Tom Ayers served as a mentor to the young Obama as far back as the time Obama spent as a community organizer on the south side of Chicago not far from Tom Ayers’ home in Hyde Park. Obama biographer David Mendell writes that Obama “had returned to Chicago from Harvard Law with an eye on the mayor’s office after witnessing Harold Washington’s historic tenure at city hall.”
Tomorrow is the day that Steve Diamond and Stanley Kurtz find out what is in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge records.
For Obama to have opened this door for the MSM on the Ayres issue was an unforced eror and maybe a catastrophe.