Another dodgy contact is dogging the Democrat hopeful
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Sarah Baxter
A PAST association with a former terrorist has returned to haunt Barack Obama as the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination nears the end game.
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3757 are turning on Obama for his connection with William Ayers, once a member of the Weather Underground, a terrorist group that bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon and the State Department in the 1970s.
Ayers was loosely involved in Obama’s election as an Illinois state senator in the late 1990s, when he was introduced to local activists at a meeting in his house. He also donated $200 to Obama’s reelection campaign in 2001.
Obama served with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund, a philanthropic foundation, for three years and shared a platform with him at two academic conferences. Republicans believe they have found new evidence that Obama lacks judgment and patriotism just as the controversy over the Rev Jeremiah Wright, his pastor, who said, “God damn America”, is dying down.
The Weathermen, a small band of extreme leftists who got their name from lines in a Bob Dylan song – “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” – conducted a bombing campaign against targets such as police headquarters, prisons and courthouses for three years to “bring the [Viet-nam war home”.
Two police officers were killed in 1981, when members of the Weathermen and Black Liberation Army stole $1m from an armoured car. It was their last action.
Ayers, 63, turned himself in to police that year, when charges against him were dropped because of mishandled FBI surveillance. He is now a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago and is admired in progressive political and educational circles.
He wisely remained silent as stories about his connection with the 46-year-old presidential candidate began to circulate – until he was goaded into the open last week by repeated taunts from Sean Hannity, the conservative Fox News television host, who described him as an “unrepentant terrorist”.
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, joined in the controversy on Hannity’s show. “It’s part of a general pattern in which Senator Obama is very comfortable with the hard left and the people who are in many ways fundamentally antiAmerican and certainly anti-American-government,” he said.
Karl Rove, President George W Bush’s former election guru, said the connection with Ayers was troubling. “There’s been talk in the past about friendship,” he said. “They made speeches together. He was a supporter of him in his race for the state senate. It would be interesting to know how close the links are.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3736043.ece