Obama Caught Lying About Ayers Connection

As Doug Ross put it: “No wonder his long directorship of the Annenberg Challenge was curiously missing from Barack Obama’s official biography.”

Unfortunately for Barack Obama, the just-released document entitled Chicago Annenberg Challenge: Assessment of the First Three Years provides the backdrop of a history in which Obama and Ayers are explicitly named as the leaders of a failed, ideologically-driven nine-figure giveaway.

Here’s more from Doug Ross on Ayers, Obama and the CAC Records: Not Just “A guy who lives in my neighborhood” and the The 1999 assessment of the first three years of the CAC .pdf

Put simply, Ayers and Obama not only directed the operations of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge together, they utterly wasted between $110 and $160 million. Improved student achievement? Well, no. But…

The Challenge allowed Barack Obama and Bill Ayers to work together, no doubt closely, in the heat of political battle to help disburse more than $100 million to allies, particularly in the LSCs, in the Chicago School system.

Under the circumstances, it seems more than a bit disingenuous of Senator Obama to dismiss Bill Ayers as “some guy who lives in my neighborhood.”

That’s putting it kindly. By any reasonable estimation, it’s an outright lie.

Kind of like the Senator’s initial attempt to convince folks that, although he sat in the pews for 18 years, he heard absolutely none of Jeremiah Wright’s virulently racist sermons.

It looks like the Obama Camp is trying to walk this story back and do some damage control. They’ve got a local supporter named Linda Lenz to defend Barack in a piece called Annenberg Challenge a radical enclave? Gimme a break!

And Steve Diamond from Global Labor and Politics had this to say: Obama Campaign Uses Sun Times to Begin Retreat on Ayers Issue

Perhaps the editors of the Sun Times should feel “a little silly” about inviting Ms. Lenz to pen an editorial defending a former terrorist without identifying her fully.

Ms. Lenz is associated with the Alliance for Excellent Education on whose board sits Obama education advisor Linda Darling-Hammond. And on Ms. Lenz’ board of directors at the Community Renewal Society is Warren Chapman, one of the founders of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and a former staff member of the Joyce Foundation on whose board served Barack Obama.

While Ms. Lenz brushes over the self-proclaimed “radical” nature of school reform in Chicago she also ignores the fact that a central goal of the Annenberg Challenge led by Ayers and Obama was to bolster flagging Local School Councils, a new power center in the schools set up in the wake of a teachers strike to watchdog teachers and principals.

And although in a recent talk she gave she lauds the research conducted by the Consortium on Chicago School Research of the University of Chicago, she ignores their studied conclusion that the Annenberg Challenge was a failure. $160,000,000 down the drain and no improvement in student outcomes.

No wonder the Mayor pushed against Ayers and Obama to re-centralize power over the schools, although that was no comfort to the teachers union.

Oh, at least Ms. Lenz gets one thing right: Ayers was indeed not “just some guy in the neighborhood” as Senator Obama attempted to mislead the American people into thinking. Given the failure of the Annenberg Challenge and the authoritarian outlook that a former terrorist brought to the reform effort, no wonder he made the attempt.

The Real Barack Obama has Andrew C. McCarthy’s take on this issue with Lou Dobbs!

DOBBS: Bill Ayers, we’re hearing today from Mayor Daley that he also knows Ayers and he’s just a fine fellow and no problem, don’t be — please don’t be discomforted by Senator Obama’s relationship with him.

MCCARTHY: Look, of all the people who’ve ever bombed the Pentagon and the State Department and the New York City police headquarters, I’m sure he’s one of the best. But I — my sense is that regular Americans aren’t going to see it that way.

DOBBS: Senator Obama, you are declaring rather straight forwardly, is denying some relatively close relationships that he is suggesting are not — are distant.

MCCARTHY: Yeah, well he’s denying the relationship, but I think more importantly what he’s trying to obfuscate is that there’s a trajectory to all of this and there’s a theme that runs through it and whether its some of the statements made by his wife or Reverend Wright or Bernadine Dohrn and Ayers, the fact is he’s comfortable…Bernadine Dohrn being Ayers’ wife.The other Weather Underground terrorist who was Ayers’ wife. But, he’s comfortable with people who hate this country. And I think when he talks about and makes the theme of his campaign “Change,” and since he hasn’t really explained to us much about the change, we’re entitled to infer, from the people he’s comfortable with, who are social revolutionaries, the kind of change he wants to make in America.

DOBBS: You’re including, obviously, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

MCCARTHY: Of course, right.

DOBBS: And — and Ayers (ph). Others?

MCCARTHY: Well, there’s Rashid Khalidi, who was a recipient of some of the largess that Obama controlled when he was on the Woods Board. He is somebody who was –

DOBBS: He was on the board with Ayers (ph)?

MCCARTHY: Yes, when Obama was on the Woods Board with Ayers, they gave grants to Rashid Khalidi, and his work. Now, he has denied being a member of the PLO. But there’s no question he’s an apologist for Palestinian terrorism, including suicide attacks against Israeli soldiers.