But such youthful indiscretions are no reason why the young scion should not go on to become a professor of childhood education, as Ayers in fact did.

Obama has acted like he has only a passing acquaintance with Ayers, as someone living in the same neighborhood, even claiming in an interview that he thought he was an “English professor.” But it seems that Obama may be hiding a lot of connections, like how Ayers and similar like-minded revolutionists of the 1960s, helped get Barry Obama a job as a “community organizer.”

I guess you have to know the right people, and it’s not the foreman at the factory.

Steve Diamond, law professor at Santa Clara University , offers a fascinating account of Obama’s connections that the New York Times has not seen fit to print and that National Public Radio has not deemed worthy of one of their “in-depth” stories. The professor also offers along the way little lessons about the various schools of communism and which type Obama allies favor.

He concludes,

“It is highly unlikely that a 30-something second year lawyer [Obama] would have been plucked from relative obscurity out of a left wing law firm to head up something as visible and important in Chicago as the Annenberg Challenge by Bill Ayers if Ayers had not already known Obama very well,” a “key move in [Obama’s] early career.”

While Obama claims to have simply happened to have served on the same board, Diamond calls Ayers the “architect” of the Annenberg Challenge, “a $50 million grant program to funnel money into reform efforts at Chicago schools.” Its purpose was “to defend the controversial and troubled local schools council effort” from 1988; the councils were made up by a majority of parents who would have “the power to hire and fire principals.” Diamond sees these types of councils as “reminiscent of ‘community’ bodies set up in regimes like those of Hugo Chavez and the Sandinistas.” Who of course was active in the councils but Bill Ayers then out from the underground and an assistant professor of education at the University of Illinois . Such a position suited Ayers’s brand of maoist communism which favors the strategy of the “long march” through our institutions, like schools and curriculums. Ayers’s view of education can be summarized in a speech he gave in front of Hugo Chavez whom he said was creating “something truly new and deeply humane.” In front of the “humane” Chavez, Ayers proclaimed his interest in “overcome[ing] the failings of capitalist education” and making education the “motor force of revolution.”

Diamond points out that “Obama chaired the Annenberg Challenge for three years and served on its board for another three years, working closely with Ayers on grants to Chicago schools,” although “The impact of the Annenberg Challenge on actual students in Chicago schools is considered mixed at best.” Bill Ayers, however, “deemed it a success on political grounds.” Through the detailed chronology Diamond also points out the ties to other members of the Ayers family as well as to Bill’s wife, ex-felon and former leader of the Weather Underground, Bernardine Dohrn.

Finally, Diamond refers to other radicals who are associated with Obama’s campaign: “Marilyn Katz, a public relations professional, who was head of security for the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) during the disaster in the streets of Chicago in 1968. She is close (politically) to Carl Davidson, a former vice president of SDS and longtime Fidelista, who is webmaster for a group called Progressives for Obama, that is headlined by other former 60s radicals like Tom Hayden and maoist Bill Fletcher. Davidson and Katz were key organizers of the 2002 anti-war demonstration where Obama made public his opposition to the Iraq war that has been so critical to his successful presidential campaign.”

Great stuff. Read the intriguing tale about the alliance between an indoctrinator of little children and a “community organizer” who wants to become President.

It’s a rare treat these days to get a professor writing prose that is enjoyable and educative. It used to be that way back in the 1950s before the radical theorists took over the academy. It should be quite convincing of what you already suspected about Obama, which as one of my neighbors from Beach Street might have put it, “You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows over the smell of a rat.”