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Senator Stealth 
How to advance radical causes when no one's looking 
By Stanley Kurtz 
Posted: Tuesday, September 2, 2008 


ARTICLE 
National Review Vol. LX, No. 16   
Publication Date: September 1, 2008 


After hearing about Barack Obama's ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bill
Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Fr. Michael Pfleger, and the militant activists of
ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), it should
be clear to everyone that his extremist roots run deep. But the presumptive
Democratic presidential nominee has yet another connection with the world of
far-Left radicalism. Obama has long been linked -- through foundation
grants, shared political activism, collaboration on legislation and tactics,
and mutual praise and support -- with the Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation,
one of the least known yet most influential national umbrella groups for
church-based "community organizers." 

The same separatist, anti-American theology of liberation that was so boldly
and bitterly proclaimed by Obama's pastor is shared, if more quietly, by
Obama's Gamaliel colleagues. The operative word here is "quietly." Gamaliel
specializes in ideological stealth, and Obama, a master student of Gamaliel
strategy, shows disturbing signs of being a sub rosa radical himself.
Obama's legislative tactics, as well as his persistent professions of
non-ideological pragmatism, appear to be inspired by his radical mentors'
most sophisticated tactics. Not only has Obama studied, taught, and
apparently absorbed stealth techniques from radical groups like Gamaliel and
ACORN, but in his position as a board member of Chicago's supposedly
nonpartisan Woods Fund, he quietly funneled money to his radical allies --
at the very moment he most needed their support to boost his political
career. It's high time for these shadowy, perhaps improper, ties to receive
a dose of sunlight. 

The connections are numerous. Gregory Galluzzo, Gamaliel's co-founder and
executive director, served as a trainer and mentor during Obama's mid-1980s
organizing days in Chicago. The Developing Communities Project, which first
hired Obama, is part of the Gamaliel network. Obama became a consultant and
eventually a trainer of community organizers for Gamaliel. (He also served
as a trainer for ACORN.) And he has kept up his ties with Gamaliel during
his time in the U.S. Senate. 

The Gamaliel connection appears to supply a solution to the riddle of
Obama's mysterious political persona. On one hand, he likes to highlight his
days as a community organizer -- a profession with proudly radical roots in
the teachings of Chicago's Saul Alinsky, author of the highly influential
text Rules for Radicals. Obama even goes so far as to make the
community-organizer image a metaphor for his distinctive conception of
elective office. On the other hand, Obama presents himself as a
post-ideological, consensus-minded politician who favors pragmatic,
common-sense solutions to the issues of the day. How can Obama be radical
and post-radical at the same time? Perhaps by deploying Gamaliel techniques.
Gamaliel organizers have discovered a way to fuse their Left-extremist
political beliefs with a smooth, non-ideological surface of down-to-earth
pragmatism: the substance of Jeremiah Wright with the appearance of Norman
Vincent Peale. Could this be Obama's secret? 

FROM REVELATION TO REVOLUTION 
Before outlining Gamaliel's techniques of political stealth, we need to
identify the views that they are camouflaging. These can be found in Dennis
Jacobsen's book Doing Justice: Congregations and Community Organizing.
Jacobsen is the pastor of Incarnation Lutheran Church in Milwaukee and
director of the Gamaliel National Clergy Caucus. Jacobsen's book, which is
part of the first-year reading list for new Gamaliel organizers, lays out
the underlying theology of Gamaliel's activities. While Jacobsen's book was
published in 2001, it is based on presentations Jacobsen has been making at
Gamaliel's clergy-training center since 1992 and clearly has Galluzzo's
endorsement. So while we cannot be sure that Obama has read or taught Doing
Justice, the book certainly embodies a political perspective to which
Obama's more than 20 years of friendship with Galluzzo, and his stint as a
Gamaliel instructor, would surely have exposed him. 

In Jacobsen's conception, America is a sinful and fallen nation whose
pervasive classism, racism, and militarism authentic Christians must
constantly resist. Drawing on the Book of Revelation, Jacobsen exhorts,
"Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! . . . Come out of her, my people, so
that you do not take part in her sins." The United States, Jacobsen
maintains, employs nationalism, propaganda, racism, bogus "civil religion,"
and class enmity to bolster its entrenched and oppressive corporate system.
Authentic Christians forced to live in such a nation can "come out of
Babylon," says Jacobsen, only by entering into "a perpetual state of
internal exile." 

Of course, many believers do feel at home in the United States, but
according to Jacobsen, these inauthentic and misguided Christians have been
lulled into the false belief that the United States is somehow different
from other countries -- that it stands as a genuine defender of freedom and
democracy. According to Jacobsen, the desire of most Americans to create a
safe, secure life for themselves and their families constitutes an
unacceptable emotional distancing from the sufferings of the urban poor.
Jacobsen says that whenever he feels himself seduced by the American dream
of personal security -- this "unconscionable removal from the lives of those
who suffer" -- he rejects its pull as the deplorable "encroachment of
America on my soul." To "feel at home in the United States," maintains
Jacobsen, is not only to fall victim to a scarcely disguised form of
political despotism; it is to betray Christianity itself. 

Although Jacobsen acknowledges that the sufferings of the poor in America do
not quite rise to the level of the Nazi Holocaust, he nonetheless finds a
similarity: "The accommodation and silence of the church amidst Nazi
atrocities are paralleled by the accommodation and silence of the church in
this country amidst a calculated war against the poor." He recounts being
present at the Pentagon "to fast and vigil with a group of religious
resisters against the madness of nuclear build-up and militarism generated
in that place" and is horrified when he sees that many in the American
military actually think of themselves as Christians. For Jacobsen, this
means that the church has "aligned itself with oppressive forces and
crucified its Lord anew." 

Jacobsen has a low opinion of the food pantries, homeless shelters, and
walk-a-thons that make up so much religious charitable activity in the
United States. All that charity, says Jacobsen, tends to suppress the truth
that the system itself is designed to benefit the prosperous and keep the
poor down. He complains: "The Christians who are so generous with food
baskets at Thanksgiving or with presents for the poor at Christmas often
vote into office politicians whose policies ignore or crush those living in
poverty." "Most churches do not operate on the basis of healthy agitation,"
he says, but instead "on the basis of manipulation, authoritarianism, or
guilt-tripping." 

The solution, says Jacobsen, is community organizing: "Metropolitan
organizing offers a chance to end the warfare against the poor and to heal
the divisions of class and race that separate this sick society." "Militant
mass action . . . fueled by righteous anger," he maintains, offers authentic
community, and therefore "the possibility of fulfillment in a vacuous
society." He continues: "If the pain and human degradation all around us
doesn't stir up within us sufficient anger to want to shake the foundations
of this society, then it's probably best for us to go back to playing
church." 

Other than the sense of community that is generated by militant struggle,
what does Jacobsen offer as the cure for America's ills? He is short on
detail here, but there are tantalizing hints. Jacobsen invokes the communal
property and absence of private ownership that prevailed among early
Christians as a possible model. Despite his initial skepticism regarding
such selflessness, says Jacobsen, he has seen this sort of "radical sharing
of limited resources" on a trip to a poor African church in Tanzania.
Unfortunately, says Jacobsen, "the church in the United States lacks
community. The American church by and large is privatistic, insular, and
individualistic. It reflects American culture." 

These, then, are the beliefs at the spiritual heart of the Gamaliel
Foundation's community-organizing efforts. They show clear echoes of
Jeremiah Wright's and James Cone's black-liberation theology, and it's
evident that Obama has an affinity for organizations that embody this point
of view. But a question arises. Gamaliel's goal is to build church-based
coalitions capable of wielding power on behalf of the poor. These
congregation-based organizations are supposed to counterbalance and undercut
America's oppressive power structures. Yet if most American Christians are
deluded servants of a sinful and oppressive system, how can they be molded
into a majority coalition for change? Given the privatistic, insular, and
individualistic character of American culture, theological frankness might
backfire and drive away potential allies, exactly as happened with Reverend
Wright. Thus arises the need for stealth. 

FAKE RIGHT, GO LEFT 
It might have been all but impossible to penetrate the strategic thinking of
Obama's cohorts if not for the fortuitous 2008 publication of Organizing
Urban America: Secular and Faith-based Progressive Movements, by Rutgers
political scientist Heidi Swarts. This is the first book-length study of the
organizing tactics and political ideologies of Gamaliel and ACORN, the two
groups to which Obama's community-organizing ties are closest. Swarts's
study focuses on Gamaliel and ACORN in St. Louis, but given the degree of
national coordination by both groups, the carry-over of her findings to
Chicago is bound to be substantial. Because Swarts is highly sympathetic to
the community-organizing groups she studies, she was granted an unusual
degree of access to strategic discussions during her period of fieldwork. 

Swarts calls groups like ACORN and (especially) Gamaliel "invisible actors,"
hidden from public view because they often prefer to downplay their efforts,
because they work locally, and because scholars and journalists pay greater
attention to movements with national profiles (like the Sierra Club or the
Christian Coalition). Congregation-based community organizations like
Gamaliel, by contrast, are often invisible even at the local level. A
newspaper might report on a demonstration led by a local minister or priest,
for example, without noticing that the clergyman in question is part of the
Gamaliel network. "Though often hidden from view," says Swarts, "leaders
have intentionally and strategically organized these movements that appear
to well up and erupt from below." 

Although Gamaliel and ACORN have significantly different tactics and styles,
Swarts notes that their political goals and ideologies are broadly similar.
Both groups press the state for economic redistribution. The tactics of
Gamaliel and ACORN have been shaped in a "post-Alinsky" era of welfare
reform and conservative resurgence, posing a severe challenge to those who
wish to expand the welfare state. The answer these activists have hit upon,
says Swarts, is to work incrementally in urban areas, while deliberately
downplaying the far-Left ideology that stands behind their carefully
targeted campaigns. 

While ACORN's membership is fairly homogeneous, consisting chiefly of
inner-city blacks and Hispanics, congregation-based community organizations
like the Gamaliel Foundation tend to have more racially, culturally, and
politically mixed constituencies. The need to overcome these divisions and
gather a broad coalition behind its hard-Left agenda has pushed Gamaliel to
develop what Swarts calls an "innovative cultural strategy." Because of the
suspicions that blue-collar members might harbor toward its elite, liberal
leaders, Gamaliel's main "ideological tactic," says Swarts, is to present
its organizers as the opposite of radical, elite, or ideological. As Swarts
explains, they deliberately refrain from using leftist jargon like "racism,"
"sexism," "classism," "homophobia," "oppression," or "multiple oppressions"
in front of ordinary members -- even though, amongst themselves, Gamaliel's
organizers toss around this sort of lingo with abandon, just as Jacobsen
does in his book. 

Swarts supplies a chart listing "common working-class perceptions of liberal
social movements" on one side, while displaying on the other side Gamaliel
organizers' tricky tactics for getting around them. To avoid seeming like
radicals or "hippies left over from the sixties," Gamaliel organizers are
careful to wear conventional clothing and conduct themselves with dignity,
even formality. Since liberal social movements tend to come off as naïve and
idealistic, Gamaliel organizers make a point of presenting their ideas as
practical, pragmatic, and down-to-earth. When no one else is listening,
Gamaliel organizers may rail at "racism," "sexism," and "oppressive
corporate systems," but when speaking to their blue-collar followers, they
describe their plans as "common sense solutions for working families." 

Although the Gamaliel agenda is deeply collectivist and redistributionist,
organizers are schooled to frame their program in traditional American,
individualist terms. As Swarts puts it: 

What makes [Gamaliel's] ideology liberal rather than conservative is that it
advocates not private or voluntary solutions but collective public programs.
They seek action from the state: social welfare programs, redistribution, or
regulation. . . . But publicly [Gamaliel and other congregation-based
groups] usually emphasize individual responsibility on the part of
authorities.

What Gamaliel really wants, in other words, is for the public as a whole to
fork over funds to the government, but they're careful to frame this demand
as a call for "personal responsibility" by particular government officials. 

The relative homogeneity of ACORN's membership allows it to display its
radicalism more openly. According to Swarts, ACORN members think of
themselves as "oppositional outlaws" and "militants unafraid to confront the
powers that be." Yet even ACORN has a deeper, hidden ideological dimension.
"Long-term ACORN organizers . . . tend to see the organization as a solitary
vanguard of principled leftists," says Swarts, while ordinary members rarely
think in these overtly ideological terms; for them, it's more about
attacking specific problems. In general, ACORN avoids programmatic
statements. During a 1980 effort to purge conservatives from its ranks,
however, the organization did release a detailed political platform -- which
Swarts calls "a veritable laundry list of progressive positions." 

Although ACORN's radicalism is somewhat more frank than Gamaliel's, ACORN
has an "innovative cultural strategy" of its own. ACORN's radicalism is
incremental; it's happy to work toward ambitious long-term goals through a
series of baby steps. For example, although ACORN has fought for "living
wage" laws in several American cities, these affect only the small fraction
of the workforce employed directly by city governments. The real purpose of
ACORN's urban living-wage campaigns, says Swarts, is not economic but
political. ACORN's long-term goal is an across-the-board minimum-wage
increase at the state and federal levels. The public debate spurred by local
campaigns is meant to prepare the political ground for ACORN's more
ambitious political goals, and to build up membership in the meantime. 

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS 
Throughout his career, Obama has drawn on all of these strategies. In
Illinois's Republican-controlled state senate, Obama specialized in
incremental legislation, often drawn up in collaboration with groups like
Gamaliel and ACORN. His tiny, targeted expansions of government-financed
health care, for example, were designed to build political momentum for
universal health care. And his claim to be a "common-sense pragmatist,"
rather than a leftist ideologue, comes straight out of the Gamaliel
playbook. 

New evidence now ties Obama still more closely to both organizations. Not
only was Obama a trainer for Gamaliel and ACORN, he appears to have used his
influence to secure a major increase in funding for both groups -- arguably
stretching the bounds of propriety in the process. 

In 2005, the year after Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate, the
Washington, D.C.–based Center for Community Change released a report titled
"Promising Practices in Revenue Generation for Community Organizing." One of
the report's authors was Jean Rudd, Obama's friend and the president of the
Woods Fund during Obama's years on that foundation's board. Buried deep
within the report lies the story of Obama's role in expanding the Woods
Fund's financial support for groups like Gamaliel and ACORN. 

Since the start of his organizing career, Obama was recognized by the Woods
Fund as "a great analyst and interpreter of organizing," according to the
2005 report. Initially an adviser, Obama became a Woods Fund board member,
and finally board chairman, serving as a key advocate of increased funding
for organizing during that period. In 1995, the Woods Fund commissioned a
special evaluation of its funding for community organizing -- a report that
eventually recommended a major expansion of financial support. Obama chaired
a committee of organizers that advised the Woods Fund on this important
shift. 

The committee's report, "Evaluation of the Fund's Community Organizing Grant
Program," is based on interviews with all the big names in Obama's personal
organizer network. Greg Galluzzo and other Gamaliel Foundation officials
were consulted, as were several ACORN organizers, including Madeline
Talbott, Obama's key ACORN contact. Talbott, an expert on ACORN's tactics of
confrontation and disruption, is quoted more often than any other organizer
in the report, sometimes with additional comments from Obama himself. The
report holds up Gamaliel and ACORN as models for other groups and supports
Talbott's call for "‘a massive infusion of resources' to make organizing a
truly mass-based movement." 

Support from the Woods Fund had importance for these groups that went way
beyond the money itself. Since community organizers often use confrontation,
intimidation, and "civil disobedience" in the service of their political
goals, even liberal foundations sometimes find it difficult to fund them
without risking public criticism. As the report puts it: "Some funders . . .
are averse to confrontational tactics, and are loathe [sic] to support
organizing for that reason. They essentially equate organizing with the
embarrassment of their business and government associates." The Woods Fund
is both highly respected and one of the few foundations to consistently
support community organizing, so its money acts as a kind of Good
Housekeeping Seal of Approval, providing political cover for other
foundations interested in funding the hard Left. Obama apparently sought to
capitalize on this effect, not only by expanding the Woods Fund's
involvement in organizing, but by distributing the Woods report to a
national network of potential funders. 

Formally, the Woods Fund claims to be "non-ideological." According to the
report: "This stance has enabled the Trustees to make grants to
organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and
government 'establishments,' without undue risk of being criticized for
partisanship." Yet ACORN received substantial funding from Woods, apparently
aided by Obama's internal advocacy, and we now know that ACORN members have
played key roles as volunteer ground troops in Obama's various political
campaigns. That would seem to raise the specter of partisanship. 

A 2004 article in Social Policy by Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes, titled
"Case Study: Chicago -- The Barack Obama Campaign," explains that, given
Obama's long and close relationship to ACORN, "it was natural for many of us
to be active volunteers" in Obama's campaigns. Perhaps ACORN volunteers
observed the technical legalities and helped Obama merely in their capacity
as private citizens. Even so, it seems at least possible that Obama used his
position at a supposedly nonpartisan foundation to direct money to an
allegedly nonpartisan group, in pursuit of what were in fact nakedly
partisan ends. 

Given Obama's political aspirations, it's notable that the focus of his
Woods Fund report is its call for "improving the tie between organizing and
policy making" and shifting organizing's focus from local battles to
"citywide or statewide coalitions." The report boldly criticizes Saul
Alinsky himself for being excessively focused on local issues, complaining
that "he did not seek to fundamentally upset the distribution of power in
the wider society." 

The ultimate goal of all these efforts -- fundamental disruption of
America's power structure, and economic redistribution along race, poverty,
and gender lines -- is entirely compatible with the program outlined by
Dennis Jacobsen in Doing Justice. Obama could hardly have been unfamiliar
with the general drift of Gamaliel ideology, especially given his reputation
as an analyst of community organizing and his supervision of a comprehensive
review of the field. 

Even after becoming a U.S. senator, Obama has maintained his ties to the
Gamaliel Foundation. According to an October 2007 report for the University
of California by Todd Swanstrom and Brian Banks, "it is almost unheard of
for a U.S. Senator to attend a public meeting of a community organization,
but Senator Obama attended a Gamaliel affiliate public meeting in Chicago."
Given this ongoing contact, given the radicalism of Gamaliel's core
ideology, given Obama's close association with Gamaliel's co-founder,
Gregory Galluzzo, given Obama's role as a Gamaliel consultant and trainer,
and given Obama's outsized role in channeling allegedly "nonpartisan"
funding to Gamaliel affiliates (and to his political ground troops at
ACORN), some questions are in order. Obama needs to detail the nature of his
ties to both Gamaliel and ACORN, and should discuss the extent of his
knowledge of Gamaliel's guiding ideology. Ultimately, we need to know if
Obama is the post-ideological pragmatist he sometimes claims to be, or in
fact a stealth radical. 

-- Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center



Brad Haslett-2 wrote:
> 
> You may recall, Mr. Kurtz had some difficulty getting the University
> of Illinois-Chicago to release the archives of the Chicago Annenberg
> Challenge (CAC).  This is his first analysis after waiting a week for
> the records to be released.  There's nothing new here for anyone who's
> been paying attention.  Now you now why The One doesn't tout his great
> executive experience and soon you will understand why he doesn't brag
> about his accomplishments in the field of education. The CAC was a
> colossal flop unless you think "educational reparation payments" over
> teaching math and science is a good idea.
> 
> Brad
> 
> -----------------------------------
> 
>     * SEPTEMBER 23, 2008
> 
> Obama and Ayers
> Pushed Radicalism
> On Schools
> By STANLEY KURTZ
> 
>     * Article
> 
> more in Opinion »
> 
>     * Email
>     * Printer Friendly
>     * Share:
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>     * smaller Text Size larger
>     *
> 
> Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never
> written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to
> 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg
> Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group
> poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers
> and radical education activists.
> [Obama and Ayers] AP
> 
> Bill Ayers.
> 
> The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather
> Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts
> bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his
> actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was
> launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.
> 
> The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last
> April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my
> neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a
> regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr.
> Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are
> housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois
> at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them.
> 
> The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve
> Chicago's public schools. The funding came from a national education
> initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama
> was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal
> matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the
> "Collaborative," which shaped education policy.
> 
> The CAC's basic functioning has long been known, because its annual
> reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley
> archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes,
> and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The
> Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to
> advance the CAC agenda.
> 
> One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer
> fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation?
> In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement
> saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to
> the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham
> (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show
> that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a
> working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr.
> Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been
> appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.
> 
> The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which
> called for infusing students and their parents with a radical
> political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor
> of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical
> alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's
> ghetto.
> 
> In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal
> and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community
> organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and
> oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small
> 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's,
> "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
> 
> CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of
> funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with
> "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from
> groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead
> CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers,
> such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or
> Acorn).
> 
> Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn,
> and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early
> campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village
> Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political
> consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional
> education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the
> effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school
> students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.
> 
> CAC also funded programs designed to promote "leadership" among
> parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf
> of their children's education. In practice, it meant funding Mr.
> Obama's alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit
> parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board
> member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents "organized" by
> community groups might be viewed by school principals "as a political
> threat." Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth
> out Mr. Weber's objections.
> 
> The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of
> the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served
> on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with
> him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board
> meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative
> before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board
> at meetings of the Collaborative.
> 
> The Obama campaign notes that Mr. Ayers attended only six board
> meetings, and stresses that the Collaborative lost its "operational
> role" at CAC after the first year. Yet the Collaborative was demoted
> to a strictly advisory role largely because of ethical concerns, since
> the projects of Collaborative members were receiving grants. CAC's own
> evaluators noted that project accountability was hampered by the
> board's reluctance to break away from grant decisions made in 1995. So
> even after Mr. Ayers's formal sway declined, the board largely adhered
> to the grant program he had put in place.
> 
> Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with
> public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you
> understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke
> resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that
> he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board
> sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides
> of the same coin.
> 
> Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily
> funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific
> political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war,
> and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as
> "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training
> programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his
> "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against
> America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social
> transformation.
> 
> The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming
> "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association;
> it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending
> moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That
> is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years
> ago.
> 
> Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
> 
> __________________________________________________
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