re: #258 McSpiff

This quote? This is bullshit.

This argument was played out during the election. Obama is too radical! He was raised by the radical left of the 60s! He’s a friend of william ayers! And we know the end result. The American people didn’t buy it. They know that the mainstream left does not consist of people like Ayers and code pink. And their votes show it.

Ayers isn’t mainstream, isn’t respectable, isn’t establishment?

Ayers worked with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley in shaping the city’s school reform program,and was one of three co-authors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant proposal that in 1995 won $49.2 million over five years for public school reform. In 1997 Chicago awarded him its Citizen of the Year award for his work on the project.Since 1999 he has served on the board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, an anti-poverty, philanthropic foundation established as the Woods Charitable Fund in 1941.

Ayers was elected Vice President for Curriculum Studies by the American Educational Research Association in 2008. William H. Schubert, a fellow professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote that his election was “a testimony of [Ayers’] stature and [the] high esteem he holds in the field of education locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.”

You’re right - he’s just a fringe outsider. Nothing there. But soft! Let us see into what obscurity Bernadine Dohrn has sunk:

In 1991, she was hired by Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, as an adjunct professor of law, with the title “Clinical Associate Professor of Law”. Trienens said he did not get her that job, although he sat on the board of trustees of Northwestern, as did Dohrn’s father-in-law, who was chairman of the board until 1986, when Trienens succeeded him in that position. Robert Bennett, dean of the law school, had hired Dohrn, according to Trienens. Because Dohrn was hired as an “adjunct”, her appointment did not need to be approved by the faculty, and no vote on it was ever taken. When law school officials were asked whether or not the dean hired Dohrn or the board of trustees approved the hiring, the school issued a statement in response stating “While many would take issue with views Ms. Dohrn espoused during the 1960s, her career at the law school is an example of a person’s ability to make a difference in the legal system.”

In 1994, Dohrn said of her political beliefs: “I still see myself as a radical.”

Dohrn now serves on the board of numerous human rights committees and teaches comparative law. Since 2002, she has served as Visiting Law Faculty at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Her legal work has focused on reforming the much criticized juvenile court system in Chicago and on advocating for human rights at the international level. Dohrn is director and founder of the Children and Family Justice Center, which supports the legal needs of adolescents and their families.

You’re right - they’re not representative of anything at all. And the extensive and in-depth examination of Obama the candidate was more than sufficient to establish his qualifications in the minds of the electorate who, when they supported him, were wise and ready to be the change they sought to see, and who, now that some portion of them oppose some portion of his policies, are a rabble of retrograde racists.