Careless allegations about Ayers and Obama are not the way to go

I want the truth about Barack Obama’s radical record to be brought forward. Andrew McCarthy at National Review Online has been doing as much as on this front as anyone. But a recent article of McCarthy’s is not up to his usual high standard. Seeking to demonstrate that William Ayers did not simply pick Obama out of the blue in 1994 to lead Ayer’s left-wing foundation but that he knew him as far back as the 1980s, McCarthy, a former U.S. attorney who normally lays out a case with lawyer-like care, makes several allegations about Obama’s and Ayer’s common social and political network that he doesn’t back up with facts.

Thus he writes:

We know precious little about Obama’s Columbia years, but the Los Angeles Times has reported that he studied under [Edward Said, the prominent pro-Palestinian and anti-Western literary professor]. In and of itself, that is meaningless: Said was a hotshot prof and hundreds of students took his comparative-lit courses. But Obama plainly maintained some sort of tie with Said—a photo making the Internet rounds shows Obama conversing with the great man himself at a 1998 Arab American community dinner in Chicago, where the Obamas and Saids were seated together. [Emphasis added.]

McCarthy presents no information connecting Obama and Said at Columbia. At most there is the assumption that Obama took a class with Said, which McCarthy himself says wouldn’t mean anything. But then, on the basis of a photo of Said and Obama at a dinner in Chicago in 1998, 15 years after Obama left Columbia, McCarthy suddenly segues to the statement that “Obama plainly maintained some sort of tie with Said,” meaning that that Obama had a tie with Said when Obama was at Columbia and that he maintained that tie from the early 1980s to 1998. But in 1998 Obama was a leftist state senator, the chairman of a leftist foundation, and the author of a well-received memoir about his bi-racial background and his alienation from white America, and if Obama and the famous leftist scholar Said were both invited to an Arab American dinner you would expect these two prominent individuals to be seated together. In any case, it is absurd and wrong to conclude that because two people were seated at the same table at a large dinner they have “ties.”

Similarly, McCarthy writes that “[Edward] Said’s circle [at Columbia in the 1980s] clearly included Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.” But he doesn’t back this up at all. All he shows is that Ayers studied at Bank Street College and Columbia Teachers’ College in the 1980s, and that Said wrote a glowing review of Ayers’s book Fugitive Days in 2001, and that Ayers praised Said on his death. McCarthy simply has not shown that the two men knew each other. He hasn’t shown that Said’s circle included Ayers and Dohrn.

Here’s the entire passage of McCarthy’s article:.

Said had a wide circle of radical acquaintances. That circle clearly included Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. When they came out of hiding in the early 1980s (while Obama was attending Columbia), Ayers took education courses at Bank Street College, adjacent to Columbia in Morningside Heights—before earning his doctorate at Columbia’s Teachers College in 1987.

Said was so enamored of Ayers that he commended the unrepentant terrorist’s 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days—the book in which the haughty Ayers brags about his Weatherman past—with this glowing dust-jacket blurb:

What makes Fugitive Days unique is its unsparing detail and its marvelous human coherence and integrity. Bill Ayers’s America and his family background, his education, his political awakening, his anger and involvement, his anguished re-emergence from the shadows: all these are rendered in their truth without a trace of nostalgia or “second thinking.” For anyone who cares about the sorry mess we are in, this book is essential, indeed necessary, reading.

Sorry mess, indeed. For his part, Ayers is at least equally enthralled by Said, of whom, even in death, Ayers says “[t]here is no one better positioned … to offer advice on the conduct of intellectual life[,]” than the man who was “over the last thirty-five years, the most passionate, eloquent, and clear-eyed advocate for the rights of the Palestinian people.”

After they left Columbia, both Obama and Ayers went to Chicago: Obama to become a “community organizer” (the director of the Developing Communities Project, an offshoot of the Gamaliel Foundation dedicated to Saul Alinsky’s principles for radicalizing society); Ayers, two years later, to teach at the University of Illinois. Diamond details how they both became embroiled in a major education controversy that resulted in 1988 reform legislation.

[end of excerpt]

It cannot fairly be said that Ayers was part of Said’s circle simply because Ayers studied at Columbia University Teacher’s College while Said was a professor in the Columbia English Department. Particularly troublesome is McCarthy’s segue from one paragraph to the next:

Ayers … earning his doctorate at Columbia’s Teachers College in 1987.

Said was so enamored of Ayers…

That suggests that Said personally knew Ayers at Columbia and was “enamored” of him. But McCarthy’s proof of this “enamored” relationship at Columbia is a review written by Said 14 years after Ayers finished his doctorate at Columbia:

Said was so enamored of Ayers that he commended the unrepentant terrorist’s 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days

Not only does McCarthy have no facts showing that Said knew Ayers at Columbia, he has no facts showing that Said knew anything about Ayers prior to his writing his review of Ayers’s book in 2001. Couldn’t it have been the case that Said liked the book because it was a radical leftist anti-American book and Said was a radical leftist anti-American?

In conclusion, what McCarthy’s article actually shows is a suggestive pattern connecting Obama, Ayers, Said, and others, but, at least in the instances I’ve discussed above, it does not establish facts of actual relationships. McCarthy should have been more clear that the evidence he was presenting was suggestive, not probative. As I wrote recently, the already known facts about Obama are devastating, and would defeat his candidacy if brought before the broad public. By throwing around charges not based in demonstrated facts, Obama’s critics undermine their own purpose.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 12, 2008 03:51 PM | Send