Why an "Unrepentant Terrorist" Got A Ringside Seat at Obama Opening

Bill Ayers Represents Not the Past, But the Democratic Party's Future

There had to be some corks-a-popping at the Chicago home of Bill Ayers and wifey Bernardine Dohrn on Tuesday night. Not since Klaus Fuchs leaked the secrets of the Manhattan Project to his Soviet handlers 80 years prior had Commies in America so much to celebrate. Salon summed up the news concisely, “Socialist sweep reveals New York City’s rising power centers.”

Ayers and Dohrn did more than their share to make communism respectable. In September 1995 they opened the doors of their home to state senate candidate Barack Obama. By staying mum about what should have been a career killer, the media opened the Democratic Party doors to New York City Mayor Zohran Mandami, and on Tuesday night three of his comrades surged right through.

Bernardine Dohrn, Weather Underground pin-up girl

It had been quite a week for the power couple. Days earlier Obama had honored Ayers and Dohrn with third-row seats at the grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center, a mausoleum-like building whose brutalist architecture evoked the ghosts of a Stalinist past. And perhaps future. Proudly wearing his red Communist star, the still unrepentant terrorist Ayers mingled with Obama’s A-list celebrities armed with the knowledge that their party was about to become his.

Although the corporate media have been fretting about the open socialist revolt within their party of choice, their journalists failed to kill the movement while still in the womb. In the category “missed opportunities,” one moment stands out.

The occasion was an April 2008 presidential debate. Moderator and former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos threw Obama a curve that he likely expected at some point, but not on his home turf, a primary debate on network TV.

Bill Ayers in 2001: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

While addressing the “general theme of patriotism,” Stephanopoulos asked Obama about Bill Ayers. “He was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s,” Stephanopoulos reminded the audience. “They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” He then asked Obama, “Can you explain that relationship for the voters and explain to Democrats why it won’t be a problem?”

The Stephanopoulos question put Obama on the spot. “I know not the man,” he replied—no, excuse me, that was Peter on the subject of Jesus. Replied Obama, “This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.”

For her part, Hillary Clinton thought the Ayers issue worth exploring. She reminded the audience that Ayers had said of his bombing campaign “that he was just sorry they hadn’t done more.” Hillary did not get the quote exactly right, but she was close enough. In a providential bit of bad timing, the New York Times review of Ayers’s book Fugitive Days was published on September 11, 2001. The review was titled, “No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives,” and began with the quote from Ayers, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

The relationship between Ayers and Obama was much tighter than Hillary knew. As I first asserted in an October 2008 article—and biographer Christopher Andersen later confirmed with six pages of detail in his 2009 book Barack and Michele: Portrait of an American Marriage—Ayers served as Obama’s hands-on muse in the writing of Obama’s overpraised 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father.

They stayed close. After that initial fund raiser in 1995, “Barack and Michelle began to see a great deal more of not only Bill and Bernardine but also their three closest friends, Rashid and Mona Khalidi and Carole Travis.” So wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow in his 2017 book, Rising Star. Added Garrow, “By the spring of 1996 Barack and Michelle were a regular presence at the two couples’ ‘very informal’ dinners. ‘I would invite them often,’ Mona recounted. ‘We used to do a lot of dinners together,’ and ‘they came to our house often.’”

The communist—Islamic alliance was forged over “dinners together” chez Khalidi

Not until Obama’s 2004 campaign for the US Senate, wrote Garrow, did “Barack and Michelle’s attendance at the almost nightly dinners at the Khalidis’ or Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn’s home” begin to fall off. As Garrow proved beyond doubt, Obama lied throughout the 2008 campaign about his relationship with Ayers and Dohrn. Ayers was much more than a “guy who lives in my neighborhood.” He was an intimate friend and co-author. That revelation alone would have finished him in the primary.

The major media did not want to know any of this. Following the April 2008 debate, just about every chatterbox in the chattering class fueled what the L.A. Times called a “storm of criticism.” Their rage was directed not at Obama for his evasiveness, but at Stephanopoulos for his effrontery. How dare he confront Obama with “such tired tripe,” said the Washington Post’s Tom Shales. What nerve to ask Obama about an “obscure sixties radical,” wrote Michael Grunwald of Time.

A Huffington Post blogger likened Stephanopoulos to the inevitable Joe McCarthy. He was one of many to do so. In the unkindest of cuts, several pundits accused him of conspiring with Sean Hannity. “The real story of this debate,” snarled MSNBC’s inimitable Keith Olbermann, may be “where one of the moderators found his questions.” If Ayers was marginally in play before the debate, he was clearly out-of-bounds afterwards, at least in the mainstream arena.

The media should have paid attention. In the Chicago magazine review for his book, Fugitive Days, Ayers set the tone for the American Left. He had himself photographed standing on an American flag. Future congresswoman Darializa Avila Chevalier did Ayers one better, tweeting, "I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me."

If you recall, Obama was keen on “fundamentally transforming the United States of America." He may finally be getting his way.