Sure, you could say they "launched his career."

Or, you could say he once went to a function of theirs and they donated $200 to one of his campaigns.

You could say that Dohrn and Ayres were influential community activists at the time.

You could also say that both Dohrn and Ayres are now professors at prestigious Chicago universities.

But I'm sure you wouldn't say any of those other things, because it wouldn't let you continue doing the republicans' work.

It's not that I defend Dohrn and Ayres, or am happy Obama ever so much as said hello to them, but it's kind of funny that this site is indistinguishable from free republic, balloonjuice, or any of the other wingnut sites that've been shrieking about these 1960s relics for the last several months.

Ayers is a professor at the University of Chicago now, and a respected citizen.

http://www.billayers.org/index.php

He gave $200 to Obama and they talked a couple times.

Next trumped up scandal, please.

Heck the Republicans won't even need Karl Rove this year.   Hit pieces against Obama practically write themselves.   Once you clear away the fog of liberal guilt, things become quite simple indeed.

I have been waiting for this. So I am sure Obama's people have been as well.

I am a boomer for Obama, there are a lot of us who have been reactivated by this election. And we bring a knowledge of and comfort with broad coalition building to the table. Quakers,MLK and the Weather Underground worked on ending the Viet Nam war. And I am fairly certain the only thing all agreed on was an end to the war.

PS some of the middle-aged middle-american working-class white guys you are afraid won't vote for BHO understand that working people get played off of each other all the time. While corporations laugh all the way to the bank. Don't sell old white guys short.

Is Ayers father still CEO of Commonwealth Edison?

Ayers and Dorhn are on charity boards and work for childrens causes...oooh scary shit.

This seems to be the only way you think you might be able to win. Keep on at it. I love your solutions for America.

A few more references may help illuminate.  Ben Smith in Politico told us about Obama's early relationship with William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn as they held a fund raiser for him:  http://www.politico.com/news/stories/020 8/8630.html

"I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers' house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress," said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. "[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor." *

Smith notes:

But -- unlike some other fringe figures of the era -- they're [Ayers and Dohrn] also flatly unrepentant about the bombings they committed in the name of ending the war, defending them on the grounds that they killed no one, except, accidentally, their own members.

The matter of their being respected depends on one's point of view.  The Chicago Sum-Times recent editorial said two things -- well, Ayers is sort of a goofy old liberal, and yes, Obama and Ayers are friends.  Here's the URL so you can read
their evaluation:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/ 822560,CST-EDT-edit03a.article

Those who will be frightened of them and their connection to Obama will note --

1.  Dohrn, however, was jailed for less than a year for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating other Weather Underground members' robbery of a Brinks truck, in which a guard and two New York State Troopers were killed.

2.  "I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough," Ayers told the New York Times in 2001. (Actually, the interview was published on 9/11)

3.  "A substantial portion of Ayers' book Fugitive Days discusses the author's penchant for building and deploying explosives. Ayers boasts that he "participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972." Of the day he bombed the Pentagon, Ayers says, "Everything was absolutely ideal. ... The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them."  http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/indiv idualProfile.asp?indid=2169  

4.  Bernadine Dohrn's most famous statement is probably this one:  "Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson."

Here's the context.  In his book "Hippie",  a detailed description of the musical and social scene of the 60's, Barry Miles wrote on page 312, about the formation of the Weather Underground:

"They held a National War Council in Flint, Michigan, where a huge cardboard machine gun hung from the ceiling and the speeches were about "organizing a city-wide anti-pig movement...".  Participants romanticized Manson's killing spree.  Speaking of the LaBianca murders, Bernadine Dohrn, who became the organization's spokesperson, said, "Dig it.  First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room as them.  Then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach.  Wild!"

Those victims were Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, a middle-aged couple who were not cops or FBI or otherwise obvious oppressors.  Leno was stabbed 12 times with a knife, and 14 times with a carving fork.  Rosemary was stabbed 41 times.  See comments at  http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2785 /  which offer a valuable correction of the events. See also http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/indiv idualProfile.asp?indid=2190  

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/group Profile.asp?grpid=6808

5.  The Weatherman, which Dohrn and Ayers led,  issued a "manifesto" eschewing nonviolence and calling instead for armed opposition to U.S. policies; advocating the overthrow of capitalism; exhorting white radicals to trigger a worldwide revolution by fighting in the streets of the "mother country"; and proclaiming that the time had come to launch a race war against the "white" United States on behalf of the non-white Third World.

Grounded in identity politics, Weatherman ideology and rhetoric rebelled against what later came to be known as America's "white skin privilege."

6.  At a 1969 "War Council" in Flint, Michigan, Weatherman leader Bernardine Dohrn proclaimed that the time had come to launch a war against "Amerikkka" (Weatherman always spelled "America" this way, to convey the group's belief that the nation was ineradicably racist to its core). Toward this end, Dohrn advocated the formation of an even more radical "Weather Underground" cult to carry out covert terrorist activities rather than public acts of protest.

Is that spelling of America consistent with Rev. Wright's spelling?

7.  A little more on Dohrn. A Chicago district attorney named Richard Elrod was seriously injured in the Weatherman riot that erupted during the Chicago "Days of Rage" in October 1969, and he was paralyzed for life as a result. Dohrn later led a celebration of Elrod's paralysis by leading her comrades in a parody of a Bob Dylan song -- "Lay, Elrod, Lay."

8. When Ayers' book "Fugitive" cam out, writer Michael Miner interviewed Ayers.  (Miner is a friend of Ayers.)  Miner wrote:

"Ayers followed a path in the 60s, from suburban child of privilege to enemy of the state, that for most of its length was heavily traveled. But he and a handful of others pushed past the apparent point of no return. "Each step was full of dread and uncertainty," he tells me. "But I took each step, for better or worse. But when I look back I'm not ashamed."* And Ayers, with absolutely no way of knowing, imagines Oughton--his lover at the time--understanding the danger and destroying herself to save the others. "The fact the bomb went off and killed only our own people saved us from something terrible and the world from something terrible," he says. "That's why I have been haunted by that moment."* The year Fitzpatrick won his Pulitzer, Seymour Hersh won another for revealing 1968's My Lai massacre, in which American troops led by Lieutenant William Calley gunned down more than 300 unarmed, unresisting villagers, among them women and children. No one was punished, though in 1998 three helicopter crewmen who'd intervened to halt the slaughter by facing down Calley's soldiers at gunpoint were honored in Washington. "It took more than 25 years to imagine their actions as heroic, to remember something moral in doing the unthinkable right thing in war, even when it seemed like the wrong thing," Ayers muses in print. "How much longer for Diana? When will she be remembered?"*

So, Ayers is saying that but for his then-lover blowing herself up accidentally, he would have embarked on a really serious career of bombing?  Isn't he also saying that Oughton, who was planning on planting a bomb at Ft. Dix, should be honored?

I would ask Obama supporters (and I may still vote for him in the general) to ask how this will play to, e.g., military voters, and to folks in middle America.

Didn't Bill Clinton pardon members of the Weather Underground?

"But Obama's relationship with Ayers is an especially vivid milepost on his rise, in record time, from a local official who unabashedly reflected a very liberal district to the leader of national movement based largely on the claim that he can transcend ideological divides."

That is why this story will stick in the general election.  It's not that association is particularly deep.  It's that it marks a milestone.  That will resonate with people.

Look, isn't a pattern starting to emerge here?  Doesn't seem like, for someone who is so new to politics, and for someone who has only endured a week or two of serious scrutiny, that he has an awful lot of associations with really dubious people?  He always seems to manage to come out just barely clean, but, common sense does start to nag at you after a while.