Stanley Kurtz: "Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools"

Stanley Kurtz has a piece up now in The Wall Street Journal's Opinion section about the Obama/Ayers relationship and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. He says that "documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC," and that they "worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda." According to Kurtz, the ultimated goal of this pedagogical agenda was basically to "infus[e] students and their parents with a radical political commitment" in order to "provok[e] resistance to American racism and oppression." Instead of striving to improve educational standards, the point was to foster a radical agenda. Money tended to be given to entities involved in stuff like "political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism" rather than stuff like math and science. The result: "no evidence of educational improvement."

Kurtz surmises that Barack Obama, then "a former community organizer fresh out of law school," couldn't have been chosen as the chairman of the CAC without the approval of Ayers, and he concludes that the real story here is that "[a]s CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle." Whereas "[t]he Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association," the real issue here "isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation," which would be "a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago."

There doesn't seem to be much here that Kurtz didn't already say on Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg, but this is a platform on a different level and it will be interesting to see whether this develops into a major story in the mainstream press, and how it will be reported if it does.