What Are Barack Obama's Ties To The Weather Underground, And Who Is The Weather Underground?

Barack Obama Visited '60s Radicals

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.

William Ayers/Weather Underground


Now, as Barack Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from a man in the Hyde Park left to one closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.

“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.

Barack Obama and Palmer “were both there,” he said.

Barack Obama’s connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Barack Obama to their home — part of a campaign courtship — reflects more extensive interaction than has been previously reported.

Neither Ayers nor the Barack Obama campaign would describe the relationship between the two men. Dr. Young described Barack Obama and Ayers as “friends,” but there’s no evidence their relationship is more than the casual friendship of two men who occupy overlapping Chicago political circles and who served together on the board of a Chicago foundation.

But Barack 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.

In one sense, Barack Obama’s journey toward the cultural and political center is not unusual among national politicians. But its velocity is.

Politicians of an earlier generation had their own relationships with figures now far to their left. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for instance, interned at a radical San Francisco law firm while in law school.

The relationship with Ayers gives context to his recent past in Hyde Park politics. It’s milieu in which a former violent radical was a stalwart of the local scene, not especially controversial.

It’s also a scene whose liberal ideological features — while taken for granted by the Chicago press corps that knows Barack Obama best — provides a jarring contrast with Barack Obama’s current, anti-ideological stance. This contrast between past and present — not least the Ayers connection — is virtually certain to be a subject Republican operatives will warm to if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee.

The tension between the present and recent Chicago past is also evident in some of his positions on major national issues. Many national politicians, including Clinton, have moved toward the center over time. But Barack Obama’s transitions are still quite fresh.

Weather Undergound Suppoter's


A questionnaire from his 1996 campaign indicated more blanket opposition to the death penalty, and support of abortion rights, than he currently espouses. He spoke in support of single-payer health care as recently as 2003.

Like many of the most extreme figures from the 1960s Ayers and Dohrn are ambiguous figures in American life.

They disappeared in 1970, after a bomb — designed to kill Army officers in New Jersey — accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, and turned themselves into authorities in 1980. They were never prosecuted for their involvement with the 25 bombings the Weather Underground claimed; charges were dropped because of improper FBI surveillance.

Both have written and spoken at length about their pasts, and today he is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she’s an associate professor of law at Northwestern University.

But — unlike some other fringe figures of the era — they’re 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.

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.

“I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough,” Ayers told the New York Times in 2001.

And their rehabilitation in establishment circles, even in Hyde Park, has its limits.

Though he is a respected figure in liberal educational circles, Ayers wrote recently about how in 2006 he was informed he was persona non grata at a progressive educators’ conference in the summer of 2006.
“We cannot risk a simplistic and dubious association between progressive education and the violent aspects of your past,” he quoted the conference organizers, whom he described as friends, as writing to him.

But the couple has been embraced, by and large, in the liberal circles dominating Hyde Park politics.

“Bill Ayers is one of my heroes in life,” said Sam Ackerman, a longtime local activist. “I knew Tony Rezko, and he ain’t no Rezko.”

(The Same Tony Rezko That Dumped Money Into The Barack Obama Campaign)


But others in Hyde Park, whose intellectual and political life revolves around the University of Chicago, view the couple with ambivalence

Rest Of Story Here

More Interesting Tidbit's On Obama And The Weather Underground, and Jeremiah Wright/Obama's Hate Speech Pastor

Obama Attended Hate America Sermon

Obama Visited Home Of Weather Underground Terrorists In '90s
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Oh Brother! The more we find out about Barack Obama, the worse this is getting. Not only does he have ties to his Pastor that Preaches "Hate Speech", Now we find he had ties to the Weather Underground who blew up a Greenwitch Village Townhouse instead of thier intended target Army Officers in New Jersey. And Ayer's claims he wished he could have done more! Just who else is Barack Obama Tied to? STAY TUNED!