Bill Ayers or McCarthy?

If you’ve been following the presidential race at all in the past couple weeks, you may have noticed a constant reference to a man named Bill Ayers, someone the McCain campaign has been linking to Barack Obama. Bill Ayers is currently a Distinguished Professor at UIC, but during the sixties and seventies, he was a cofounder and member or the radical left Weather Underground

organization, an anti-Vietnam War group that protested U.S. policies by bombing the Pentagon, U.S. Capitol and several other government buildings. As a result, the FBI labeled them as a domestic-terrorist organization. (Although these actions were certainly wrong, it is worth noting that warnings for evacuation always preceded the bombings, and as a result, none were ever injured in the attacks.)
So where is the connection to Barack Obama? Well, turns out, Ayers and his wife, both currently very successful and distinguished college professors, live in Hyde Park, the same place where Obama and his family live. The relation between the two is explained clearly in a recent Chicago Sun Times article:

In the mid-1990s, Ayers and Dohrn [his wife] hosted a meet-and-greet at their house to introduce Obama to their neighbors during his first run for the Illinois Senate. In 2001, Ayers contributed $200 to Obama's campaign. Ayers also served alongside Obama between December 1999 and December 2002 on the board of the not-for-profit Woods Fund of Chicago. That board met four times a year, and members would see each other at occasional dinners the group hosted.

In addition, Ayers and Obama interacted occasionally in their roles with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a not-for-profit group charged with spending tens of millions of dollars it obtained through its affiliation with a school-improvement foundation created by late Ambassador Walter H. Annenberg. Obama chaired the Chicago Annenberg Challenge's board of directors. Ayers served on the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, which made recommendations to the board on which organizations should get grants. The groups worked on school-reform efforts between 1995 and 2000.

Obama’s connection with Bill Ayers is indeed fairly minor. Not to mention, the Bill Ayers today is certainly a much different person than who he was in his notorious anti-war activism days. (The Sun Times Article compares him to Bobby Rush, Black Panther-turned-U.S. Representative, for his work with Mayor Daley to overhaul Chicago Public Schools.) However, the McCain campaign has repeatedly referred to Obama’s minor connection with Bill Ayers as a major issue that voters should be concerned about in this election.

So why am I bringing all this up? Well, I realize that we just finished up our “Perilous Times” unit, but I couldn’t pass up this connection. In a recent interview on MSNBC’s Hardball, Michele Bachmann, Republican Congresswoman from Minnesota, made some comments that sounded eerily like McCarthy. Yeah, McCarthy! Remember him? Watch the interview here.

I find it troubling, but rather unsurprising, that as the McCain campaign and the GOP are entering a “time of peril” (Real Clear Politics Poll: Obama +5.0), they are starting to exhibit similar tactics as McCarthy to gain control of the people. If you noticed toward the end of the interview, Bachmann stated that she suspects Barack Obama to be Anti-American, and thinks the media ought to try to uncover who else within Congress might possess such views. “I have here in my hand a list…”