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When I was a Professor of Political Science and Education at the University of Chicago I lived in the Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood where Ayers and Barak Obama live and I was very familiar with school reform movements in Chicago and served on many civic and educational boards and advisory groups. The charges that the Republican candidates are making seem preposterous to me.

When you are on one of these groups, you don't go around investigating what your fellow members did when you were eight years old. If there is a billionaire businessman who committed some kind of fraud decades ago, he is simply looked on as someone who wants to help and is willing to come to a 7:30 AM meeting in the Loop and do something. Boards are not about personal confessions or forgiveness or endorsement of the lives of fellow members. They are about coming together, usually in limited ways, to move some set of issues or programs forward. There are not enough people willing to take on the terrible problems of a weak school system in a city with massive social problems. People with knowledge and skills or money are welcomed. Being on a board with someone has nothing to say about making a personal judgment about the character and history of every other board member. Most people who do this are extremely busy and have very little time to develop any serious personal relationship with any other board member. Membership only implies that one shares some general goals and wants to help with a set of problems or support a civic organization.

Bill Ayers reputation was far from radical--that of a good serious mainstream reformer, concerned about things like better teacher training. The project where he and Obama served on the same board was a mainstream effort founded with funds from a leading GOP Nixon appointee and millionaire and, to my mind, was too bureaucratic and too close to the Chicago Public Schools. There was nothing radical about it, though some fine people were involved.

This is simply a disgraceful effort to distract voters from the real issues and smear a candidate though guilt by association, a time-tested GOP tactic. I hope people will be sophisticated enough to see right through it. The fact that Bill Ayers did something crazy many years ago has precisely zero relationship to who should be president and they should suspect that those who are desperately trying to fool them about this don't have much to say about solving the country's truly urgent problems.

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Larry Grathwohl, an undercover FBI agent who infiltrated The Weather Underground, claimed that Ayers wanted to overthrow the United States government <a href="http://www.superiorpapers.com">custom written papers</a>. In an interview in January 2009, Grathwohl stated that: "The thing the most bone chilling thing Bill Ayers said to me was that after the revolution succeeded and the government was overthrown, they believed they would have to eliminate 25 million Americans who would not conform to the new order."

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Good post, but have you thought about Bill Ayers and the guilt-by-association tactic before?

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David Flores says:

This guy completely missed the point.

David Parsons says:

You are known by the company you keep. If you're comfortable palling around with John Smith, then you won't mind when people talk about you and John. But if you’re not comfortable having palled around with John, you will have a ready explanation when people look at you funny, or you will squeal like a pig that can’t get comfortable in mud. Either way, as always, your actions speak louder than your words.

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Bill Ayers and the guilt-by-association tactic