http://judicial-inc.biz/86who_is_%%20obama.htm

Who "sent" Obama?

Updated May 24, 2008: former Sidley managing partner tells Chicago
Tribune he hired Bernardine Dohrn as favor to Bill Ayers' father
Thomas Ayers.Updated May 18, 2008 with information from Nell Minow,
daughter of Obama mentor Newton Minow and sister of Obama's Harvard
professor, Martha Minow.Updated May 3, 2008: Ken Rolling, first
Executive Director of the Annenberg Challenge, had been a program
officer of the Woods Fund; Republican activist claims Ayers is
"advisor" to Barack Obama. In Chicago politics a key question has
always been, who "sent" you?

Insiders Know Someone Is Sponsoring Him

The classic phrase is "We don't want nobody that nobody sent" -
from an anecdote of Abner Mikva's, the former White House Counsel
(Pres. Clinton) and now retired federal judge. (And someone I
campaigned for while in high school when he ran, unsuccessfully, for
Congress in the early 70s.) As a young student, Mikva wanted to help
out the his local Democratic Party machine on the south side of
Chicago. In 1948, he walked into the local committeman's office to
volunteer for Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas and was immediately
asked: "Who sent you?" Mikva replied, "nobody sent me." And the retort
came back from the cigar chomping pol: "Well, we don't want nobody
that nobody sent."

Who Sent You, Who's Boy Are You?

So it is reasonable to ask, who "sent" Barack Obama? In other
words, how can his meteoric rise to political prominence be explained?
And, of course, in an answer to that question might lie a better
understanding of his essential world view. When I started looking at
this question a few weeks ago I quickly grew more concerned about the
kinds of people that seem to have been very important in Obama's
ascendancy in Chicago area politics. It is the connection of some of
these people to authoritarian politics that has me particularly
concerned. And a key concern of this blog has been the rise of
authoritarian tendencies in the global labor movement.

Obama's Sponsors Had Roots In The Radical 1960's

The poeple linked to Senator Obama grew to political maturity in
the extreme wings of the late 60s student and antiwar movements. They
adopted some of the worst forms of sectarian and authoritarian
politics. They helped undermine the emergence of a healthy
relationship between students and others in American society who were
becoming interested in alternative views of social, political and
economic organization. In fact, at the time, some far more
constructive activists had a hard time comprehending gorups like the
Weather Underground. Their tactics were so damaging that some on the
left thought that government or right wing elements helped create
them. There is some evidence, in fact, that that was true (for
example, the Cointelpro effort of the federal government.)

Chicago's Jewish Elite

Today, however, many of these individuals continue to hold
political views that hardened in that period. Many of them have joined
up with other wings of the late 60s and 70s movements, in particular
the pro-China maoists elements of that era and are now playing a role
in the labor movement and elsewhere. And yet this question of Obama's
links to people from this milieu has not been thoroughly explored by
any of the many thousands of journalists, bloggers and political
operatives looking so closely at Obama.

The most recent effort was by Jonathan Kaufman in the Wall Street
Journal who argued that a critical connection for Obama was his links
to some in the wealthy and prominent Jewish community in Chicago. This
article contains some important insights and is well worth reading.
But, I think Kaufman gets it wrong.

Newton Minow (nee Minowski)

So, who did “send” Obama? The key I think is his ties not to well
connected uber lawyer Newton Minow, as Kaufman suggests, but more
likely to the family of (in)famous former Weather Underground leader
Bill Ayers – not just Bill Ayers, but also Bill’s father Tom Ayers and
his brother John as well. Obama was a community organizer from about
1985 to 1988, when he left Chicago for Harvard Law School. During that
time a critical issue in Chicago politics was the ongoing crisis in
the public schools. A movement was underway from two angles: below in
black, latino and other communities for more local control of schools
and from above by business interests who wanted to cut costs. (For a
fascinating account and analysis see Dorothy Shipps, The Invisible
Hand: Big Business and Chicago School Reform, Teachers College Record,
Vol. 99, #1, Fall 1997, pp. 73-116 or her later excellent book on the
subject: School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago, 1880-2000 (Kansas
2006.))

A Jewish Black Committee On Chicago Education

A 1987 teachers’ strike brought those two sides together to push
for a reform act passed by the Illinois legislature in 1988 that
created "Local School Councils" (LSC) to be elected by residents in a
particular school area. According to Shipps, the strike "enrag[ed]
parents and provid[ed] the catalyst for a coalition between community
groups and Chicago United [the business lobby] that was forged in the
ensuing year." (The full story of this complicated process is provided
by Shipps in her book.)

The LSC’s were to be made up by a majority of parents and have the
power to hire and fire principals thus creating a new power center in
the school system against what both reform groups viewed as the
bureaucratic and expensive school board, on the one hand, and, on the
other, the teachers union. In my view these types of councils are
reminiscent of the manipulative "community" bodies set up in regimes
like those of Hugo Chavez and the Sandinistas - used to control
genuine democratic movements such as trade unions. Dorothy Shipps
argues, as I will suggest below, that there is an alternative approach
that is genuinely democratic and possibly more effective in improving
outcomes for students.

Bill Ayers, A Student Of Saul Alinsky

Active in the local control from below, on the "community" side of
this effort, was Bill Ayers who had returned to Chicago in 1987 as an
assistant professor of education at the University of Illinois'
Chicago Circle campus, after surfacing from the underground and
earning his Ph.D. at Columbia. Another ally in this battle at the same
time was Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project (DCP), as Obama
notes briefly in his Dreams From My Father. (See also, "Meeting on
School Reform Halted," Chicago Tribune, Feb. 19, 1988 at 3; and "Black
Parents" A letter to the Chi. Trib. on Aug. 23, 1988 from a DCP member
defending the 1988 local control reform bill) The DCP had its origins
in the "radical" movement started by Saul Alinsky. (It should be
remembered Alinsky's world view was one that is and was often in
tension with many in the trade union movement - for example, Alinksy
was an almost uncritical admirer and biographer of trade union
bureaucrat par excellence John L. Lewis. For one independent approach
that urges re-examination of the Alinsky view of unions today in light
of rise to power of SEIU's Andy Stern, see Staughton Lynd, Commentary:
Another World is Possible, Working America, March 2008).

Ayers And His Wife In 1967

Ayers, of course, had long held what the left once knew, broadly,
as “maoist” politics – a view of the world that was opposed to Russian
style bureaucratic communism from above, instead advocates of this
approach supported sending revolutionary cadre to “swim among the
masses like fish in the sea” or attempting to establish guerilla foco
as romantically theorized by Regis Debray and carried out with
disastrous results by Che Guevara.

Today one of the approaches used by these types is the "long
march" through the (presumably "bourgeois") institutions. (See this
discussion of it by "Progressives for Obama" supporter, Fidelista and
former SDS leader Carl Davidson.) Of course, the "long march" referred
to is that taken by Mao and the Red Army in 1934. Now, Davidson et. al
apply the concept to the tactics of the "left" inside various "reform
movements" such as the anti-war movement. Davidson was one of the
organizers of the 2002 anti war rally at which Obama first spoke out
against the war.

Obama's Works At A Chicago Law Firm

In the fall of 1988, however, Obama left the city to go off to law
school. My best guess, though, is that it was in that 86-88 time frame
that Obama likely met up with the Ayers family. I will explain why I
believe that in a minute. Interestingly, after his first year in law
school Obama returned in the summer of 1989 to work as a summer
associate at the prestigious Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin. This
in and of itself is a bit unusual. Very few top tier law students work
for big law firms during their first summer. The big law firms
discourage it because if you work for them in the first summer you are
likely to work for a second firm the following year and then the firms
have to compete to get you.

So, why or how did Obama - at that point not yet the prominent
first black president of the Harvard Law Review (that would happen the
following year) - end up at Sidley?

Sidley had been long time outside counsel to Commonwealth Edison.
The senior Sidley partner who was Comm Ed's key outside counsel,
Howard Trienens, was a member of the board of trustees of Northwestern
alongside Tom Ayers (and Sidley partner Newton Minow, too). It turns
out, Bernardine Dohrn worked at Sidley also. She was hired there in
the late 80s, because of the intervention of her father-in-law Tom
Ayers, even though she was (and is) not a member of any state bar.

Dohrn was not admitted in either NY or Illinois because of her
past jail time for refusing to testify about the murderous 1981 Brinks
robbery in which her former Weather Underground (now recast as the
"Revolutionary Armed Task Force") "comrades," including Kathy Boudin
(biological mother of Chesa Boudin, who was raised by Ayers and Dohrn)
participated. She was finally paroled after serving 22 years of a plea
bargained single 20-to-life sentence for her role in the robbery where
a guard was shot and killed and two police officers were killed. The
father of Chesa Boudin, David Gilbert, was sentenced to 75-to-life,
with no chance of parole, after a trial in which he refused to
participate. Chesa is the co-author of a recent apologia for the
regime of Venezuelan "left" strong man, Hugo Chavez.

Trienens recently explained his unusual decision to hire Dohrn,
who had never practice law and had graduated from law school (before
going on her bombing spree) 17 years before in 1967) to The Chicago
Tribune saying, "[W]e sometimes hire friends."

I can only speculate, but it is possible that Tom Ayers introduced
Obama to Sidley. That might have happened if Obama had met up with
Bill and Tom and John Ayers prior to attending law school when Obama's
DCP group was supporting the reform act passed in 1988. Or it might
have been Dohrn who introduced Obama to the law firm. Dohrn's CV
indicates that she left Sidley sometime in 1988 for public interest
work prior to starting a position at Northwestern (again, hired there
by some accounts because of the influence of Tom Ayers and his Sidley
counsel Howard Trienens). Obama and Dohrn would likely not have been
at the firm at the same time, although if Obama and Dohrn met before
Obama left to attend Harvard Law School, she might have discussed the
firm with him and introduced him to lawyers there.

My best guess, though, is that it would have been Tom Ayers who
introduced Obama to Sidley and that would have helped him get the
attention of someone like Newton Minow. And that would have come in
very handy later in Obama's career as Kaufman suggests. Recently I
heard from Nell Minow, daughter of Newton Minow, who tells me her
sister Martha, a Harvard law professor, had Obama as a student at HLS
and that she called her father to tell him about Obama. While Nell
contends on the basis of this anecdote that her family met and
supported Obama before he met Bill Ayers, she was unable to provide me
any evidence of when in fact Obama met Ayers, either Bill or Tom.

In any case the summer of 1989 was eventful for Obama as he did
meet his future wife, Michelle, there, already a lawyer and working as
a Sidley associate. Michelle was Obama's first supervisor or mentor
there. Obama went back to Harvard in the fall of 1989 where, of
course, he became president of the law review in the spring of 1990.
After graduation in 1991 he went back to Chicago to run a voter
registration campaign (which would turn out to be an important step in
his career).

It's 1991

Then Obama joined a tiny, little known (outside Chicago, at least)
public interest law firm called Davis Miner Barnhill. The partner who
hired him was Judson Miner. Miner was a well known left wing lawyer in
Chicago who had been counsel to the progressive black mayor in the
80s, Harold Washington. But Miner possibly also had ties to the Ayers
family. He was law school classmates with Bernardine Dohrn at the
University of Chicago (both Class of 1967). He formed a lawyers group
against the war after graduation and organized a left wing alternative
to the local Chicago bar association.

The Mysterious Annenberg Foundation

Then, in late 1994 or early 1995, Obama made what I think was
probably the key move in his early career. He was named Chairman of
the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a $50 million grant
program to funnel money into reform efforts at Chicago schools. It
turns out that the architect of the Annenberg Challenge was Bill
Ayers, who designed the grant proposal and sheparded it to success.
The purpose of the program was to defend the clearly failing local
schools council effort that had been put in place back in 1988. The
first Executive Director of the Challenge was Ken Rolling, who came
there from the much discussed Woods Fund (where he had been a program
officer) and where Obama and Ayers would later sit side by side on the
board of directors.

The Jewish Intellectual Movement

A report authored by Dorothy Shipps on the first three years of
the Annenberg Challenge program, when Obama was its Board chair,
concluded: "The Challenge sought to build on the momentum of the 1988
Chicago School Reform Act which had radically decentralized governance
of the Chicago Public Schools."

While apparently several hundred school principals had been fired
by the LSC’s, kids were still doing poorly in schools and there was
chaos of a sorts in the system. (See Shipps, Invisible Hand, for a
summary of the problems.) Interestingly, Shipps concludes that the
local control movement in Chicago, though backed by radicals like
Ayers, gave "business the clearest voice in systemwide reform." She
argues that a district level democracy effort such as an "Education
Assembly" is required rather than the parochial local control
approach:

"A large districtwide elected group intended to serve as a
legislative body, such an assembly would have both the staff and
structure of one. This alternative vision of democracy rests on
citizenship and stewardship even as it builds on the private interests
and knowledge of concerned parents and neighbors. As an example of a
different form of democratic governance, it serves to remind ordinary
Chicagoans that they now have no systemwide forum through which to
debate broad issues of equity, standards, and accountability."

One Nice Pension Fund

This represents a very different vision than that of Ayers & co.
(not to mention of the charter school business group approach now in
vogue). In fact, in retrospect the Ayers/Ayers (business from above,
local activism from below) joint campaign against both the Chicago
School District bureaucracy and the Teachers Union is reminiscent of
the kinds of alliances one finds in neo-stalinist regimes like that of
Cuba, China or Sandinista-run Nicaragua. In the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, for example, Mao appealed to local activists to attack the
party bureaucracy. These authoritarian movements often try to build
their power against democratic institutions like unions. Well-
intentioned liberals even from the business community are often
willing to support such efforts because they view the traditional
labor movement as even more of a threat than the neo-stalinist
authoritarians like Castro, Chavez or Ortega. While many on the left
try to portray such movements as a new form of democracy, they are
anything but.

One educational policy analyst called the early 90s Chicago school
system "dysfunctional." The former business allies of Bill Ayers and
the local control advocates broke away from their support of the LSC's
in favor of recentralization of power in the hands of Chicago's new
Mayor Daley. According to Shipps,

"for six years, LQE [led by John Ayers until he later joined up
with the charter school movement] remained a strong advocate of the
1988 reform. But in 1993 Club [ Commercial Club of Chicago ] members
decided the LQE's support for community organizing and voter turnout
campaigns was not producing better schools, resurfacing their initial
skepticism about political decentralization as a reform strategy.
Moreover, they determined that the role of outside agitator might suit
community groups, but was ill suited to corporate leadership. It was
creating a rift between Club leaders and the central administrators
whom they hoped to influence. Club leaders were increasingly convinced
that central office accountability was a necessary component of
results. As the fundamental divisions between the business view of
administrative decentralization and the political version held by
community activists reemerged, activists felt betrayed. They protested
the 'pull-back' loudly, but succeeded only in becoming less central
actors in future reform efforts."

Now the business groups backed re-centralization through a 1995
bill that gutted the power of the LSC’s.

The Fabulous Pritzkers

But the Annenberg Challenge money came through anyway due to the
efforts of Bill Ayers, among others, and since it had to be matched 2
to 1 by corporate and foundation money, the Board Chairmanship would
have allowed Obama to be in touch with the powerful money interests in
Chicago, such as the Pritzkers (Penny Pritzker is now head of Obama's
fund raising efforts) and others that Kaufman mentions in his story.

The Real Power Behind Obama's Meteoric Rise

Thus, we have one possible answer to the question: Who "sent"
Obama? It was the Ayers family, including Tom, John, Bill and
Bernardine Dohrn.

It is highly unlikely that a 30-something second year lawyer would
have been plucked from relative obscurity out of a left wing law firm
to head up something as visible and important in Chicago as the
Annenberg Challenge by Bill Ayers if Ayers had not already known Obama
very well. One possibility is that Obama proved himself to the Ayers's
in the battle for local school control when he was at the DCP in the
80s.

One guess as to why Obama does not play up his educational
experience more thoroughly now – it certainly could be of use to him
one would think in beefing up his “I have the experience to be
President” argument – is that it would lead to a renewed discussion of
the Ayers connection, which is clearly toxic for Obama. This likely
explains why Obama tried a kind of head fake when asked about Ayers by
George Stephanopoulos in the TV debate with Clinton prior to the
Pennsylvania primary. Obama said Ayers was a "professor of english."
Yet, Obama chaired the Annenberg Challenge for three years and served
on its board for another three years, working closely with Ayers on
grants to Chicago schools. And he did not know that Ayers was a
professor of education? That strains credulity.

Perhaps this would be of just historical interest if it could be
firmly established that Bill Ayers no longer has any role in the Obama
campaign. But that is not something we know for sure yet. In a recent
television interview with Greta Van Susteren (granted, it was on Fox),
John Murtagh, a Republican town council member from Yonkers, New York,
said that Ayers is currently an "advisor" to Obama. Murtagh has a
particular and understandable sensitivity to the Ayers-Obama
connection besides his Republican politics: his father was a New York
Supreme Court (in NY the Supreme Court is a trial court) judge who
presided over a trial of the "Black Panther 21" in 1970-71.

Murtagh was 9 years old at the time. During the trial Murtagh's
home was fire bombed and Murtagh claims the Weather Underground was
responsible for that bombing along with several others in "solidarity"
with the Panthers. He charges, specifically, that Bill Ayers' wife
Bernardine Dohrn later took credit (apparently on behalf of the entire
WU group) for the bombing. Accounts sympathetic to the Panthers
confirm the role of the Weather Underground. (See David Barber,
"Leading the Vanguard: White New Leftists School the Panthers on Black
Revolution" in In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives
on a Revolutionary Movement, edited by Jama Lazerow and Yohuru
Williams (Duke 2006).) The Panther 21 were acquitted of the bombing-
related charges made against them, after a lengthy trial.

Certainly Ayers' politics remain unapologetically authoritarian.
He recently traveled to Venezuela - only the most recent of several
such trips - and delivered a speech in front of Hugo Chavez in which
he spoke of education as the "motor force of revolution" and his
interest in "overcom[ing] the failings of capitalist education" and
said he thought Chavez was creating "something truly new and deeply
humane." He closed his speech by mouthing typical slogans of the
authoritarian left: "Viva Mission Sucre! Viva Presidente Chavez! Viva
La Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta La Victoria Siempre!"

As it turns out, there are other ex-SDS types around the Obama
campaign as well, including Marilyn Katz, a public relations
professional, who was head of security for the SDS during the disaster
in the streets of Chicago in 1968. She is close (politically) to Carl
Davidson, a former vice president of SDS and longtime Fidelista, who
is webmaster for a group called Progressives for Obama, that is
headlined by other former 60s radicals like Tom Hayden and the maoist
Bill Fletcher. Davidson and Katz were key organizers of the 2002 anti-
war demonstration where Obama made public his opposition to the Iraq
war that has been so critical to his successful presidential campaign.
Davidson apparently moved into the maoist movements of the 70s after
the disintegration of SDS.

Now that we have some idea of who "sent" Obama, the left and labor
movement deserve to know more about how the exhausted ideas of the
authoritarian side of 60's politics may still be influencing the
thinking of a potential U.S. president. Maybe Andy Stern's endorsement
of Obama makes more sense, now.

In any case, imho, if either Hillary or Obama wins they will keep
our troops in Iraq for at least three years and possibly
longer....makes you want to run into the arms of Ralph!
Posted by Steve Diamond at 8:59 PM

Source

http://judicial-inc.biz/86who_is_%%20obama.htm