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Who "sent" Obama?
by Steve Diamond
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
From:
Global Labor and the Global Economy
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? 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."
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.
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.)
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.
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 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.
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, 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.
Here is how Ayers
in 2006 described his approach to "electoral politics" in an
interview with the left wing Chicago magazine,
In These Times:
"ITT: [A]ren’t
progressives putting high hopes in November? Even leading
Republicans admit that the Dems are likely to recapture at least
one house of Congress.
"So what? That’s not the
point, Ayers says. Electoral politics is a tool to connect
causes, like gay rights, disability rights, voting rights, human
rights. 'That’s how you use electoral politics. Not as an end in
itself, but as an organizing mechanism. Our deepest belief, I
think, is that we need to connect all these good projects and
build the movement. …we should always be positioning ourselves,
thinking, okay, if I’m involved in this next election, how am I
positioned to help contribute to building a movement, raising
consciousness, making the connections, and that’s a real tricky
business.'"
Bill Ayers appears to
be attempting to lead a similar "long march" in the education
world. Ayers is a vigorous advocate of local control along with
a related concept called “small schools,” most likely because he
believes it gives him the potential to build a political base
from which to operate. He has discussed these ideas in speeches
and writings on his
blog.
As he said in a
speech he gave in front of Hugo Chavez
in Venezuela in late 2006: "Teaching invites transformations, it
urges revolutions small and large.
La
educacion es revolucion!"
Bill
raised money to start the
Small Schools Workshop in the early
90s and eventually hired another former maoist from the 60s (and
actually someone who was a bitter opponent of Ayers as SDS
disintegrated) named
Mike Klonsky to head it up. [Bill's
brother John later got in on the small schools approach also,
raising money in part from the Annenberg Challenge program
started by Bill and chaired by Obama (see
School
Leadership in Times of Urban Reform edited by Bizar and
Barr).]
A leading figure in
the Chicago business groups that were lobbying for cost cutting
and "efficiency" in the Chicago schools in the 1980's was Bill
Ayers' father, Thomas Ayers. Tom Ayers, of course, was a very
prominent Chicago business man, a retired head of Commonwealth
Edison, a lifelong liberal, and a supporter of open housing
campaigns (in which my parents participated when I grew up in
Chicago in the 60s) as well as Martin Luther King. According to
Dorothy Shipps, Tom Ayers co-authored
a report of a joint public-private task force on school reform
and was later nominated to head up Chicago United, a business
backed school reform group, by Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne, but was
opposed successfully by black community activists.
When the 1988 Reform Act
was passed a group called Leadership for Quality Education (LQE)
was formed, according to Shipps, by the elite business lobby
that was in part behind the new reforms, to train the newly
elected local school council members. Some 6000 LSC members were
elected. And they became a huge thorn in the side of school
administration in Chicago.
Interestingly, one LSC
member was John Ayers, son of Tom and brother of Bill. In 1993,
John was made head of the LQE - which, by then, according to
Shipps, was caught in the middle of the battle emerging to
re-centralize control of the schools in the hands of the mayor.
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).
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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!
Source:
http://globallabor.blogspot.com/2008/04/who-sent-obama.html
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