I heard a right-wing braying head on talk radio, this morning, ridiculing Obama for having claimed not to have known, back when he worked with Bill Ayers, about Ayers's connections to the Weather Underground bombings . The right-winger asserted that this proved that either Obama was an idiot or a liar. I'm curious what people here think. Were you familiar with the name "Bill Ayers" before the Obama controversy?
I'll admit to my ignorance on this one. Like Obama, I was too young to be politically aware back when Ayers was news. I'd heard of the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground, from documentaries about 60s radicalism, and knew a little about the latter (how they'd taken their name from a Dylan lyric, how they'd been involved in bombings). However, the only name I'd ever heard connected to that was Terry Robbins. I'm not completely dim about 60s radical politics. I know quite a bit about Timothy Leary, Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin, Elijah Mohammed, Malcolm X, Abbie Hoffman, and Cesar Chavez, but no Bill Ayers.
I did a quick Amazon "search inside" of Zinn's "A People's History" (the source of most of my counter-cultural history lessons), and Ayers isn't mentioned. A quick news archive search suggests that before Obama's rise to prominence Ayers was a pretty damned obscure figure. I, for one, wouldn't find it at all implausible to think that a few years back a politician could have interactions with Ayers without knowing much more about him than that he was a former hippie. Do other here disagree?
