My Daily Domestic Diigolet 10/11/2008

WITH EARLY VOTING already under way in many states, Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod now tiptoes up to questions about Ayers by recycling the defense that his boss first used to distance himself from Rev. Jeremiah Wright. What Axelrod told the New York Post can be paraphrased as “Bill Ayers the unrepentant terrorist is not the Bill Ayers whom Obama (barely) knows.”

Ayers and Dohrn are professors in a neighborhood where the local coffee shop almost doubles as a faculty lounge for the University of Chicago. Their jobs, in other words, are unremarkable. But they are celebrities of sorts because they bombed whatever they could back in the day.

Nearly forty years after the crimes for which he and his associates became notorious, “Ayers sees his education work as carrying on his radicalism in a new guise,” writes Stanley Kurtz.

That Obama knew none of this as a rising politician fails even the smell test at Democrat-friendly CNN. Long past his eighth birthday, Obama publicly endorsed Ayers’ book on juvenile justice. The two men worked together against a 1998 juvenile crime bill that neither liked. And Ayers’ memoir of life on the run has striking tonal similarities to Obama’s Dreams From My Father.