On Obama's big day, Bill Ayers speaks

By Peter Slevin
updated 2:55 a.m. PT, Wed., Nov. 5, 2008

CHICAGO - In his first interview since he became an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground leader, said Tuesday that he had a distant relationship with Barack Obama and that Obama's opponents had turned him into "a cartoon character."

Ayers, now an education professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said he thought the accusation by Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that Obama had been "palling around with terrorists" was absurd.

"Pal around together? What does that mean? Share a milkshake with two straws?" Ayers said. "I think my relationship with Obama was probably like thousands of others in Chicago. And, like millions and millions of others, I wish I knew him better."

Republicans have tried to make Ayers into Obama's Willie Horton. His name and face — a mugshot from his radical anti-Vietnam War days — have appeared in campaign advertisements across the country. His story, as told by his critics, is a cable television fixture.

Death threats

Yet Ayers, 64, said he does not "feel very victimized." Although he declined media interviews and received reported death threats, he continued to teach and write, postponing the release of one book because of the controversy. "I didn't do anything. It's all guilt by association. They made me into a cartoon character, they threw me up on stage just to pummel me," Ayers said. "I felt from the beginning that the Obama campaign had to run the campaign and I had to run my life."

He said he had no contact with the Obama campaign. "That's not my world," he said.

The McCain campaign should be ashamed of themselves attempting to make this nothingburger relationship an issue. Fortunately the vast majority of Americans dismissed it as nonsense. In the end, it was crap like this than undid McCain's own campaign.