©Jack Cashill
WorldNetDaily.com - May 13, 2010

ot surprisingly, Media Matters went after Aaron Klein’s groundbreaking new book, the Manchurian President, like a left wing watchdog on a right wing bone.

Klein has well answered the smear, but allow me to elaborate on two related points: one is Media Matters’ airy dismissal of Klein’s most revealing find, namely that Ayers routinely met with Obama at breakfast meetings in 1988, six years before either acknowledged meeting.

The second is the charge, in the always restrained words of Media Matters, “Klein promotes ludicrous theory that Ayers ‘may have ghostwritten’ Obama’s book.” In fact, there is nothing ludicrous about the theory, and a review of the textual evidence offers added support for Klein’s discovery.

The answer as to why Ayers helped Obama write Dreams From My Father may be found in a 1994 essay that Ayers co-authored whose title befits a former merchant seaman, “Navigating a restless sea: The continuing struggle to achieve a decent education for African American youngsters in Chicago.”

In “Navigating,” Ayers and his nominal co-author, former New Communist Movement leader Michael Klonsky, offer a detailed analysis of the Chicago school system and a discussion of potential reforms.

Curiously, so too does Obama in Dreams. What makes Obama’s educational digression curious is that, according to Dreams, he had spent only a few months working on education issues as a community organizer--and that seven years before Dreams while his mind was admittedly “elsewhere.”

Unlike Obama, Bill Ayers has had a genuine, career-long interest in education. As shall be seen, the likely reason he invested so much energy in Obama was because this young black man had the ability to address problems a white man could not.

The clue to understanding the particular value Obama brought to the relationship can be found not in the many points on which Ayers and the Obama of Dreams agree but rather on the one in which they differ.

First, the areas of agreement. Dreams tells us that Chicago’s schools “remained in a state of perpetual crisis.” “Navigating” describes the situation as a “perpetual state of conflict, paralysis, and stagnation.”

“Unlike Obama, Bill Ayers has had a genuine, career-long interest in education.”

Dreams describes a “bloated bureaucracy” as one source of the problem and “a teachers’ union that went out on strike at least once every two years” as another. “Navigating” affirms that the “bureaucracy has grown steadily in the past decade” and confirms Dreams’ math, citing a “ninth walkout in 18 years.”

“Self-interest” is at the heart of the bureaucratic problem as described in Dreams. “Navigating” clarifies that “survivalist bureaucracies” struggle for power “to protect their narrow, self-interested positions against any common, public purpose.”

In Dreams, educators “defend the status quo” and blame problems on “impossible” children and their “bad parents.” In “Navigating,” an educator serves as “apologist for the status quo” and “place[s] the blame for school failure on children and families.”

Another challenge cited in Dreams is “an indifferent state legislature.” Ayers cites an “unwillingness on [the legislature’s] part to adequately fund Chicago schools.”

In Dreams, “school reform” is the only solution that Obama envisions. In “Navigating,” “reforming Chicago's schools” is Ayers’ passion.

In Dreams, the thoughts on educational reform are channeled through the soulful voices of two older African Americans. One goes by the phonied-up name "Asante Moran,” who lectures Obama and his pal "Johnnie" on the nature of public education:

"The first thing you have to realize," he said, looking at Johnnie and me in turn, "is that the public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period."

"Social control" is an Ayers' obsession.  "The message to Black people was that at any moment and for any reason whatsoever your life or the lives of your loved ones could be randomly snuffed out," he writes in Fugitive Days.  "The intention was social control through random intimidation and unpredictable violence."

In Dreams, Moran elaborates on the fate of the black student:  “From day one, what's he learning about? Someone else's history.  Someone else's culture.”

Ayers had been making the same case since he first got involved in education. In 1968, as the 23 year-old director of an alternative school in Ann Arbor, he told the Toledo Blade:

“The public schools’ idea of integration is racist,” he argued. “They put Negro children into school and demand that they give up their Negro culture.”

The second of Obama’s educational mentors is, of course, “Frank,” Obama’s mentor in Hawaii, the real life poet, pornographer and communist, Frank Marshall Davis.

“Understand something, boy,” Frank tells the college-bound Obama. “You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained.”

Says Ayers similarly in his 1993 book, To Teach, “What we call education is usually no more than training.  We are so busy operating schools that we have lost sight of learning.”

By 1994, Ayers had been preaching educational reform for nearly thirty years. After years of struggle, however, he faced one major obstacle: Chicago’s sluggish and self-interested educational bureaucracy.

Compounding the problems was that this bureaucracy had morphed, as Ayers notes in “Navigating,” from being a bastion of “White political patronage and racism” to being “a source of Black professional jobs, contracts, and, yes, patronage.”

For reasons both ideological and practical, Ayers wilts in the face of this bureaucracy. In none of his writing, in fact, can he bring himself to criticize any feature of black culture.

So in “Navigating” he seems to buy into the claim of black activists that calls to break up the bureaucracy were based not “on hopes for educational change, but on simple Chicago race politics.”

As to the culprits in the city’s race politics, Ayers cites everyone but the black bureaucrats. In Dreams, however, Obama openly chides the black “teachers, principals, and district superintendents,” who “knew too much” to send their own children to public school.

“The biggest source of resistance was rarely talked about,” Obama continues, namely that these educators “would defend the status quo with the same skill and vigor as their white counterparts of two decades before.”

As to the claims of these educators, seconded in “Navigating,” that “cutbacks in the bureaucracy-were part of a white effort to wrest back control,” the author of Dreams says teasingly, “not so true.”

“Not so true?” In these three words one can see Obama’s strategic value and anticipate his potential return on Ayers’ investment.

Simply put, as an African-American Obama could address sensitive racial issues in ways Ayers could not. Ayers surely recognized this.

To advance Obama’s career, Ayers finished up Dreams, got Obama appointed chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant, and held a fundraiser for his state senate run in his Chicago home, all in 1995.

In a Salon interview a year ago, Ayers gave a glimpse into his motivations for helping Obama. “Everyone who knew him thought that he was politically ambitious,” said Ayers of Obama. “For the first two years, I thought, his ambition is so huge that he wants to be mayor of Chicago.”

The political calculus behind that ambition helped shape Dreams. This was a careful book written to launch the career of a deeply indebted and highly malleable politician, one who saw the world through white eyes, as Ayers did, but one who could speak in a black voice, as Ayers could not.

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