Bill Ayers: Right-wing media convinced leftists that Obama was a secret leftist

[DonViejo]

By Eric W. Dolan
Tuesday, November 26, 2013 10:32 EST

Leftists in the United States were mistaken to view President Barack Obama as one of their own, according to education activist and former revolutionary Bill Ayers.

During an appearance last Friday at D.C.’s legendary Politics and Prose bookstore, Ayers said he was well-acquainted with Obama. Both men were involved in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Woods Fund of Chicago. They also both taught at the University of Chicago and lived in Hyde Park.

“It’s a small neighborhood,” Ayers explained. “I was a guy around that neighborhood and so was he, and we would run into each other at the supermarket or the bookstore or the park. That’s the kind of neighborhood it is.”


Ayers never viewed Obama as a leftist like himself.

“He was a community organizer to his great credit, but all through the 2008 campaign Barack Obama said, whenever asked, he would say, ‘I am a moderate, compromising, pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, politician.”

“The right-wing looked at him and said, ‘No, he is a secret socialist, palling around with terrorists and Palestinians, he has a fiery black nationalist minister, he is probably a black nationalist on top of everything else.’ And the left-wing looked at him and said, ‘He is winking in our direction, I feel it.’”

“Well, he wasn’t winking,” Ayers continued. “If you look at his record in Illinois, if you look at his record in the last six years, if you look at his record in the U.S. Senate, it is the record of a moderate, pragmatic politician.”

He concluded that leftist spent too much time “gazing at the sights of power they have no access to” rather than engaging in grassroots activism. Lyndon Johnson wasn’t part of the civil rights movement, Franklin D. Roosevelt wasn’t part of the labor movement, and Abraham Lincoln wasn’t part of the abolition movement, Ayers said.

“Those three names are linked with those three great accomplishments precisely because of fire from below,” he remarked.

Watch video, uploaded to YouTube, below:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/26/bill-ayers-right-wing-media-convinced-leftists-that-obama-was-a-secret-leftist/

full article posted with permission

[snot]

1. K&R'd.

[niyad]

2. k and r. not everyone fell for the spin, bill.

[lumpy]

3. Fed up with this sort of bullshit.

n

[frazzled]

4. Well, he's right

That was never who Obama was. (Nor, as Ayers rightly points out, is it who Roosevelt or Johnson or any of the rest of them ever were.)

Furthermore, it was never what he claimed to be. He has always been totally WYSIWYG.

The part of this argument that interests me is the "right-wing media" convinced leftists." How can that be? I mean, leftists don't believe right-wing media. Or do they?

For many years I have marveled at how many on the Internet who claim to be leftists spend a whole lot of time watching right-wing television (and listening to right-wing radio). Monitoring it, so they say. But that can't be it. No one who is a true leftist could stand five minutes of that shit. (I am proud to say I have never once watched Fox News. Ever. Ain't nobody got time for that.)

There's an old slogan we used to have in the 60s when we were protesting the war in Vietnam. Marching, we'd say, "Out of the buildings and into the streets!" That should be updated for today to "Off of the TV and into the streets!"

That, by the way, is precisely what Barack Obama said he wanted from us: demand the change we want. He can't do it from above. (He said that, too.) Bill Ayers gets it.

[DonViejo]

6. I'm guessing but, I think Ayers considers the entire MSM...

empire to be right wing. Which seems to me to be a logical conclusion.

[blkmusclmachine]

5. BHO says he's a 90's-style Republican, or at least shares many of their world viewpoints, yes?

I think we all figured out from Day 1 with his noxious cabinet appts. that we'd been tricked with the old bait-and-switch tactic by the blank slate known as Mr. Obama.

[DonViejo]

7. No, an 80's style Republican. eom

[JoePhilly]

8. Another example of the far right and far left coming to the same wrong conclusion.

I used to laugh at right wingers who thought the left saw Obama as some type of liberal Messiah. I don't know anyone in real life who thought that.

But here on DU, there are a bunch of folks who clearly thought Obama was some sort of liberal socialist ideologue. And almost from the start they've been complaining that he's not. That they were tricked.

Obama was obviously a moderate pragmatic candidate.

But the far right and far left talked themselves into believing something totally different.