Nice to see a detailed, factual rebuttal of the right-wing smears linking Obama to Ayers:

Twenty-six years later, at a lunchtime meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper, Barack Obama met Mr. Ayers, by then an education professor. Their paths have crossed sporadically since then, at a coffee Mr. Ayers hosted for Mr. Obama’s first run for office, on the schools project and a charitable board, and in casual encounters as Hyde Park neighbors.

Their relationship has become a touchstone for Mr. Obama’s opponents. Video clips on YouTube, including a new ad that aired Friday, juxtapose Mr. Obama’s face with the young Mr. Ayers or grainy shots of the bombings. In a televised interview last spring, Senator John McCain, his Republican rival, asked: “How can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings that could have or did kill innocent people?”

More recently, conservative critics who accuse Mr. Obama of a stealth radical agenda have asserted that he has misleadingly minimized his relationship with Mr. Ayers, whom the candidate has dismissed as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” and “somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know.”

A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”.

Obama campaign aides said the Ayers relationship had been greatly exaggerated by opponents to smear the candidate.

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October 4, 2008

Obama Has Met Ayers, but the Two Are Not Close

By SCOTT SHANE

www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/us/politics/04ayers.html

CHICAGO — At a tumultuous meeting of anti-Vietnam War militants at the Chicago Coliseum in 1969, Bill Ayers helped found the radical Weathermen, launching a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and United States Capitol.