It was widely noted in the media yesterday morning that former Weather Underground leader and current professor of education Bill Ayers voted at the same grade school where Sen. Barack Obama (and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan) cast their ballots.
But lost in the election-night hoopla was the fact that two enterprising members of the Fourth Estate, New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick and Peter Slevin of the Washington Post, followed the onetime Capitol bomber across the street to his home, where they secured the first interviews he has given since his 1990s association with Obama came to wide notice. Ayers received his visitors wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the image of Riley, the pint-size gangsta from Aaron MacGruder’s comic strip/cartoon series The Boondocks. (Left unanswered was why Huey, the strip/show’s pint-size Black Panther, had been passed over.)
Ayers insisted to the reporters that Obama’s campaign was “not my world” (although he acknowledged he planned to join the throng at Grant Park later that night) and continued: “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.”
The radical-turned-prof, incidentally, is appearing in Washington on November 17 to promote his latest book on education at Busboys and Poets, a hipster bar in the city’s Adams-Morgan neighborhood. No word yet on whether he plans to be in the city on January 20 or afterward.