Mister Magoo Goes to Washington - David Freddoso



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David Freddoso

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October 8, 2008 10:00 A.M.

Mister Magoo Goes to Washington
Obama and the failure of the Annenberg Challenge.

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Barack Obama would have you believe that, after 20 years of friendship, he had no idea the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was a bomb-throwing racial demagogue. And that after 15 years of what he described as a close friendship, he had no idea Tony Rezko was a crook.

Similarly, this week, his campaign claimed that when Obama entered William Ayers’s home in 1995 to raise money for a state-senate run, the future presidential hopeful didn’t know Ayers was a former terrorist.

So by his own account, Obama wanders through life completely unaware of his surroundings.

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To be fair, there is no conclusive proof that Obama was ever filled in on Ayers. A lot of the most well-known information came out since the fundraiser: Ayers wrote a 2001 memoir claiming credit for bombing the Pentagon. He posed for that famous photograph trampling the American flag. He said that he had not done enough during his terrorist days to force America out of Vietnam. He told the New York Times that the patriotic outburst of national unity after the 9/11 attacks made him “want to puke.”

Perhaps Obama really did know nothing about Ayers’s unrepentant terrorism at that fundraiser, and even that same year, when Obama became the first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge — an education-reform project Ayers had founded, on whose board Obama would serve until it ended in 2001 (he was chairman until 1999).

But Obama’s work on the Challenge says a lot about the candidate’s leadership abilities.

The Challenge, which operated in 210 Chicago schools between 1996 and 2001, comprises the only serious executive experience in Obama’s career. In 2000, during his failed run for Congress against incumbent Rep. Bobby Rush (D., Ill.), Obama bragged about his role in the project. During a televised debate, Obama argued that his relative lack of experience in office was no reason he would not be a good congressman.

“My experience previous to elected office equips me for the job,” Obama said. “I have chaired major philanthropic efforts in the city, like the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, that gave $50 million to prompt school-reform efforts throughout the city.”

So how did he do?

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