[lit-ideas] Stanley Fish on Ayers [2]
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:11:26 -0700
Ayers is a longtime professor of education at UIC, nationally known for
his prominence in the “small school” movement. Dohrn teaches at
Northwestern Law School, where she directs a center for child and family
justice. Both lend their skills and energies to community causes; both
advise various agencies; together they have raised exemplary children
and they have been devoted caretakers to aged parents. “Respectable” is
too mild a word to describe the couple; rock-solid establishment would
be more like it. There was and is absolutely no reason for anyone who
knows them to plead the fifth or declare, “I am not now nor have I ever
been a friend of Bill’s and Bernardine’s.”
Least of all Barack Obama, who by his own account didn’t know them that
well and is now being taken to task for having known them at all. Of
course it would have required preternatural caution to avoid associating
with anyone whose past deeds might prove embarrassing on the chance you
decided to run for president someday. In an earlier column, I spoke of
the illogic of holding a candidate accountable for things said or done
by a supporter or an acquaintance. Now a candidate is being held
accountable for things said and done four decades ago by people who
happen to live in his upper middle class neighborhood.
Hillary Clinton and John McCain should know better. In fact, they do
know better. To date, Clinton has played hardball, but hasn’t really
fouled. I never saw anything wrong or inaccurate about her saying that
Martin Luther King’s vision required a president’s action before it
could be implemented, or Bill Clinton’s saying that Jesse Jackson won
the South Carolina primary twice. He did, and if the implication was
that Obama’s base constituency is African-American, that too was
accurate and continues to be so.
As for her saying that all Obama had ever done was give a speech, she
was being generous: he gave that speech against invading Iraq at a small
event featuring other speakers (including Jackson); the local press
coverage did not even mention him; and if this was, as his campaign
claims, an act of courage, it was a singularly private one, maybe even a
fairy tale. Clinton’s exaggerating the danger of her visit to Bosnia
(most likely unintentional because, as she said, “I’m not dumb”) came a
little closer to crossing a line, but didn’t. Re-telling a story (about
a hospital’s refusal to treat an uninsured patient) that turned out not
to be true was evidence of faulty campaign organization, not of
deliberate duplicity.
But the literature the Clinton campaign is passing around about Obama
and Ayers cannot be explained away or rationalized. It features bold
headlines proclaiming that Ayers doesn’t regret his Weathermen
activities (what does that have to do with Obama? Are we required to
repudiate things acquaintances of our have not said?), that Ayers
contributed $200 to Obama’s senatorial campaign (do you take money only
from people of whose every action you approve?), that Obama admired
Ayers’s 1997 book on the juvenile justice system, that Ayers and Obama
participated on a panel examining the role of intellectuals in public
life. That subversive event was sponsored by The Center for Public
Intellectuals, an organization that also sponsored an evening
conversation (moderated by me) between those notorious radicals Richard
Rorty and Judge Richard Posner (also a neighbor of Ayers’s; maybe the
Federalist Society should expel him).
I don’t see any crimes or even misdemeanors in any of this. I do see
civic activism and a concern for the welfare of children. The suggestion
that something sinister was transpiring on those occasions is backed up
by nothing except the four-alarm-bell typography that accompanies this
list of entirely innocent, and even praiseworthy, actions.
As for Senator McCain, in 2004 he repudiated the Swiftboat attacks
against fellow veteran John Kerry, but this time around he’s joining in,
and if Obama gets the nomination, it seems that the Arizona senator will
be playing the Ayers card. Of course, McCain knows a little about
baseless accusations and innuendos, given his experience in South
Carolina in 2000. And in case he has forgotten what it feels like, he
may soon be reminded; for there’s a story abroad on the Internet that
says that rather than being a heroic, tortured prisoner of war, McCain
was a collaborator who traded information for a comfortable apartment
serviced by maids who were really prostitutes. I don’t believe it for a
second, just as I am sure that Senators McCain and Clinton don’t really
believe that Obama condones setting bombs or supports a radical agenda
that was pursued (as he has said) when he was eight years old.
The difference is that I feel a little dirty just for having repeated a
scurrilous rumor even as I rejected it. Apparently Obama’s two opponents
have no such qualms and are happily retailing, and wallowing in, the dirt.
--------------------------------------------
Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor
and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami,
and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also taught at the University
of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Duke University. He is the
author of 10 books. His new book on higher education, "Save the World On
Your Own Time," will be published in 2008.
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Robert Paul
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