Glenn Beck: Obama's ties to Ayers

Bill Ayers audio

GLENN: From Radio City in Midtown Manhattan, hello, you sick twisted freak. Welcome to the program. My name is Glenn Beck. I want to play a piece of audio for you. This is the latest piece of audio. This is from an interview in 2002 of William Ayers. Listen carefully to what the man says.

AYERS: I consider myself partly, I consider myself partly an anarchist now. I'm as much that as I am a Marxist which is to say, you know, I find a lot of the ideas in anarchism, you know, appealing and I'm very open about what I think and nobody is surprised about what I think, over various religious fundamentalisms beyond being, you know, the most visible but the religious fundamentalism of the Christians and of the Jews is equally troubling. Is one of those regrets that I took extreme measures against the United States at a time of tremendous crisis? No, it is not. I don't regret that.

GLENN: Okay. "Nobody was surprised by what I believe." He has said before in an interview that he is a communist. Here he says he has a lot in common with anarchists. He is not -- this is two years ago. He does not regret that he took extreme measures against the United States. Extreme measures? He was a terrorist. He was a domestic terrorist. Now, why does this matter? People will say, oh, well, he knows a lot of people. Well, he was working, the week he gave this interview, with Barack Obama. They were working on education together. Barack Obama has endorsed some of his education books. This man shouldn't be anywhere near our school system. That's not a surprise to me that he's in our colleges. Does it matter? It matters because you can't trust what Barack Obama says because what Barack Obama has been saying the whole time is he distances himself from, well, the latest is ACORN.

Stanley Kurtz is with us from the National Review and he's got some latest, the latest on Barack Obama and the New Party. Stanley, what is the New Party?

KURTZ: Glenn, a New Party was a party that briefly flourished and then died off due to a Supreme Court decision in the mid-Nineties. And the idea of this party was to be something like Ralph Nader's Green party, a very left-leaning third party force. But in contrast to Nader's strategy, the New Party was called a fusion party. That meant instead of being a spoiler, instead of drawing votes away from the major party candidates, the New Party wanted to be able to endorse very left-leaning Democratic candidates. They wanted to have a separate line on the ballot but they would still endorse the leftist Democrat and in that way they would try to pull the Democratic party far to the left.

GLENN: Okay. So they were actually, they were actually a support to the Democrat as long as you were leftist?

KURTZ: Exactly, exactly. And we see some of this in New York state. They have liberal and conservative parties and they try to pull the major parties in one direction or other. Now, the New Party had an awful lot of very, very far left leaning people on it. Some people have argued, and they've got a good case, I think, that the New Party was either socialist or very close to being socialist. But even if we bracket that question, it's difficult to give a final answer to, the New Party was really left leaning. In Chicago they were controlled by ACORN, very strongly controlled by ACORN. Now --

Stanley Kurtz

GLENN: How do you mean, how do you mean they were cold by ACORN?

KURTZ: Well, ACORN, the way ACORN works is it spins off a lot of side organizations and gives them a slightly different name and tax status but really they are all basically the same organization.

GLENN: That's the story in the New York Times today about ACORN and Project Vote which Barack Obama ran. The New York Times is saying that the people who are -- some of the people that were involved in Project Vote had no idea they were involved in Project Vote. They thought they were working for ACORN.

KURTZ: Yes. In fact, you go to some of these offices, Glenn, I've heard people who would go to the office and there would be one telephone with maybe five lines on it and each line would be for a different organization and all the same people would answer and they would just answer as to a different name but really it was all the same people. So ACORN decided, hey, our nonprofit status says that we can't directly go into campaigning and be a political party, but we really would like to be a political party. So let's help create one. So ACORN's lead organizers got together with some other very left-leaning folks in the mid-Nineties and created a party and particularly in the cities where ACORN was strong, the party was strongest because basically they were the same, the same thing with a few socialists added on. In Chicago it was ACORN and a few what they call Democratic Socialists of America, maybe 80% ACORN, 85% ACORN. And Barack Obama, who's had, despite all his denials, very close working ties with ACORN through the years, Barack Obama was endorsed by the New Party in his very first run for office. He was running for the Illinois State Senate and according to documents that have been put on the Internet, Barack Obama was a member of the New Party.

GLENN: Stanley, when you say according to documents on the Internet, there is a lot of stuff that's on the Internet that I don't believe at all. Did you check these documents out? Are these accurate documents?

KURTZ: Well, they certainly seem to be. They are actual publications of the New Party which brag about the fact that some of our New Party members have won the election. And as I understand it, the New Party used to ask people they endorse to sign a pledge. Now, the New Party did not require that you be a full member to endorse you because this fusion idea meant that sometimes they would endorse a Democrat even if the Democrat didn't really belong to the New Party. But according to these documents on Internet that I believe are reliable and that I haven't seen anyone dispute the reliability of, in fact there's a fellow who's the top expert on the New Party. His name is Micah Sifry, and I used a lot of his work in the article I wrote. He actually had a post after my article came up and he did not dispute the legitimacy of the documents that said Obama was a member of the New Party and if anyone might have, it would have been him.

GLENN: Stanley, I know that there are people in the audience and I know there are people that every time they see, you know, William Ayers or ACORN or anything else come up on the news, they've gotten to the place to where they say, "Oh, well, what difference does it make." I mean, I've watched the news -- the network news numbers now are dropping like a stone. I believe that's because America's made up her mind. America's to a point to where, "Okay, I've heard enough, I get it." But why, how would you respond to, why does William Ayers make a difference? Why does Barack Obama's even endorsement from the New Party, let alone his involvement with the New Party, ACORN, why do these things make a difference?

KURTZ: Well, Glenn, that's a great question and I don't think the McCain campaign has done enough to connect the dots on it. Certainly the media has blocked the issue. But even the McCain campaign has portrayed it chiefly as the focus on Ayers, chiefly about what Ayers did in the 1960s, chiefly as a question of judgment. Those are all important. I don't deny it. But I actually think what's most important is this very large, detailed, and systematic pattern of Obama throughout his career in the Nineties, which is not that far back, working very closely with people who are very far onto the radical left. This isn't just William Ayers, it isn't just about what he did in the 1960s. Obama was closely associated with people on the very far left, and his portrayal of himself, so far successful in much of the media, has been as a post-partisan, post-ideological, pragmatic moderate. In fact, that itself comes from some of these radical community organizers. They actually have a whole philosophy coming out of Saul Alinsky that when you work with people who are blue-collar people, you don't start quoting all the leftist ideology. You call yourself a pragmatist, you say that it's not -- you're not Democrat or Republican; you just want to solve real problems of working people. And yet the very people who say that tend to be these far left-leaning folks. So I think if people say, "Look, Obama is not a centrist, he's not a post pragmatic, he's very far to the left now," people want to support someone far to the left, okay, that's great. I don't think it means that Obama shares every single idea that Bill Ayers has, but Obama was the most liberal senator in his voting record. Obama has a very, very sharply liberal record. He's tried to portray himself as something other than that. And again and again and again his past -- I won't even call them associations. They are really political partnerships. And his past issues that he has focused on all place him far onto the left end of the political spectrum and that message has not gotten across.

GLENN: So Stanley, here a something that concerns me. You have his associations with ACORN. ACORN is -- and we're seeing it now. The election, the election fraud that is going on right now is in a group that says that they're a nonpartisan group that says they are just trying to get out the vote, they are not trying to campaign for Barack Obama. Dan, play the audio from, you know, the speeches that ACORN recently has given, the convention speech. Can you play these quick pieces?

VOICE: This has been the worst presidency that this country has ever known. But that's all right because we're getting rid of his ass. He got to go.

VOICE: We're getting Obama for President (applause)! Obama needs us, ACORN. We need Obama, don't we.

GLENN: So here's the thing. They say one thing and do another, and a lot of these people that he knows and he's associated with will break the law, go around the law, do anything they have to. Bill Ayers doesn't regret taking up arms and blowing up the Pentagon in the 1960s. He is a terrorist and he doesn't disavow it by any stretch of the imagination. No matter what Barack Obama might believe, the people he has constantly surrounded himself are not necessarily trustworthy people.

KURTZ: Well, that's right, Glenn. The truth, Glenn, is that Barack Obama was part of all this, as actually Senator McCain said in the last debate. What Obama and Ayers were doing on these foundations was funneling money to ACORN. Now, at the time Obama was funneling money to ACORN, he knew he was about to run for office. And ACORN people, although they call themselves individuals instead of ACORN officially, were walking the precincts working for Obama's election. Now, technically it's illegal to give money to an organization that supplies your precinct workers and, you know, this is one of those cases where Obama himself was involved. Why did Ayers and Obama give out $150 million to improve education in Chicago and yet there was no measurable improvement. Because I don't think they were as focused on improving achievement tests as they were in funneling money to these community organizers who would help them politically.

GLENN: Okay. Stanley, answer this. There were Republicans on that board. It's not just Barack Obama. Why isn't this an indictment on everybody that was on that board?

KURTZ: Well, the truth is that the Chicago Annenberg Challenge did have this one Republican fellow but he was a dissenter. That's what Obama doesn't want to talk about. When Obama and the others came up with a plan to funnel money to the developing communities project, his original radical organizing group, this fellow, Arnold Weber, who is the Republican, he dissented. And we also have indications someone whose name is not given but their description fits Arnold Weber's description who said that the proposals that came in were awful proposals that were getting funded. So they actually ran roughshod over a dissenter and it was certainly the Republican.

GLENN: What about these two, these two heads of universities that were on that board with him that supposedly are -- you know, hold a picture of Ronald Reagan, you know, close to their heart at night?

KURTZ: Well, they don't. Weber, the businessman was also at Northwestern University. He was a dissenter and, he was a liberal. The rest of the people were super left leaning foundation people in Chicago. I mean, it's just, it's just absurd. I mean --

GLENN: Okay. So Stanley, you're a thinker. I mean, you look at this stuff and you must say this matters for what reason? This matters to you. You feel compelled to get this information out. You've done a lot of your work on this. Nobody else is in the mainstream media really focused on this. Why personally do you think this matters? What's coming if we don't, if we don't pay attention to this?

KURTZ: Well, Glenn, Barack Obama is a clever fellow. I think he sees himself -- I haven't published this yet but you had a quotation earlier where he sees himself really like Paul Wellstone but who is smarter politically than Paul Wellstone. Paul Wellstone was a super left leaning Democratic senator. He sees himself as the smart guy on the left. He isn't necessarily going to favor every single radical left proposal right away because he wants to retain power, but what many voters believe is that whatever moderation he will show is coming from his soul. Actually in his heart of hearts, he wants to go as far left as he can and he'll go as far left as he thinks the political traffic will bear. He'll do everything he can. He will only stop short because he's being cautious politically. But if you want to know where his heart is -- and he's said over and over himself, his heart is with his community organizing days, with the thoughts and philosophy of community organizers. And as I read into what community organizers believed and as I saw that Barack Obama and Bill Ayers who, by the way, Ayers was also a community organizer and thinks of himself that way, they both did everything they could to funnel money to these community organizers which, when you see what they believe, you see that it's just like Reverend Wright. And I'm not exaggerating. I had an article called Senator Stealth in the National Review. You have to subscribe to read it, but you read the philosophy of the Gamma Leo Foundation which is the network that Obama first worked for. It's just like Reverend White Wright, and I'm not exaggerating.

GLENN: Who's using whom? You've got the Reverend Wrights, you know, the nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, you have the George Soroses of the world. They are all supporting Barack Obama. He doesn't necessarily have to have ties or endorsements, you know, going his way back to them. Who is using whom? Who do you think is the -- who do you think is the winner in that game? Which one has the real power to shut the other side down?

KURTZ: Well, I think Obama, again Obama is a fellow who has a lot of sympathies with people on the far left but who sees himself quite accurately as being a lot smarter politically than they are. He sees himself as someone who's going to deliver for the left, broadly speaking, in the most pragmatic way you can if you're in a country that is center right. So he's going to be torn if he gets in with a Democratic congress because the Democratic congress is going to be split between the people who want to go for everything they can possibly get in the two years that they're certain that they hold power and the people who fear that that will cause a reaction, something like the Gingrich reaction to Clinton, and Obama will be mediating. He will be torn between both sides, but in his heart, his heart will be with the left and he will give them as much as he can.

GLENN: I have just about a minute left here. The New Party and the philosophy of the UN themed peace school which William Ayers and Barack Obama funded, the peace school, the UN themed peace school, the philosophy between the two, is there a link?

KURTZ: Well, you know, I haven't seen a direct link but to talk about the peace school a little more, Ayers, Ayers has a book where he gives examples of teachers who teach social justice in an appropriate way, and one of his examples is a woman -- this is not from Annenberg funding but it's something Ayers was touting, a woman who wouldn't let her children say the "Pledge of Allegiance". She stopped them from saying the "Pledge of Allegiance". By the way, most of them were illegal aliens, most of her students, and she wrote for them something called "I pledge allegiance to the world." And Ayers touted this in his book as an ideal example of teaching for social justice. So then you move over to a school, the peace school where all the holidays are focused around the anniversary of the founding of the UN or the anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights.

GLENN: Unbelievable.

KURTZ: You know, now I don't think Obama was particularly closely tied to Louis Farrakhan. I haven't seen a lot of that.

GLENN: I'm not saying -- no, no, no, but Louis Farrakhan is tying himself to Barack Obama.

KURTZ: Right. But the thing I want to do --

GLENN: I'm not saying the other way around.

KURTZ: Even though he is not personally directly tied, one thing people forget is that when Jeremiah Wright went with Louis Farrakhan to visit Kadafi in Libya, that was all this same period. I think it was '95. So Obama knew that his pastor and his mentor, Reverend Wright, was palling around with Louis Farrakhan visiting Muammar Kadafi. So I think that's not a particularly patriotic idea, if you know what I mean. So Barack Obama's at least willing to tolerate all of this because of his general sympathies with the left. Even if he doesn't accept it 100%.

GLENN: Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow of ethics in public policy center and writer for the National Review. Thank you so much, Stanley. We'll talk to you again, sir.

KURTZ: Thanks much, Glenn.





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