Bill Ayers and Barack Obama are Following Me.

This post could also be called "In the Spirit of Full Disclosure." My advisors (OK, my therapist) have inveighed against my sharing this info with you (Annie: did I use "inveigh" correctly?), but it's my belief that the American people expect candor from their future Baby Boom retirees.

I hope no one reads this and thinks I'm some paranoid kook who's receiving radio signals from Obama's flag pin. The fact is, I'm not following him. He, and his associates -- and even his daughters -- appear to be following me. Except where noted below, in which case my following is of the purely chronological and coincidental sort.

• Barack Obama lives across the street from my parents' synagogue, a merger between the one at which I wasted time growing up and another, neighboring one (the building that was my actual childhood synagogue and Sunday school is now RainbowPUSH Coalition headquarters).
• Obama's home, then, is only a few blocks from where I grew up.
• Here's Obama casting his ballot in the Illinois presidential primary. See the logo on the gym floor behind him? That's the Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School, which I attended from Kindergarten through 3rd grade.
• I now attend the University of Chicago Divinity School, a few blocks from the University of Chicago Lab School, which I attended from fourth grade through high school and which Obama's daughters currently attend.
• (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should also note here that the Divinity School includes the Reverend Jeremiah Wright among its graduates.)
• Some of Barack Obama's associations and affiliations have been called into question, especially his relationship with unrepentant bomber and revolutionary Bill Ayers.
• Ayers lives less than a block from my childhood home.
• This is where it gets really interesting -- and damaging to my potential Supreme Court nomination. Bill Ayers' name has been tied to Business and Professional People for the Public Interest (BPI), a public-interest law and social policy nonprofit on whose board I sit. It appears that, between 1998 and 2002, BPI's initiative to improve education in Chicago's public schools received about $375,000 from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge -- the nonprofit grassroots school reform organization that Obama and Ayers worked on together. Of course, in this case, I am following Bill Ayers: I joined the BPI board, I think, in late '02 or early '03, and in any case I was brought on because of my involvement in affordable housing. (See this and subsequent comments on me True Ann-Sister's recent excellent post -- on comment threads! -- and help me determine whether I should've more fully vetted BPI in order to preserve intact my political virginity.)
• The BPI board is salted with influential Democratic donors -- some of whom I've known since I was a kid growing up on 50th Street in Chicago's Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood.
• One of these Democratic donors was in my car when I was ticketed by a Chicago policeman, on the afternoon of September 9th, for allegedly failing to come to a full stop at a STOP sign on Chicago's North Side.
• Was it a traffic violation -- or a surveillance moment?

You decide.

--T.A.

DISCLAIMER: The statements of fact contained in this post are true to the best of my knowledge. I am not following anybody, and nobody is following me. By the time you read this, I will likely already have taken advantage of early voting to cast my ballot. I am of sound mind and body and harbor no political ambitions, pretensions or delusions.

Comments

[William Ayers]

Davey, baby,

Stop denying our deep connection. Don't you remember those long, stoned nights at the Medici, giggling over pizza and milkshakes, fantasizing about blowing up Sunny Gym, hitting golf balls with a baseball bat off the roof of your parents' building, trying to bust the gym windows? We called them our own little nights of rage

Your buddy,

B.A.

[karen]

~snort~ ... too funny.

[Danny]

You are clearly a threat to our democracy and everything we hold dear. Just my luck to be born at the same time and in the same place as unrepentant blogger David Hussein Gottlieb. No wonder they now want to tear down Michael Reese Hospital, lest it become a shrine to you and your ilk.