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PAGE: Bomb thrower vs. Obama bashers

By Clarence Page | Saturday, November 22, 2008

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"You hear that, Clarence?" Bill Ayers said. "I just apologized."

Indeed, he did. But it was a joke.

In his first public event since the elections, Mr. Ayers, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and cofounder of the radical Weather Underground, spoke to more than 200 people in a Washington, D.C., church Monday night as part of his book tour.

Speaking in the church after the originally scheduled bookstore proved to be too small, the former leader of the radical Weather Underground was joking about how he hated to be tagged as "a guy of the '60s."

"I am so much a guy of right now," he told the crowd, smiling as they chuckled. "OK, I lived in the '60s. I apologize. You hear that, Clarence? I just apologized."

The nod to me, sitting in the second row, referred to a question I asked him in a backstage interview: Was he ready to apologize for the violent turn taken by the Weather Underground when he helped to lead their breakaway from the radical Students for a Democratic Society in 1969?

The Weather Underground claimed responsibility for bombing government buildings among other mayhem in the early 1970s. Sen. John McCain's campaign used Mr. Ayers' more recent associations with Barack Obama, a neighbor in Chicago's Hyde Park, to accuse the president-elect of "palling around with terrorists."

Times have changed. For example, Mr. Ayers' old Black Panther pal Bobby Rush is now a senior congressman from Illinois — Mr. Obama failed to unseat him in 2000.

And Mr. Ayers, who was tear-gassed by Mayor Richard J. Daley in the 1960s, has been honored by his son, Mayor Richard M. Daley, for his school reform work. That's the side of America Mr. Ayers loves, he admits, the land-of-opportunity side.