An odd way of cashing in on Obama campaign
By Dave
December 13th, 2008 | Leave a comment
The one man who threatened to sink President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign this fall is reissuing his 2001 memoir, “Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist.” Former Weather Underground radical Bill Ayers had the misfortune of publishing his book days before the 9/11 attacks of 2001, effectively killing any chance he had, however slim, of attracting a sympathetic audience to his peace-through-violence campaign.
Now in the wake of the 2008 presidential campaign in which desperate McCain partisans pointed to a thin connection Obama had to Ayers in Obama’s nascent political days in Chicago, Ayers is retelling his story with a new afterword.
The Los Angeles Times’ Jim Newton doesn’t find much to write home about. “Overwrought and inane” summarize the critic’s description of Ayers’ writing. Not exactly the touchstone of history, at least in that critic’s eyes.
Ayers, now a “respected professor in Chicago” in Newton’s words, is careful not to alienate his colleagues by overglorifying his radical past: ” ‘Fugitive Days’ is all that one might expect from a now-settled radical interested in reliving his youth but worried about discrediting himself to his modern peers. It’s self-consciously cool — the free love, the clenched fists, the running through the streets, the overbearing self-seriousness — but purposefully guarded.”
To read the L.A. Times review, CLICK HERE.
