Barack Obama now says that he thought terrorist Bill Ayers had been rehabilitated.
Audio

Ben Smith

In an interview with the sympathetic conservative talk radio host this afternoon, Obama offered the clearest explanation yet of how an extremely careful politician allowed himself anywhere near a former ’60s radical who would become a Republican target in this year’s presidential campaign.

Obama “had assumed” from Bill Ayers’ stature in Chicago, he told the Philadelphia-based Michael Smerconish, that Ayers had been “rehabilitated” since his 1960s crimes.

“The gentleman in question, Bill Ayers, is a college professor, teaches education at the University of Illinois,” he said. “That’s how I met him — working on a school reform project that was funded by an ambassador and very close friend of Ronald Reagan’s” along with “a bunch of conservative businessmen and civic leaders.”

“Ultimately, I ended up learning about the fact that he had engaged in this reprehensible act 40 years ago, but I was eight years old at the time and I assumed that he had been rehabilitated,” Obama said.

Do you believe that Obama thought Bill Ayers was rehabilitated while at the same time Ayers was publishing articles filled with America-hating rhetoric and stating he did not do enough while he was a Weatherman terrorist?

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