Why I won't be running for elected office

I admit it, Bill Ayers was a member of my dissertation committee. I met with him on several occasions and have even invited him for Shabbat dinner in my home. Oh yeah, and my daughter's bat mitsva.

Apparently, being associated with Bill is a severe no-no in the political world. This explains why a blogger for The National Review, searching for dirt on Obama, brought up their association through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a $500 million multi-city school reform grant, and why Hillary Clinton, and now the Republican party, in desperate attempts to tarnish Obama's name used this association to paint their opponent as a radical by association.

The truth is that Bill is a radical. He has a lot of crazy ideas. For instance, he is an editor of an anthology called Teaching for Social Justice. What kind of hippie nonsense is that? We all know that teaching is about transferring irrelevant information and filling students' heads with antiquated knowledge. It's about scores on tests in math and reading, even when it means eliminating arts and citizenship studies from schools. And it's about disciplining children so they will grow up and go into the work force or join the armed forces without questioning their own ability to write their future and that of their country.

If that's not a good enough reason to fault Obama for his association with Bill, then how about his book, A Kind and Gentle Parent, which he wrote after volunteering in the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center for a year and worked hard to understand why Jane Addams' brilliant idea of a separate justice system for children has failed so many of our young people, particularly those of color. Bill, stop wasting the University of Illinois' taxpayers money trying to solve the problems of our society's most vulnerable members.

And how about this completely un-American idea. Bill made it all the way to professor status at UIC, and instead of selling his courses to an Internet start-up, on-line college so he can take his hippie wife on vacations to Haight-Ashbury, he decided to take the 2 year writer's workshop at the University of Iowa to improve his craft and get his radical ideas out to the widest audience of unsuspecting teachers. Bill, don't you know that bilking a state university for all you can and doing the least amount of work for it is the American way?

Beside Ayer's name on my dissertation, I can be traced to my high school friend, Shlomi Lechiani's visit to Bill for counsel on applying the “small schools” ideas in the school's of Bat Yam, one of Israel's biggest city's where Shlomi is mayor. What chutzpa of Shlomi to take the Jewish people's money to consult with a known terrorist and implement his ideas in schools where Jewish children study. This shanda on Shlomi makes me guilty by association.

But my biggest mistake, by far, is when I had Bill speak to my collaboration of the Chicago Avenue Homeless Book Club I led for two years and the Chicagoland Jewish High School social justice club. What was I thinking? It was bad enough that I exposed Jewish kids to actual, physical homeless people, but to bring in a sixties radical to teach and then have them all go together in the same school bus to Jane Addams' Hull House, that's just too much.

So, there it is. Even with no experience with cocaine or drunk driving convictions, like our current president, I must recuse myself of any current or future political ambitions. If I don't, we might be dragged through another episode of Ayersgate, and clearly this country is not ready for a sequel.