Bill Ayers Quotes
I do think [Barack Obama's] strategy for re-election is so misguided. He's counting on the Republicans to self-destruct, and they might, you know, but they might not. So he might be a one-term president.
Daley, David. "Bill Ayers: 'I didn’t expect Obama to go to the root of things'." Salon, 2 Nov. 2013.
This appears to be the first time in American history where the losing opposition did not at least claim that they wanted to work with the elected president to better the country. In this case, the partisanship was so bad that the major goal of the Republicans was to do what they could to have the president fail in his first term. To achieve their objective, the Republicans opposed almost every presidential legislative initiative of Obama’s including those that they had supported in previous ones. In several cases, the President proposed to accept previous Republican programs and ideas, and must Republicans then voted against the proposal so that they could deny the president any legislative success even if it moved the Republican programmatic agenda ahead. The Strategy worked in the sense that that Congress passed fewer bills that any in history, but failed to keep Obama from a second term. While the voters were not happy that the President was not able to persuade the Republicans to compromise and pass needed legislation, enough of them realized that the Republicans were more responsible, and reelected the President. The constant opposition to anything Obama advocated and the drumbeat of accusations against him drove his public approval numbers way down. In the process the Republicans drove their own approval percentage under 10 percent. The Republicans followed McConnell’s leadership, hurt the President badly, hurt themselves worse, and hurt the country.
William Charles Ayers is an American elementary education theorist. During the 1960s, Ayers was a leader of the Weather Underground militant group, described by the FBI as a terrorist group, that opposed US involvement in the Vietnam War. He is known for his 1960s radical activism and his later work in education reform, curriculum and instruction.
