Obama to Name William Ayers Secretary of Education
Nov 6, 2008, 16:46
CHICAGO, Ill. – President elect Barack Obama is expected to name Chicago educator William Ayers to the post of secretary of education.
Sources close to Mr. Obama say that he is focused on assembling the key components of his administration as quickly as possible; that is why he will appoint his longtime friend Mr. Ayers to a cabinet position.
“Barack has been paling around with Bill for some time,” said interim Obama press secretary, Chris Rock. “He believes Bill is a dynamite guy who will have an explosive impact on educational policy.”
Despite the difference in their ages—when Mr. Ayers was twenty-five, Mr. Obama was only eight—the two men have been friends for more than a dozen years. They met in 1995 when they served together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Project’s board of directors, helping to oversee the distribution of welfare grants to unwed, nonworking mothers in Chicago. Later that year Mr. Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois, hosted a “single-estate, fair-trade-coffee-and-conversation” event for Mr. Obama when he first ran for political office.
“I have been privileged to work with Barack Obama in the past,” said Mr. Ayers in a prepared statement. “I only wish we could have done more. From the first time I met him, I could tell he was going places. Like Bob Dylan said, ‘You don’t need a weatherman to known which way the wind blows.’”
