Transcript: Obama on ‘FNS’, Fox News, April 27, 2008
Here is an excerpt from Obama’s visit to Fox News Sunday, April 27, 2008, wherein he was asked about terrorist William Ayers:
WALLACE: Let me ask you one other (INAUDIBLE) which some will call the distraction, some will call values. In the last debate, you were asked about your relationship with William Ayers, the former ‘60s radical and you said that you were no more responsible for what he did back in the 1960s than for your friendship with Tom Coburn, senator from Oklahoma, pediatrician, who has made comments about possibly taking the death penalty for cases of abortion. Do you really feel moral equivalency between what Ayres did and what Tom Coburn said?
OBAMA: No of course not. The point I was making and I actually called Tom Coburn afterwards, because I thought that people were suggesting that I had drawn a moral equivalent, so that’s what I was, what I was doing.
All I was saying was is that the fact that I know somebody, worked with them, had interactions with them, doesn’t mean that I’m endorsing what they think and Chris, I’m sure you’ve got people who you serve on a board with or have dinner with who you would never expect that somehow have that seen as an endorsement of their views.
Now, Mr. Ayres is a 60 plus year old individual who lives in my neighborhood, who did something that I deplore 40 years ago when I was six or seven years old. By the time I met him, he was a professor of education at the University of Illinois.
We served on a board together that had Republicans, bankers, lawyers, focused on education, who worked for Mayor Daley. Mayor Daley, the same Mayor Daley probably who when he was a state attorney prosecuted Mr. Ayres’s wife for those activities, I (INAUDIBLE) the point is that to somehow suggest that in any way I endorse his deplorable acts 40 years ago, because I serve on a board with him.
Source: Transcript: Obama on ‘FNS’, Fox News, April 27, 2008.

