Bill Ayers' Run for Office

This has nothing to do with polling but I'm from Ann Arbor and I think it's interesting so I'm blogging about it.

Somehow I never heard about this even when Bill Ayers was prominent in the news last fall, but the excellent Ann Arbor Chronicle reported yesterday that Ayers was a one time Ann Arbor School Board candidate.

I got my start working in electoral politics on some highly charged and competitive Ann Arbor BOE races early in this decade so that piqued my interest. I e-mailed my dad, the reference librarian, and asked him to send me any information he could find on Ayers' candidacy.

Dad reports that Ayers was one of eight candidates in the 1968 election. He finished in last place with 1,781 votes, well behind even the 7th place finisher, who received 3,606 votes. The three winners in the at large contest earned anywhere between 6,352 and 8,032 votes.

Some of Ayers' more colorful quotes on the campaign trail included 'The crying need is to liberate the kids from the suffocating regimentation that passes for education' and 'The kind of meaningful education envisioned here cannot be attained without radical changes in the structure of our whole society.'

I guess Ayers decided that running for the School Board was too mundane a way to achieve the change he was looking for because he started participating in bombings the next year.

Apparently you can survive an election in which your opponents try to tar you with Bill Ayers...but you can't make it through one actually being Bill Ayers.