CHICAGO — In his first interview since he became an issue in the presidential campaign, William Ayers, the former Weather Underground leader, said that he had a distant relationship with Barack Obama and that Obama's opponents had turned him into "a cartoon character."
Ayers, now an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said he thought the accusation by Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that Obama had been "palling around with terrorists" was absurd.
"Pal around together? What does that mean? Share a milkshake with two straws?" Ayers said in an election day interview with the Washington Post. "I think my relationship with Obama was probably like thousands of others in Chicago. And like millions and millions of others, I wish I knew him better."
Republicans have tried to make Ayers into Obama's Willie Horton. His name and face -- a mug shot from his radical anti-Vietnam War days -- appeared in campaign advertisements across the country. His story, as told by his critics, was a cable news fixture.
But Ayers, 64, said he did not "feel very victimized." Although he declined media interviews and reportedly received death threats, he continued to teach and write, postponing the release of one book because of the controversy.
"I didn't do anything. It's all guilt by association. They made me into a cartoon character; they threw me up onstage just to pummel me," Ayers said. "I felt from the beginning that the Obama campaign had to run the campaign and I had to run my life."
He said he had no contact with the Obama campaign. "That's not my world," he said.
On a sunny afternoon, Ayers came to the door of a row house in Chicago's Hyde Park area that he shares with his wife and former Weather Underground partner, Bernardine Dohrn.
Ayers, wearing jeans, running shoes, a T-shirt and hoop earrings, called out to friends as they passed by. To one couple walking their dogs, he said: "Palling around! You guys are palling around."
Ayers talked about the fact that he and his wife, a Northwestern University law professor, held an open house for Obama when he first ran for the Illinois state Senate, in 1995. Ayers also served on two civic boards with Obama.
The Weather Underground, a radical offshoot of the 1960s antiwar movement, claimed responsibility for about a dozen bombings. Among the targets were the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, police stations, banks and courthouses. Beyond the three conspirators killed in the 1970s when a bomb exploded prematurely, no one was injured in a campaign described by one critic as "immensely bad ideas and dreadful tactics."
