Is Obama a closet Maoist?

Before the above question is dismissed out of hand read the linked article. It lays the groundwork for some deep journalism that clearly needs to be done. Obama's rise is largely unexplained - or explained away. If any other candidate of either party had ongoing connections with someone like Ayres the media would have vetted that relationship. In this case it has not.

It is highly unlikely that a 30-something second year lawyer would have been plucked from relative obscurity out of a left wing law firm to head up something as visible and important in Chicago as the Annenberg Challenge by Bill Ayers if Ayers had not already known Obama.
Read the whole piece.
Ayers, of course, had long held what the left once knew as "maoist" politics - a view of the world that was opposed to Russian style bureaucratic communism from above, instead supporting sending revolutionary cadre to "swim among the masses like fish in the sea" or attempting to establish guerilla foco as romantically theorized by Regis Debray and carried out with disastrous results by Che Guevara.

During the debate, Obama seems to have told outright lies about his relationship to Ayres.
And:
As it turns out, there are other ex-SDS types around the Obama campaign as well, including Marilyn Katz, a public relations professional, who was head of security for the SDS during the disaster in the streets of Chicago in 1968. She is close (politically) to Carl Davidson, a former president of SDS, who heads up a group called Progressives for Obama. Davidson and Katz, it appears, were key organizers of the anti-war demonstration where Obama made public his opposition to the Iraq war that has been so critical to his successful presidential campaign.