Ayers Speaks

Ayers said that once his name became part of the campaign maelstrom he never had any contact with the Obama circle. "That's not my world," he said.

Ayers said he felt "a lot of sympathy" for the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, "who was treated grotesquely and unfairly" by the media. He said that Martin Luther King Jr. was, in his time, far more radical than Wright: "Wright's a wimp compared to Martin Luther King—he had a fiercer tone."