http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama_endorsements You lose.

By "past associates" I meant people who had the same degree of closeness as Ayers did, and prior to 2004. I've updated the post to make clear that things like 2008 endorsers don't count.

Looks like you lose Michael. Keep grasping your Communist Manifesto as if it is the Bible.

its over here inside the PC Nation of fools,and its going to be fun to watch the hell come down on you all.

Psssssst.... what does the chorus of crickets on this thread say about the myth promulgated by yourself and others that the dreaded evil liberal Main Stream Media was playing slow pitch softball with Obama? For months all we have heard from the media was "AYERS AYERS WRIGHT WRIGHT" with an occasional "REZKO". The media beat the "link" to death and the bottom line is the American people don't care about his "association" (living in the same neighborhood, being in the same social circles) as a former vandal. Name his non-controversial associations? His non-controversial associations haven't made the news. The Harvard Law Review is hardly some fringe group, but I seem to recall some sort of affiliation there. It's hard to imagine there weren't other people involved. Can I name a speciic person? Let me pop into my TARDIS and go back in time to conduct some personal interviews... Of course you frame the question to only include "past" associations. There's nothing magic about your cut-off of 2004 except that you know that Obama only recently came to prominence, making it less likely we would have heard of anybody he was associated with unless there was controversy involved. Barring your little bit of selection bias, I could enter in the roll call of the Senate for the past two years and every name on that list would be a closer association with him than Ayers, who has very publicly stated that they were nothing more than neighbors and friends of each other's family. Ayers no more shaped Obama's outlook than the guy across the street who borrows a barbecue fork when he's having a patio party. John McCain is a closer associate of Barack Obama than Ayers. And hey, you want to exclude "forced" associations as when it comes up in his work? Please recuse yourself from ever mentioning everybody's favorite Palestinian professor again! They were work acquaintances! And for that matter, the fact that he served on boards at the same time as Ayers then becomes a matter of trivia rather than suspicion. Oh, wait. There I go assuming you're not a hypocrite.

Whoops, that should be "with a former vandal", not "as a former vandal". Of course, just as the nutbars on the Right somehow interpreted Joe Biden's correct statement that under the same plan Obama has always advocated, a person making $150,000 would get a cut* as a sign that "OOPS THEY ARE LOWERING THE NUMBERS AND FORGOT TO LIE ABOUT IT!", I'm sure you'll interpret that slip of the fingers as my admission, as a member of the monolithic Evil Liberal Conspiracy, that Obama was a vandal. *(For the math majors here: if it's "$250,000 and less won't see an increase, $200,000 and less gets a cut", well, $150,000 < $200,000, so they cut a cut. See how that works? Do you understand elementary math?)