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Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Obama’s Entry into Politics In the mid-1990s, Obama entered electoral politics, setting his sights initially on a state senate seat in Illinois. He launched his political career in the home of two well-connected Chicagoans, longtime activists who would help him make important contacts and enlarge his public profile. These two allies were Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, lifelong Marxists who in the 1960s and ’70s had been revolutionary leaders of the Weather Underground Organization, a domestic terror group that aspired to transform the U.S. into a Communist country. In 1974 Ayers and Dohrn co-authored a book that openly advocated “revolutionary war” as “the only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism”; called for “a revolutionary communist party … to lead the struggle [to] seize power and build the new society”; and lauded socialism as the key to “the eradication of the social system based on profit.”