Political briefs

New meeting set

to bury campaign ax

CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama will meet Monday with John McCain in talks that Obama’s transition office said would focus on ways they can cooperate on an array of troublesome issues facing the country.

The meeting will be the first since Obama, the Democratic Illinois senator, beat McCain, the Arizona Republican senator, by an Electoral College landslide in the Nov. 4 election.

"It’s well known that they share an important belief that Americans want and deserve a more effective and efficient government, and will discuss ways to work together to make that a reality,” Obama spokesman Stephanie Cutter said in announcing the meeting.

Advisers to both men say they do not expect Obama to consider McCain for a position in his administration, as he is with former primary rival Hillary Rodham Clinton for secretary of state. But he’d like to have McCain as a partner in the Senate on legislation they both have advocated on the campaign trail, like climate change, earmark reform and torture.

Cutter also said the two will be joined at Obama’s Chicago transition office by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a McCain confidant, and Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat whom Obama has chosen to be his White House chief of staff.

Ex-radical Ayers distances himself from Obama

CHICAGO — Vietnam-era radical Bill Ayers said Friday that he doesn’t know President-elect Barack Obama any better than "thousands of other Chicagoans” and that the two never talked about Ayers’ anti-war activities.

In a television interview on ABC’s "Good Morning America,” the college professor disputed the contention that in the new afterword of a paperback edition of his 2001 memoir "Fugitive Days” he describes himself and Obama as "family friends.”

"I’m describing there how the blogosphere characterized the relationship,” Ayers said. "I would really say that we knew each other in a professional way, again on the same level as say thousands of other people.”

Ayers, an education professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, helped found the radical group the Weathermen, which carried out bombings at the Pentagon and the Capitol.

His name came up repeatedly in Republican Sen. John McCain’s campaign, with McCain wondering about the closeness of the relationship. McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, talked about how Obama would "pal around with terrorists.”

In fact, Ayers said he didn’t even know Obama when he hosted a coffee early in Obama’s political career at Ayers’ home in the Chicago neighborhood where the two live. Ayers added that he agreed to have the meet-the-candidate event after a state senator asked him to.