However Matthews, who paradoxically may not even be alive to conduct this interview today if the Weather Underground's bombs were more devastating, devoted most of the interview tossing softballs Ayers' way, as the two often agreed with each other on Barack Obama and Iraq policy as the Hardball host pointed out they only really differed on how to spread their points of view: "Well, Mr. Ayers, with all due respect, you agitate your way, I agitate my way."

     [This item, by the MRC's Geoff Dickens, was posted Wednesday night on the MRC's blog, NewsBusters.org: newsbusters.org ]

     Matthews, who back in October dismissed Sarah Palin's mention of Ayers, as "the politics of distraction," began the interview by setting up Ayers to play down any association he had with Obama:

     MATTHEWS AFTER A CLIP OF SARAH PALIN: That was Sarah Palin on October 4th of this year and the "palling around," reference was to William Ayers. He became a flashpoint in the election because of his association with Barack Obama and his association with the Weather Underground, a radical anti-war group active in the 1970s. William Ayers is an education professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago and his 2001 book Fugitive Days: Memoirs of An Anti-War Activist has been re-released with a new afterward. Mr. Ayers thank you for joining us. I know you don't do much of this and I appreciate you coming on. Your book is out in paperback. Let me ask you what was your personal reaction when you saw Governor Palin exploiting your relationship with Barack Obama?
     WILLIAM AYERS: I think I saw it after everybody else saw it because I don't tend to watch television news. And I have three grown sons who kind of filter those things and they sent it to me. And I thought it was outrageous really. Really it was outrageous and profoundly dishonest and I chose not to react to it at the time. I couldn't see any honest way to react to it.
     MATTHEWS: What's the phrase, "palling around," mean in reality? You weren't pals, with Barack Obama, obviously. Well explain. What was your relationship with him?
     AYERS: Well you know I, I, again, I don't know what, what they were thinking exactly. We certainly, I, I was on a board with President-elect Obama. We did live in the same neighborhood. But the dishonesty of the narrative really is about the fact that if you can place two people in the same room or prove that they can take bus downtown together, that they're somehow responsible for one another's politics, policies, outlook and behavior. And that seems to me, patently absurd. It's guilt by association and I think, thankfully the American people rejected it this time.

     Then later in the interview Matthews turned to the "lesson of Vietnam" and how it applied to Bush's Iraq policy:

     MATTHEWS: What's the lesson of Vietnam for America?
     AYERS: Well I think one of the lessons is that we should be, very, very wary when the United States government tells us that we must invade and occupy a country. We should be very wary of led down, being led down that path. And we should be rethinking, right now, most of all, we should rethink America's role in the world. Do we have to be the policemen of the world? Do we have to be the one and only superpower? Or could we imagine ourselves a nation among nations. Could we imagine a foreign policy based on justice, rather than power.
     MATTHEWS: Yeah. Aren't you scared a little bit, I certainly am, by the willingness of the American people to assume language, brand new language like "weapons of mass destruction," "Homeland Security," all these references to a new kind of foreign policy? "Forward leaning." "A preemptive, preventive war." Preventive war sounds like an oxymoron to me. But aren't you scared that the American people bought every one of those words, bought the whole argument that we had to go to Iraq?
     AYERS: I actually think that those are contested. And I think you're right to worry about how much we did buy into that. But on the other hand I think we should be very hopeful that people rejected quite, a month ago, rejected eight years of the politics of fear, the politics of terror, the politics of violence and war and said, "Let's turn in a different direction." So we're, we've ended the era, I think, of 9/11, or at least turned a page on it.
     MATTHEWS: Yeah.
     AYERS: And we've entered an era of "Yes We Can!" But the question remains, "Yes we can, what?" And in foreign policy can we become a nation among nations? Can we become a nation who believes in justice for everyone.
     MATTHEWS: Yeah well those are good things. I think you're a different man. I think you're a different man than the one that was in the Weather Underground and you've said so. Let me ask you are you concerned that the centrist positions of the people, Senator Obama, President-elect Obama has named -- Senator Clinton, Jim Jones, General Jim Jones, Bob Gates, the holdover Defense chief -- are you concerned that she's putting establishment figures, who, who, who supported the war authorization in Iraq in powerful positions of influence over him? That the people in the room, all around him now, will be people who disagreed with him and you about the Iraq war? Are you worried about that?
     AYERS: A bit but I think that people like you and me, and probably most of the people who watch your show are suffering a kind of postpartum depression. That is we were so used to reading the polls and getting agitated about every nuance of what was happening that we now don't know what to do with ourselves. So we try to read the mind of the President-elect. I think it's much less important that we do that, than that we pay attention to building, on-the-ground, forces that want to rethink-
     MATTHEWS: Yeah.
     AYERS: -and, and re-imagine what America could be.
     MATTHEWS: Well, Mr. Ayers, with all due respect, you agitate your way, I agitate my way. Thank you very much for coming on Hardball.

     To read about how Matthews dismissed Ayers as an issue for Obama during the campaign see: newsbusters.org

     To see compare how ABC News' Chris Cuomo interviewed Ayers back in November: www.mrc.org