It depends on what your definition of "is" is.....

With less than a month to go until the presidential election, John McCain and supporters have heavily criticized Bill Ayers, a man with some previous minor connections to Barack Obama.
Early in his political career, Obama served on some educational committees with Ayers. Ayers ultimately did donate a small amount of money, $200, to Obama's reelection campaign while Obama still served in the Illinois legislature.
Of course, this doesn't mean that Obama holds all the beliefs that Ayers had back in the day.
Back in the day, Ayers had a fondness for blowing stuff up, like the Haymarket Riot memorial in Chicago. Ayers also helped plan a number of other bombings elsewhere.
Naturally, once federal charges were dropped, this opened up a shiny new career for Ayers, in education.
In his writings, Ayers parses his words with all the skill you'd expect from a self-serving, narcissistic child of privilege. One of his money quotes?
Right here:
We were very careful....to be sure we weren't going to hurt anybody, and we never did hurt anybody. Whenever we put a bomb in a public space, we had figured out all kinds of ways to put checks and balances on the thing and also to get people away from it, and we were remarkably successful......Terrorists terrorize, they kill innocent civilians, while we organized and agitated. Terrorists destroy randomly, while our actions bore, we hoped, the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate. No, we're not terrorists.--Fugitive Days, Bill Ayers.
Guess that explains how Ayers got his nice, shiny professorship at UIC. Bombs educate people. On second thought, maybe that happened because his daddy ran Commonwealth Edison and was friends with Richard J. Daley.
Bombs sure educated a close friend of Ayers and his girlfriend in 1970. Three of his terrorist friends, including his girlfriend, were killed when a nail bomb they were building exploded, tearing them to shreds. Literally. Cops were only able to identify his girlfriend after they found what remained of her thumb.
Another thing I really dig is about Ayers is how others are fooled into parsing words like he does. Check out a recent blog entry from Eric Zorn, who writes for the Chicago Tribune: http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2008/10/what-is-and-isn.html#comments
By definition, a terrorist is someone who uses violence in an attempt to coerce others into different beliefs. Zorn justifies Ayers' actions by saying Ayers didn't want to kill anyone.
Riiiiiiiight.
So, let's sum up. All you have to do to become a respected professor is bomb a lot of shit, not mean to kill anyone, and have a daddy who's close friends with the mayor. This also works in never having to do time for your crime.
Ugh.
I'm not gonna even start on my disgust for both presidential candidates.