A few more references may help illuminate.  Ben Smith in Politico told us about Obama's early relationship with William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn as they held a fund raiser for him:  http://www.politico.com/news/stories/020 8/8630.html

"I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers' house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress," said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. "[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor." *

Smith notes:

But -- unlike some other fringe figures of the era -- they're [Ayers and Dohrn] also flatly unrepentant about the bombings they committed in the name of ending the war, defending them on the grounds that they killed no one, except, accidentally, their own members.

The matter of their being respected depends on one's point of view.  The Chicago Sum-Times recent editorial said two things -- well, Ayers is sort of a goofy old liberal, and yes, Obama and Ayers are friends.  Here's the URL so you can read
their evaluation:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/ 822560,CST-EDT-edit03a.article

Those who will be frightened of them and their connection to Obama will note --

1.  Dohrn, however, was jailed for less than a year for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating other Weather Underground members' robbery of a Brinks truck, in which a guard and two New York State Troopers were killed.

2.  "I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough," Ayers told the New York Times in 2001. (Actually, the interview was published on 9/11)

3.  "A substantial portion of Ayers' book Fugitive Days discusses the author's penchant for building and deploying explosives. Ayers boasts that he "participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972." Of the day he bombed the Pentagon, Ayers says, "Everything was absolutely ideal. ... The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them."  http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/indiv idualProfile.asp?indid=2169  

4.  Bernadine Dohrn's most famous statement is probably this one:  "Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson."

Here's the context.  In his book "Hippie",  a detailed description of the musical and social scene of the 60's, Barry Miles wrote on page 312, about the formation of the Weather Underground:

"They held a National War Council in Flint, Michigan, where a huge cardboard machine gun hung from the ceiling and the speeches were about "organizing a city-wide anti-pig movement...".  Participants romanticized Manson's killing spree.  Speaking of the LaBianca murders, Bernadine Dohrn, who became the organization's spokesperson, said, "Dig it.  First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room as them.  Then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach.  Wild!"

Those victims were Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, a middle-aged couple who were not cops or FBI or otherwise obvious oppressors.  Leno was stabbed 12 times with a knife, and 14 times with a carving fork.  Rosemary was stabbed 41 times.  See comments at  http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2785 /  which offer a valuable correction of the events. See also http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/indiv idualProfile.asp?indid=2190  

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/group Profile.asp?grpid=6808

5.  The Weatherman, which Dohrn and Ayers led,  issued a "manifesto" eschewing nonviolence and calling instead for armed opposition to U.S. policies; advocating the overthrow of capitalism; exhorting white radicals to trigger a worldwide revolution by fighting in the streets of the "mother country"; and proclaiming that the time had come to launch a race war against the "white" United States on behalf of the non-white Third World.

Grounded in identity politics, Weatherman ideology and rhetoric rebelled against what later came to be known as America's "white skin privilege."

6.  At a 1969 "War Council" in Flint, Michigan, Weatherman leader Bernardine Dohrn proclaimed that the time had come to launch a war against "Amerikkka" (Weatherman always spelled "America" this way, to convey the group's belief that the nation was ineradicably racist to its core). Toward this end, Dohrn advocated the formation of an even more radical "Weather Underground" cult to carry out covert terrorist activities rather than public acts of protest.

Is that spelling of America consistent with Rev. Wright's spelling?

7.  A little more on Dohrn. A Chicago district attorney named Richard Elrod was seriously injured in the Weatherman riot that erupted during the Chicago "Days of Rage" in October 1969, and he was paralyzed for life as a result. Dohrn later led a celebration of Elrod's paralysis by leading her comrades in a parody of a Bob Dylan song -- "Lay, Elrod, Lay."

8. When Ayers' book "Fugitive" cam out, writer Michael Miner interviewed Ayers.  (Miner is a friend of Ayers.)  Miner wrote:

"Ayers followed a path in the 60s, from suburban child of privilege to enemy of the state, that for most of its length was heavily traveled. But he and a handful of others pushed past the apparent point of no return. "Each step was full of dread and uncertainty," he tells me. "But I took each step, for better or worse. But when I look back I'm not ashamed."* And Ayers, with absolutely no way of knowing, imagines Oughton--his lover at the time--understanding the danger and destroying herself to save the others. "The fact the bomb went off and killed only our own people saved us from something terrible and the world from something terrible," he says. "That's why I have been haunted by that moment."* The year Fitzpatrick won his Pulitzer, Seymour Hersh won another for revealing 1968's My Lai massacre, in which American troops led by Lieutenant William Calley gunned down more than 300 unarmed, unresisting villagers, among them women and children. No one was punished, though in 1998 three helicopter crewmen who'd intervened to halt the slaughter by facing down Calley's soldiers at gunpoint were honored in Washington. "It took more than 25 years to imagine their actions as heroic, to remember something moral in doing the unthinkable right thing in war, even when it seemed like the wrong thing," Ayers muses in print. "How much longer for Diana? When will she be remembered?"*

So, Ayers is saying that but for his then-lover blowing herself up accidentally, he would have embarked on a really serious career of bombing?  Isn't he also saying that Oughton, who was planning on planting a bomb at Ft. Dix, should be honored?

I would ask Obama supporters (and I may still vote for him in the general) to ask how this will play to, e.g., military voters, and to folks in middle America.