Posted by
Always To The Right on Sunday, October 05, 2008 5:18:11 PM
One of the clearest examples you’ll ever see of why The One seldom dirties his hands by playing the race card. Not only will his political surrogates do it for him, his media surrogates happily will, too. There were stories out yesterday about how McCain’s planning to go after him on Ayers over the next month and how Team Barry’s planning a little “preemptive” action.
Here’s part of the preemption, courtesy of the AP: Mention Obama’s
connection to a white domestic terrorist and you’re a racist.
Biden couldn’t do any better in his VP attack-dog role, and now he
doesn’t have to. The left’s spin on this is that the two never really
“palled around,” which may or may not be true (Obama supporter Richard
Daley famously calls them “friends”)
but in either case is beside the point. The question isn’t whether
they’re “pals,” it’s whether Obama had any objection to working with
Ayers until he started running for president and was pressed on the
subject. He attended a meet-and-greet at Ayers’s home as a neophyte pol
to help launch his career; he served, apparently without a problem,
alongside him on nonprofits. Not once, to my knowledge, has he claimed
that he didn’t know Ayers’s past during that time. According to Andrew
Sullivan, Palin’s refusal to produce medical evidence that Trig emerged
from her birth canal and not Bristol’s is relevant as a measure of transparency and accountability.
Presumably, then, Obama’s sustained comfort around a degenerate whose
chief regret from his mad bomber days is that he didn’t do “more” is
relevant as a measure of character, particularly since Ayers wasn’t the first radical with whom The One’s associated. Or have the Obama rules now been updated to absolve him from character questions that any other politician would be asked? Hillary didn’t think so. But she’s a racist too, I guess.
Update: Palin’s not backing down, and neither is Team Maverick:
“The last four weeks of this election will be about
whether the American people are willing to turn our economy and
national security over to Barack Obama, a man with little record,
questionable judgment, and ties to radical figures like unrepentant
domestic terrorist William Ayers. Americans need to ask themselves if
they’ve ever befriended an unrepentant terrorist, or had a convicted
felon help them buy their house — because those aren’t smears, those
are true facts about Barack Obama.” —Tucker Bounds, spokesman
McCain-Palin 2008
Update: E&P makes a good point,
inadvertently, in trying to absolve Obama: If The One is guilty of
looking the other way at Ayers’s terrorist past, so is pretty much
every other Democrat in Chicago. This isn’t an “Obama problem,” in
other words, as much as it is a problem with his side not fretting
overly much about youthful ’60s indiscretions like killing cops with pipe bombs in the name of progress.