BY TAYLOR MARSH
We knew it was coming. So, here we go, as the Wall
Street Journal mainstreams the association card.
The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground
in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon,
and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama’s first run
for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers’s
home.The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April,
Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,”
and “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis.”
Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama
were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley
Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I’ve recently spent days
looking through them. …
Having stirred up quite a storm in the primaries warning what was to come on
this one, I’ve been waiting for the Republicans to pull this trigger. *Ayer’s
presence at only six board meetings doesn’t seem to dim Stanley Kurtz’s enthusiasm
for the connections he’s making, and it won’t be enough for team Obama to “cry
foul,” as Kurtz characterizes Obama’s responses to tying him to Ayers.
Clarence Page got very defensive on Ayer’s behalf with Bill O’Reilly last week about the
work Ayers and his wife have done since their revolutionary days, saying Ayers is a model citizen doing good makes up for his past, which was a long time ago.
That the WSJ is mainlining the Ayers association is indicative of what Republicans
believe is an easy way into Obama’s soft spot. People are still getting to know
Obama, so anything that draws a picture or fills in spaces that are currently
blank, especially if it’s negative, can give people more reasons why not
to vote for him. Chipping away at the idea that turning the corner from the Republican disasters
of the last 8 years Barack Obama is the only choice we’ve got and it’s a good
one. That’s the bottom line reason to vote for Obama. If nothing else, can he possibly
do any worse than Bush has done in the last 8 years? Than McCain has done throughout
his Senate career, as he’s been part of the de-regulation party, as well as
the neocon war campaign, both of which have bankrupted this country, making
us less secure in every way, national security, as well as domestically.
But the WSJ is on the job, which is to soften support for Obama through associations, juxtaposing
the guy people don’t know as well with the old white guy on the other side of
the ticket that we’ve known for a very long time. The choice is clear, right? Depends on if you want the same old, same old, or if you believe nothing could be worse than more of the same.
* TM Note: Originally, this sentence offered that Obama had attended 6 meetings that was meant to read Ayers, which has now been corrected.
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