DENVER
Barack Obama has learned the lesson of the John Kerry campaign – at least, the lesson of liberal legend.
Democrats believe that Kerry was sunk in 2004 because he failed to hit back soon enough and hard enough against the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. So they now demand a rapid, harsh response to any attack – even if such a response is stupidly self-destructive.
That’s why Obama has – incredibly – launched an ad replying to a spot from a conservative independent group criticizing Obama’s relationship with former domestic terrorist William Ayers.
Yet the campaign’s response ensures that the Ayers controversy will burn all the brighter. For its trouble, it got a most unwelcome headline in USA Today yesterday, “Obama dogged by links to 1960s radical.”
This shouldn’t be an argument that the Obama campaign is eager to have – it has a “when did you stop beating your wife” aspect. It doesn’t take a political consultant to know that any day you’re explaining your relationship with a former terrorist is a bad day.
In the early 1970s, Ayers was a leader of the radical Weather Underground, which bombed the Capitol and the Pentagon. He went on the lam and eventually escaped federal charges due to prosecutorial misconduct. Now a professor of education at the University of Illinois, he’s an accepted part of Chicago’s liberal scene, even though he has said he doesn’t “regret setting bombs.”
Obama knows Ayers through Chicago politics. When he was first running for state Senate, he met some key political players at Ayers’ home; he served on the board of the Woods Fund together with Ayers for years, and Ayers gave $200 to Obama’s 2001 state Senate campaign.
The anti-Obama ad takes this information and gives it the most unflattering interpretation possible – although having any relationship with a former terrorist is unflattering enough for most people.
It says much about the left-wing context of Obama’s Chicago that Ayers was considered so mainstream. Surely, this is fair political game. It would undeniably be a story if a Republican running for president had a relationship with a former leader of the Klan, unrepentant about his past.
The Obama response ad falsely blames the Ayers attack on McCain, although the Republican’s campaign had nothing to do with it. It also notes that the bombings occurred when Obama was just a kid, and Obama has condemned them. True enough, but that still leaves Obama’s relationship with Ayers. Obama will surely spend more time now explaining it than he would have otherwise.
But, hey, he’s “not repeating the mistakes of John Kerry.”