How Big of a Problem Will Bill Ayers Be for Obama?
I've been waiting for it and it finally happened. The McCain, plummeting in the polls, has finally decided it's time to wheel out "unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers" as a wedge issue against a surging Barack Obama. While Obama's connection with Ayers is loose, they know each other well enough to where the association packs a punch...or at least has the potential to.
The Bill Ayers connection was only officially brought up once in the campaign thus far, specifically in an ABC debate last spring. Hillary never really ran with it, apparently believing it was a loser in the primary, but the McCain campaign seems to think they have something in a general election, and I suspect they could be right. At the very least, the association will add to the doubts that independents and conservative Democrats have about Barack Obama's character and background.
In some ways, the Ayers connection has at least as much bite as the Jeremiah Wright videos because of the mental parallel that "domestic terrorist" brings to the oft-repeated myth that Obama is a Muslim. The fact that Ayers bomb went off in the Pentagon only makes the false analogy more perfect, as it implies to low-information voters that Obama's is best friends with a guy responsible for the 9-11 attacks. And the word "terrorist" itself implies Ayers killed people. He did not. His bombs didn't produce a casualty. Still, the power of the word "terrorist" in the post 9-11 world seems likely to put Obama on defense for the foreseeable future, particularly since very few Americans even know about the Obama-Ayers connection.
Obama's many adorers seem confident this Ayers attack by the McCain campaign won't stick....but far more trivial grievances about Obama (he's the world's biggest celebrity, he doesn't wear a flag lapel pin) have stuck, so I think they're being naive. Perhaps it won't be a "game changer", but coupled with the reintroduction of Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko puts Obama in a defensive position in the final month of the campaign, and with the worst of the financial crisis likely to be off the front page, he doesn't those headlines to hide behind anymore.
Of course, the Obama team is confident they can negate the charge by reminding voters of McCain's connection to the Keating Five in the S & L scandal of the late 1980s. It seems unlikely that that will have the same negative effect on McCain as "close ties to a domestic terrorist" will to Obama. Interestingly, both McCain and Palin have bullet points in their biography more likely to render them unelectable than Obama's, but they are so personal that it seems unlikely the Obama campaign will be willing to go there.
Palin's kooky witch-hunting preacher makes Jeremiah Wright look like Billy Graham. And her husband's long-standing association with the Alaska Independence Party, which hates America and wants the state to secede from the union, almost directly negate the patriotism and association charges against Obama. But is Obama likely to go for the jugular on an already discredited Vice-Presidential nominee?
As for McCain himself, his military record is full of question marks. And while details on his divorce from his first wife are sketchy, Ronald and Nancy Reagan broke off their friendship with McCain at the time because they were so disgusted with his treatment of his dutiful first wife. Then there's his psychotic temper which has reared its ugly head on too many public occasions to count, but none more humiliating or personal than when he called his current wife Cindy a "trollup cunt" in front of reporters in one of his patented purple-faced outbursts. I wonder how many little old ladies planning to vote for McCain would take kindly to discovering that little insight into his character?
Still, these issues are so personal they seem unlikely to come out about McCain in any organized manner. If an independent 527 tries it, it will reflect badly on Obama. But it does strike me as completely within bounds for Obama to go after McCain's temperament with direct quotes from many of his Republican colleagues who've gone on record citing how nuts the guy gets when he gets angry. Mississippi Republican Thad Cochran has been the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to outing McCain's temper issues, specifically the trip he and McCain took to Nicaragua in the late 1980s, where Cochran spotted McCain grabbing one of Ortega's lieutenants by the shirt collar in a room full of hostiles with guns. Deploying quotes from that Cochran story in a well-timed ad could prove very interesting.
Hopefully, it doesn't come to this because I don't want to see the race get that negative in the home stretch, but I suspect it may have to come to that if McCain gets any bounty at all from his regurgitation of the Ayers scandal.
The Bill Ayers connection was only officially brought up once in the campaign thus far, specifically in an ABC debate last spring. Hillary never really ran with it, apparently believing it was a loser in the primary, but the McCain campaign seems to think they have something in a general election, and I suspect they could be right. At the very least, the association will add to the doubts that independents and conservative Democrats have about Barack Obama's character and background.
In some ways, the Ayers connection has at least as much bite as the Jeremiah Wright videos because of the mental parallel that "domestic terrorist" brings to the oft-repeated myth that Obama is a Muslim. The fact that Ayers bomb went off in the Pentagon only makes the false analogy more perfect, as it implies to low-information voters that Obama's is best friends with a guy responsible for the 9-11 attacks. And the word "terrorist" itself implies Ayers killed people. He did not. His bombs didn't produce a casualty. Still, the power of the word "terrorist" in the post 9-11 world seems likely to put Obama on defense for the foreseeable future, particularly since very few Americans even know about the Obama-Ayers connection.
Obama's many adorers seem confident this Ayers attack by the McCain campaign won't stick....but far more trivial grievances about Obama (he's the world's biggest celebrity, he doesn't wear a flag lapel pin) have stuck, so I think they're being naive. Perhaps it won't be a "game changer", but coupled with the reintroduction of Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko puts Obama in a defensive position in the final month of the campaign, and with the worst of the financial crisis likely to be off the front page, he doesn't those headlines to hide behind anymore.
Of course, the Obama team is confident they can negate the charge by reminding voters of McCain's connection to the Keating Five in the S & L scandal of the late 1980s. It seems unlikely that that will have the same negative effect on McCain as "close ties to a domestic terrorist" will to Obama. Interestingly, both McCain and Palin have bullet points in their biography more likely to render them unelectable than Obama's, but they are so personal that it seems unlikely the Obama campaign will be willing to go there.
Palin's kooky witch-hunting preacher makes Jeremiah Wright look like Billy Graham. And her husband's long-standing association with the Alaska Independence Party, which hates America and wants the state to secede from the union, almost directly negate the patriotism and association charges against Obama. But is Obama likely to go for the jugular on an already discredited Vice-Presidential nominee?
As for McCain himself, his military record is full of question marks. And while details on his divorce from his first wife are sketchy, Ronald and Nancy Reagan broke off their friendship with McCain at the time because they were so disgusted with his treatment of his dutiful first wife. Then there's his psychotic temper which has reared its ugly head on too many public occasions to count, but none more humiliating or personal than when he called his current wife Cindy a "trollup cunt" in front of reporters in one of his patented purple-faced outbursts. I wonder how many little old ladies planning to vote for McCain would take kindly to discovering that little insight into his character?
Still, these issues are so personal they seem unlikely to come out about McCain in any organized manner. If an independent 527 tries it, it will reflect badly on Obama. But it does strike me as completely within bounds for Obama to go after McCain's temperament with direct quotes from many of his Republican colleagues who've gone on record citing how nuts the guy gets when he gets angry. Mississippi Republican Thad Cochran has been the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to outing McCain's temper issues, specifically the trip he and McCain took to Nicaragua in the late 1980s, where Cochran spotted McCain grabbing one of Ortega's lieutenants by the shirt collar in a room full of hostiles with guns. Deploying quotes from that Cochran story in a well-timed ad could prove very interesting.
Hopefully, it doesn't come to this because I don't want to see the race get that negative in the home stretch, but I suspect it may have to come to that if McCain gets any bounty at all from his regurgitation of the Ayers scandal.
posted by Mark at 2:56 PM
3 Comments:
Mark, I dont think anything is going to derail Obama at this point. He has this thing pretty much locked up. If I were him I would work hard trying to pick up close Senate seats in Mississippi, North Carolina, Georgia, and Oregon and get to 60 Democratic senators.
Plus, the Ayers deal is at least 20 years old and had already been settled.
Perhaps you two are right, but every day that Bill Ayers is on the evening news is a day that Obama is playing defense. Most Republicans were hoping he'd play the Ayers card in tonight's debate, but I suspect he's saving it for next week's debate so it will be revived for more news cycles eight days from now. It's a tough call given that the public just doesn't seem to be taking to McCain's shtick, but considering how little it has taken to boost McCain's numbers at previous junctures of this race (the celebrity ads, the Sarah Palin veep selection), I'm not convinced that McCain can't make hay out of raising Obama's negatives with a daily assault on his admittedly dubious personal associations.
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