Obama’s First Defense: I Was Eight Years Old
- 08.25.2008 - 4:39 PMBarack Obama’s staff seems to be distracted or confused. Or maybe they have some revealing poll results available only to them. How else to explain them airing this ad?
Barack Obama: I’m Barack Obama and I approved this message.
ANNCR: With all our problems, why is John McCain talking about the sixties, trying to link Barack Obama to radical Bill Ayers?
McCain knows Obama denounced Ayers’ crimes, committed when Obama was just eight years old.
Let’s talk about standing up for America today.
John McCain wants to spend $10 Billion a month in Iraq, tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs overseas, selling out American workers.
John McCain, just more of the same.
A McCain spokesman fired back: “The fact that Barack Obama chose to launch his political career at the home of an unrepentant terrorist raises more questions about his judgment than any ad ever could. And the fact that he’s launching his own convention by defending his long association with a man who says he didn’t bomb enough U.S. targets tells us more about Barack Obama than any of tonight’s speeches will.”
What would possess the Obama camp to go down this road? Obama’s lame defense of the relationship–that he was eight when Ayers committed his crimes–is, of course, entirely irrelevant. His association with Ayers, as Hillary Clinton pointed out in the Philadelphia debate, ran deeper than he has tried to present it and it began and continued when both men were adults, long after Obama had become acquainted with Ayers’s past.
Soon enough everyone will learn that Ayers donated money to Obama, held a fundraiser to launch his first political race in his home, served on the board of the Woods Foundation with Obama, and headed the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (the records of which Stanley Kurtz will gain access to tomorrow), an organization which Obama supported and for which he may have approved grant money. We are off to the races on this. It’s unclear why Obama opened the door.
Perhaps realizing it all will inevitably come out, he wanted to begin trying to shape the public perception of this relationship. But he has just begun setting out to convince Americans that he is a patriotic, non-radical, non-exotic guy just like them, so the timing could not be worse. After all, how many of us are friends with unrepentant former terrorist bombers?
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