In his latest column, PoliGazette managing editor argues that Obama should get a pass on his connection to Ayers. 

 Trailing in the polls, the McCain campaign has increasingly sought to highlight Obama’s links with Weathermen terrorist Bill Ayers as a means to call into question Obama’s judgment and candor.  While understandable as a political tactic, these attacks are ultimately misguided as an attempt at substance.

Let me first be clear about something.  Bill Ayers was and is detestable in his beliefs, statements, and actions.  The Weathermen group that he led during the 1960s and 1970s was a militant off-shoot of radical anti-war groups that actively cheered for the victory of the Communist North Vietnamese over the United States and ultimately for the victory of the Soviet Union as well. Believing the justness of their cause to be sufficient reason to cancel any conventional moral obligations (which were just the self-serving creations of bourgeois traditionalists anyway), they planned and carried out a string of bombings and robberies designed ultimately to bring down the American political system by force of a violent revolution.

After the Weathermen “movement” (it was never much more than a small group of radical narcissists, actually) collapsed after much of its membership was killed due to an accident with a bomb they were building for the purpose of attacking American draftees on a military base, Ayers spent many years underground, sheltered by fellow travellers sympathetic to the radical anti-American cause and willing to tolerate and even endorse the violence of the Weathermen.  After emerging from hiding after the heat was off in the post-Vietnam political malaise, Ayers openly bragged about how he had cynically exploited American freedoms to attack the American system and his political opponents.

In spite of the vileness of Ayers and his contemporaneous enablers who offered him and his allies support and shelter at the time, I cannot extend responsibility to all those who might happen to associate with him since he emerged from the fog of his Weathermen days.  In particular, I cannot accept as valid the attempt to condemn Barack Obama for his association with Ayers.

First, some of the attempts to link Obama to Ayers are just so rhetorically over the top as to call into question the critic’s judgment more than Obama.  For example, the allegation “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” implies that Obama and Ayers were associates at the time of Ayers’ violent antics.  While I would agree that it is fair and proper to condemn those who, like TMV’s Shaun Mullen, willingly agreed to provide support and shelter for Weathermen terrorists during the time of their terrorist activities, the same taint does not extend to those like Obama who’s association comes only decades later.

Second, the evidence for a true Obama-Ayers link is non-existent.  Obama’s relationship with Ayers is limited to shared membership in some community groups and shared service on the boards of charity and activist groups.  If such shared memberships were to be taken as grounds for condemning all those that held them, well, I guess I myself would have to stand condemned as a communist due to the fact that I have shared membership in some academic groups with avowed communists.  Indeed, the prime exhibit in the Obama-Ayers case is a single gathering held in Ayers’ home where Obama launched the early stages of his political career as a neighborhood activist in exactly the same way as dozens, if not scores, of other aspirants to a political career in Chicago’s notoriously nepotistic and cynical political culture — hardly evidence of deeply shared ideological commitment.  I would prefer to believe that people are responsible only for their own beliefs and actions and not those of the person who might be sitting next to them on some board or at some conference.

Third, there is no sign that Obama shares Ayers’ militant and violent anti-Americanism.   To the contrary, all of Obama’s statements even from the time of his association with Ayers indicate views that, while often quite liberal, are in no way radical or violent.  Given the brevity of Obama’s political career, it is unlikely that he has hidden a true radical core for over two decades out of a Machiavellian plan to gain power before revealing his true colors.  It is much more reasonable to take Obama’s relatively conventional liberalism on its face and to reject suggestions that his social and institutional associations with Ayers are indications of ideological affinity.

The bottom line is that Ayers is slime, but Obama is not coated with it.  Criticism of Obama for his policy proposals or for the way his campaign chooses to pursue its goals is legitimate, but criticism premised on guilt-by-association is not.  And I just don’t agree with the spin that the issue isn’t the association itself, but rather with Obama’s “lying” about it.  As far as I can tell, Obama’s characterizations of his relationship with Ayers are objectively accurate — he shared membership on some boards and community groups, but did not share in Ayers’ radical and violent ideology by doing so.

The McCain campaign and Obama’s other critics would do well to give up on the Ayers bit and move on to more fertile ground if they hope to persuade those who are persuadable.  Continuing to focus on the Obama-Ayers link only appeals to those who weren’t voting for Obama anyway and it appears to those in the middle as a desperate and dated attempt to play the kind of 1960s politics that normally is only the domain of aging and unrepentant hippies who refuse to leave their romanticized childhood of 1968.