As I (and many others) speculated yesterday, the impact of Barack Obama’s ballistic response to a third-party ad explaining his connection to former terrorist Bill Ayers was obvious: it would make it a mainstream news story.

And sure enough, the RNC is touting a USA Today story giving many of the details of this troubling relationship. USA Today explains:

Ayers was a founder of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school-reform group. Obama chaired its board from 1995-99. National Review reported last week that UIC said records detailing meetings and other business were public, then reversed itself. UIC said Friday there was a misunderstanding. Obama and Ayers, now a professor and author, live a few blocks apart in this city’s Hyde Park neighborhood. Conservative activists say their relationship is evidence that Ayers’ radical politics helped mold Obama’s views.”Ayers is clearly a relevant issue as it relates to Obama’s pattern of relationships,” says David Bossie of Citizens United. American Issues Project spokesman Christian Pinkston says Ayers’ influence is an open question, but “it’s hard to see how one actually could resolve having any sort of relationship with an admitted, remorseless domestic terrorist.”

The report provides a handy list:

•In 1997, they were on a juvenile justice panel sponsored by the University of Chicago. They were on a 2002 panel on intellectualism that was co-sponsored by the Chicago Public Library.

•In 1997, the Chicago Tribune published a blurb from Obama about books he was reading. Obama said he was reading Ayers’ A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court.

•From 1999-2002, both men were on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago foundation that makes grants to arts and civic groups. Obama left the board in 2002; Ayers remains on it.

Laura Washington, chairwoman of the Woods Fund board, says suggestions of close ties are “an attempt to demonize Bill as a way of damaging Barack Obama.”

•Ayers gave $200 to Obama’s 2001 state Senate campaign.

And we are reminded that Ayers has refused to apologize for his crimes. Then for good measure (and to rile anyone who wasn’t already upset about hearing of the Ayers’ ties) we hear from Tom Hayden: “I have met and like John McCain, but he bombed, and presumably killed, many people in a war I opposed. . . If I can set all that aside, I would hope that Americans will accept that Ayers has changed, too.” Yeah, that’ll convince people–equating fighting for your country with bombing innocent fellow citizens in a restroom.

The kicker: close Obama advisor (and often mentioned as a potential Supreme Court nominee) Cass Sunstein assures us that Obama is “very disturbed by Ayers past” (not all that disturbed, judging from their relationship) and that this will have “zero impact” on the race. Maybe.

Aside from dropping copies of the USA Today story and others to follow out of airplanes, the McCain campaign has a few options. The most obvious is to make the point that despite the charming tableau of Obama presented at the Democratic Convention, the public knows precious little about him. And that is because he has concealed it from view.

As Michael Barone notes:

His paper trail is surprisingly thin, too. He has left no papers from his Illinois Senate days; he hasn’t listed his law firm clients or provided more than one page of medical records; the papers of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which he chaired and in which the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers was heavily involved, were suddenly closed to National Review’s Stanley Kurtz by the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois.

The real race is just beginning and many voters are forming their first serious impressions of the candidates. Thanks to Obama’s team, more and more Americans will know about Ayers, decide what this tells them about Obama’s character and judgment and ask themselves in light of the Ayers’ relationship if Obama really is “just like them.”