More media outlets are onto the Bill Ayers story. Michael Barone notes this is not good news for Obama:
It doesn’t help the Obama campaign that William Ayers is back in the news. Ayers, you’ll recall, was the Weather Underground terrorist in the late 1960s and ’70s whose radical group set bombs at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol. During the April 16 Democratic debate, Barack Obama explained his past association with Ayers by saying he was just a guy “in my neighborhood,” meaning the University of Chicago enclave known as Hyde Park. But is that end of it? This is, after all, Chicago we’re talking about; where political patronage and nepotism are the only ways one moves up the power ladder.
After detailing the family-based ties that permeate Chicago politics and considering whether Ayers’ relationship was critical to Obama’s upward climb from law professor to U.S. Senator, Barone concludes:
For Obama, the outsider who gained the trust of the insiders, the position is different. He was willing to use Ayers and ally with him despite his terrorist past and lack of repentance. An unrepentant terrorist, who bragged of bombing the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, was a fit associate. Ayers evidently helped Obama gain insider status in Chicago civic life and politics–how much, we can’t be sure. But most American politicians would not have chosen to associate with a man with Ayers’s past or of Ayers’s beliefs. It’s something voters might reasonably want to take into account.
This is remarkable on several fronts. First, we are less than three months from Election Day and we don’t know the depth and breadth of this relationship. Neither Hillary Clinton nor the mainstream media explored this for over two years. With Stanley Kurtz and others now plowing through the files at University of Illinois, we will have (if the files are intact) a better answer to the question as to whether Obama’s career path was greased by a former terrorist. Second, there must be a lot of nervous Democrats. They know–despite the silly protestations of the Obama team–that an extensive and intimate political alliance with an ex-terrorist would spell trouble. That would disrupt Obama’s effort to convince Americans — the vast majority of whom don’t know a former terrorist, let alone rely on one to advance their careers — that he is a high-minded, ordinary fellow just like them. And finally, the potential for a game-changing revelation hangs over the campaign. In a week or a month or maybe two we may know more and the presidency may hang in the balance. Unlike Reverend Wright, Obama never got all the facts out and now is in no position to declare it “old news.” Whatever we learn will then be very “new news” and potentially debilitating.
Obama would do well to follow the basics of damage control — get the facts out, decide on your position (Was Ayers a “friend” or a “guy in the neighborhood”?), stick with it, and try to explain why it’s no big deal. But unleashing the Justice Department to silence a third party ad about Ayers likely isn’t the way to go.
