Obama Camp: Not the Ayers He Knew

Stung by Gov. Sarah Palin's revisiting of Sen. Barack Obama's ties to former 60's radical William Ayers, the Obama campaign today tried to defend the candidate against charges that he "pals around with terrorists." Campaign spokesmen fanned out on television this morning to answer Palin and explain away the Obama-Ayers connection. In so doing, the campaign employed a defense that it has used time and time again when questions about Sen. Obama's associations have been raised: Obama was unaware of Ayers radical past, says the campaign.



The McCain campaign, sensing a bite on its line, fired back. The campaign released a barrage of past Obama campaign statements in which he referred to Ayers as everything from, "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," to someone who, "engaged in...despicable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old." Those statements are meant to obscure the working relationship that Obama and Ayers shared on two public boards in the late 1990's and early 2000's. Today's line from the Obama campaign seems to acknowledge that there was a close working relationship of a nature greater than the campaign has thus far been willing to admit.

When confronted with the inflammatory tapes of sermons given by his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Obama first defended his association with Wright, then disowned him by saying the tapes did not represent, "the man I met 20 years ago." Today's comments on Ayers from the campaign are a sight variation on the same theme. Sen. Obama seeks a pass from the public for his association with Ayers by claiming ignorance of his terrorist past just as he sought a pass on Wright by claiming that he was unaware of the incendiary nature of some of his sermons.

But with one month to go before Election Day, and the stakes for Obama considerably higher, it is huge gamble to bet on voters being satisfied with only an outline sketch of the Obama-Ayers relationship. By its statement today, the Obama campaign has already admitted that its past statements on Ayers were a cover up. Questions will continue to dog the campaign until it finds a way to explain how Sen. Obama could not have known just who Ayers was, and what he had done, while he was working along side him for at least three years.