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Last Updated: Oct 7, 2008 - 8:51:33 AM |
The Alaska governor’s larger point – made in her Oct. 2 debate and on
the campaign stump since then – is that Obama is a person who dares to
find fault with U.S. policies overseas and thus deserves to have his
patriotism questioned.
"Our opponent,” Palin told Republican supporters during a post-debate
speech in Colorado, “is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so
imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists
who would target their own country."
Palin added about Obama, "This is not a man who sees America like you
and I see America. We see America as a force of good in this world. We
see an America of exceptionalism."
It’s unclear if Palin understood the full significance of her reference
to American “exceptionalism,” the theory preached by the
neoconservatives who led her debate prep. They argue that the United
States has the exceptional right to operate outside international law.
But Palin does grasp the political usefulness of smearing an opponent
in the style of Jeane Kirkpatrick, who in 1984 famously defined critics
of Ronald Reagan’s aggressive foreign policy as people who would “blame
America first.” Palin is, in effect, labeling Obama a
blame-America-firster.
In the vice presidential debate, Palin twisted Obama’s 2007 analysis of
U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan – which called for more troops on
the ground to reduce reliance on air strikes that had killed civilians
– into him condemning everything the U.S. military has done in
Afghanistan.
“Barack Obama had said that all we're doing in Afghanistan is
air-raiding villages and killing civilians,” Palin said. “And such a
reckless, reckless comment and untrue comment, again, hurts our cause.”
With the blessings of John McCain’s campaign, Palin then expanded on
this “character” assault against Obama by citing his tenuous connection
to former Vietnam War-era radical William Ayers as well as recalling
the controversy over Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Though McCain has in the past decried this sort of personal smear
tactic – especially when he was the victim in 2000 – his campaign has
announced, rather openly, its intent to go negative on Obama in a
guilt-by-association barrage in the weeks before Nov. 4.
New Assault
Several top Republicans told the Washington Post that “McCain and his
Republican allies are readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen.
Barack Obama’s character, believing that to win in November they must
shift the conversation back to questions about the Democrat’s judgment,
honesty and personal associations.”
McCain aides also left no doubt that the strategy would have a
McCarthyistic tinge by highlighting Obama’s limited connections to
Ayers, who as a young man in the late 1960s and early 1970s, veered off
into violent radicalism in protest of the slaughter going on in the
Vietnam War.
Ayers became a leader of an extreme faction, known as the Weathermen,
that planted bombs at the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. After years of
living underground, Ayers surfaced and escaped a prison sentence in
1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct in his case.
Though never disavowing his rationale for reacting to the Vietnam War
violence by trying to bring a small measure of that violence back home,
Ayers expressed regret for some of his actions and quietly built a life
as a Chicago-based college professor focusing on educational issues.
Possibly because Ayers came from a family with deep ties in the Chicago
establishment – his father had served as chief executive of
Commonwealth Edison – the ex-student radical was given a kind of second
chance to turn his expertise to the good of his community.
One of Ayers’s defenders now is Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, whose
father had run the city at the time of infamous clashes in 1968 between
anti-war activists and police.
“He’s done a lot of good in this city and nationally,” Daley told the
New York Times in a front-page article on Oct. 4. Daley also urged
people to view Ayers’s radicalism four decades ago in the context of
the time when the brutality of the Vietnam War had torn apart the
nation’s social fabric.
“This is 2008,” Daley said. “People make mistakes.”
History also shows that the mistakes were not just made by anti-war
activists, but by the nation’s leaders who intervened with a
half-million U.S. troops and massive firepower in what amounted to a
local civil war.
The record reveals that President Lyndon Johnson’s decisions were
driven by fear that he would be blamed for “losing Indochina” and by
the erroneous belief that communism was a monolith. Johnson and his
advisers failed to appreciate the emerging Sino-Soviet split or the
nationalism that inspired much of the Vietnamese resistance to French
and then American domination.
As Johnson pushed forward into the bloody Vietnam quagmire, the
American people also splintered into angry factions, some backing the
war and some doing what they could to end it. In 1967, the Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr. threw his moral weight on the anti-war side, calling
the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world
today.”
A few young Americans reacted to the violence in Vietnam – and to the
refusal of the U.S. government to stop the war – by turning to anarchy
or trying to “bring the war home” through violent acts within the
United States. William Ayers was such a person.
Clearly, however, Obama had nothing to do with Ayers’s behavior during
the Vietnam War when Obama was still a child. It’s also a stretch to
suggest that a tenuous connection to Ayers implicated Obama in either
Ayers’s actions during the Vietnam War or his lack of remorse for some
of his decisions.
Establishment Connections
Ironically, it was the Chicago establishment that put Obama – a bright,
young community organizer working with churches on Chicago’s South Side
– into contact with Ayers, who served on philanthropic boards seeking
to improve educational opportunities in the city.
The Obama campaign says the two men first met in 1995 through an
educational project known as the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which was
part of a $500 million national program for school improvement funded
from the fortune of Walter Annenberg, a pro-Republican publisher (and
close personal friend of Ronald Reagan).
Ayers also hosted a small political gathering for Obama’s first state
senate campaign; their terms overlapped as members of board for the
Woods Fund, another community-oriented philanthropy; and they lived in
the same Hyde Park neighborhood, seeing each other occasionally on the
street, the Times reported in the Oct. 4 story.
Though Palin cited the publication of the Times article to justify her
new attacks linking Obama to Ayers’s Vietnam-era “terrorism,” the
article actually cites no evidence to support Palin’s charge that Obama
was “palling around with terrorists,” with its suggestion that Obama
and Ayers were close friends.
The article concludes that the two appear to have been only casual
acquaintances and that Ayers had little to do with Obama’s political
development. According to the Times article, even conservative
Republicans who knew Obama in that time period said he showed no
radical tendencies.
“I saw no evidence of a radical streak, either overt or covert, when we
were together at Harvard Law School,” said Bradford Berenson, who
worked with Obama on the Harvard Law Review and later became an
associate White House counsel to George W. Bush.
Berenson called Obama a “pragmatic liberal” whose moderation frustrated
others at the law review who held more leftist views.
Nevertheless, McCain and Palin appear determined to make this
guilt-by-association theme work in the final weeks of the campaign,
hoping that it will raise doubts about Obama that might scare off white
working-class voters, so-called Reagan Democrats.
Clinton Oppo
The McCain-Palin ticket is helped by the fact that during the latter
stages of the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton’s campaign injected
the Ayers issue into the race under the guise that the Republicans
would use it – and therefore it was best to raise it in time for
Democrats to deny Obama the nomination.
The Ayers issue was part of the Clinton “oppo” research on Obama dating
back at least to December 2007 when I was briefed on it by a close
Clinton associate. The Clinton campaign pushed the Ayers theme during
the spring 2008 primaries in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania and
Ohio.
Key media personalities helped, such as George Stephanopoulos of ABC
News, a former Bill Clinton adviser. During a key prime-time debate
before the Pennsylvania primary, Stephanopoulos said about Ayers that
“in fact, on 9/11 he was quoted in the New York Times saying, ‘I don’t
regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough.’”
Obama was left protesting this pejorative guilt-by-association. “The
notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged
in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow
reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense, George,” Obama
responded.
“So this kind of game, in which anybody who I know, regardless of how
flimsy the relationship is, is somehow – somehow their ideas could be
attributed to me – I think the American people are smarter than that.
They’re not going to suggest somehow that that is reflective of my
views, because it obviously isn’t.”
By referring to the fact that Ayers’s comments were published on Sept.
11, 2001, Stephanopoulos led viewers to believe that Ayers had either
hailed the 9/11 attacks or used the 9/11 tragedy as a ghoulish
opportunity to suggest that more bombings were desirable.
But that wasn’t true. The comment, which was from an interview about a
memoir that Ayers published earlier in 2001, was included in a New York
Times article that appeared in the newspaper’s Sept. 11, 2001, edition,
which went to press on Sept. 10, hours before the 9/11 attacks. In
other words, the Ayers comment had no relationship to the 9/11 attacks.
During the debate, in response to Sen. Clinton’s piling on about Ayers,
Obama pointed out that her husband had done more for ex-members of the
Weather Underground than he had.
“By Sen. Clinton’s own vetting standards, I don’t think she would make
it, since President Clinton pardoned or commuted the sentences of two
members of the Weather Underground, which I think is a slightly more
significant act” than knowing Ayers, Obama said. [For more details, see
Consortiumnews.com’s “Are the Clintons Playing Joe McCarthy?’]
But now the Ayers issue is back, thanks to Republican operatives, the
New York Times front-page article on Oct. 4 – and Sarah Palin’s new
role as the attack dog for John McCain’s campaign.
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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