McCain: Is the ‘terrorist’ charge out of bounds?

What happened to “Country First”? said Kirsten Powers in the New York Post. With less than three weeks left before the election, and his poll numbers slipping, John McCain has decided to start spreading the word that the man likely to be our next president is an “America-hating terrorist sympathizer.” The terrorist in question is one William Ayers, founder of the 1960s leftist group the Weathermen, who, decades later, as a middle-aged professor and proud recipient of Chicago’s Citizen of the Year award, happened to sit on the board of an education-reform project with Barack Obama. Never mind that Obama was all of 8 years old when the Weathermen were waging their deadly campaign of bombings and bank robberies, said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post, or that Obama’s and Ayers’ fellow board members included Republicans. In a shameless, textbook attempt at “guilt by association,” McCain is having his attack-dog running mate Sarah Palin whip crowds into a frenzy with the charge that Obama sees America as “imperfect enough that he’s palling around with terrorists.”

“But associations are important,” said Charles Krauthammer, also in The Washington Post. No one is seriously suggesting that Obama shares the Weathermen’s revolutionary agenda or the nutty racist fantasies of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor. But the fact that Obama “clearly did not consider these views beyond the pale” speaks volumes about his character and his core convictions. Obama’s explanation of why he did, in fact, pal around with these anti-American agitators also tells us much about his honesty, said Dick Morris in Realclearpolitics.com. When first challenged about his relationship with Ayers, Obama described him as “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” In fact, we now know, Obama launched his political career with a party at Ayers’ house. Ayers later put him in charge of disbursing $50 million to the Chicago school system. What’s wrong with McCain telling voters that Obama has already “misled the American people”?

It’s entirely fair to question Obama’s “character and dubious associations,” said Kathleen Parker in the Orlando Sentinel, but the McCain campaign is going far beyond that. Ayers has become part of a larger strategy to energize and expand that portion of the electorate convinced that Obama is a secret Muslim terrorist. That’s why Palin describes Obama in her stump speech as “not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America,” and why other speakers at McCain-Palin rallies refer with such relish to “Barack Hussein Obama.” Cries of “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” have been heard from some frothing supporters, and at one rally, a woman told a stunned McCain that she’d heard Obama was “an Arab.” When McCain said, No, Obama is a “decent family man” with whom I disagree, the crowd angrily booed. McCain-Palin rallies are “beginning to look, sound, feel, and smell like lynch mobs,” said Frank Schaeffer in the Baltimore Sun. To suggest that one’s political opponent is a terrorist sympathizer is, in “a country with a history of assassinations,” utterly irresponsible.

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“What reckless nonsense,” said Kathryn Jean Lopez in National Review. It’s preposterous to interpret valid criticism of Obama’s friendship with Ayers as an invitation for some lunatic to take matters into his own hands. Indeed, if the media is truly so concerned that no one “give crazy people any ideas or encouragement,” then why are they incessantly talking about it? To silence criticism of Obama, said Ruth Ann Dailey in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The rules were established early in the campaign: Anyone who questions Obama’s record, character, or politics is a hateful bigot standing in the way of Change.

Ethical or not, said John Dickerson in Slate.com, McCain’s personal attacks on Obama do not seem to be working. Riling up crowds of rabidly partisan Republicans is all very well, but with polls showing McCain now trailing by five to 10 points, he should really be wooing “those soft, uncommitted voters who have moved to Barack Obama in recent weeks.” Instead, he’s driving them away, said James Taranto in The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.com. The seething rage of the “Angry Right,” now on daily display at McCain-Palin rallies, is deeply “unattractive to those who do not share the feeling,” and vastly more likely to lose McCain the election than to win it for him.