"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal
The Nation has re-posted a story it ran on the Obama-Bill Ayers connection when the Clinton campaign tried to make hay out of the same issue during the primaries.
What’s completely baffling to me is what inference the McCain campaign thinks we should draw from Obama’s (tenuous) connection to Ayers. That Obama is a secret terrorist? That he will appoint unreconstructed 60s radicals to top cabinet positions? What?
I suspect the inference for all potential voters is to consider this: What we read, who we hang around with, and what decisions we have made in our past all tell something about our character. It is reasonable to draw conclusions about the person’s future actions based on what we know about their past. Perhaps Obama would appoint Ayers to a cabinet position – say, Secretary of Education. It is quite normal for Americans to want to know about the activities of a political candidate before deciding whether or not to vote for the individual. If McCain’s association with Chuck Keating 20 years ago is fair game (he was cleared of any wrongdoing, by the way) for the press, then certainly Barack Obama’s associations with Ayers, Rezko, Wright, and Mudd should be on the table, too. I’m not inclined to vote for someone based on what I see on a bumper sticker – because I’m “interviewing” each candidate for a high position, I want to see his resume.
If you had to choose between McCain and Bill Ayers, who would you vote for?
Ayers has my vote.
I wonder how Wright would do as, say, at HUD?
Or maybe just the White House Chaplain, if there is such an office.
Better than John Hagee or that witch-doctor of Sarah P’s.
So what does the fact that Obama served on the board of a charitable organization with Ayers and moved in some of the same Chicago political circles–long after Ayers’ crimes and his re-integration as a respected member of the community–say about Obama’s character? That’s what I don’t get.
I mean – I know the real reason the McCain campaign is doing this: because they have nothing substantive to run on so they’re trying to tie Obama to “terrorism” (a link even more tenuous than Iraq and 9/11 come to think of it).
A Thinking Reed 
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