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The myths of US campaign that wouldn't go away
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-11-04 13:52 Guilty By Association: William Ayers, a University of Illinois education professor and former member of the radical Weather Underground, was front and center in Republican claims that Obama was "palling around with terrorists," as Palin put it.
Ayers had a meet-the-candidate event in his home for Obama early in the Democrat's political career. The two served on the board of the Woods Fund. And they live in the same neighborhood. McCain and Palin stretched the extent of that relationship to link Obama with shadowy figures. Beyond that, they falsely implied that Ayers used the occasion of the September 11, 2001, attacks to wish even greater harm. "We don't care about an old washed-up terrorist and his wife, who still, at least on September 11, 2001, said he still wanted to bomb more," McCain told a rally. This distortion originated in Hillary Rodham Clinton's playbook during the primaries, when she criticized Obama for the same relationship. Ayers, Clinton said, made comments "which were deeply hurtful to people in New York and, I would hope, to every American, because they were published on 9/11, and he said that he was just sorry they hadn't done more." By coincidence, The New York Times published a story on the day of the attacks about Ayers and what he called his fictionalized memoirs. The story was based on an interview he had done earlier, in Chicago, in which he declared, "I don't regret setting bombs," and "I feel we didn't do enough," even while seeming to dissociate himself coyly from the group's most destructive acts. Late in the campaign, McCain and Palin criticized Obama for attending a 2003 party for Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American professor and critic of Israel. But McCain is also linked Khalidi. The professor was a founder of the Center for Palestine Research and Studies, which received $448,000 from an organization McCain chairs. |
