Is Harold Ford Jr. right? Would the Republicans be running 90 second ads about William Ayers if Barack Obama were a white man? Is Jonathan Martin right that McCain would be accused of racism no matter what he did? I agree with Harold Ford Jr. to this degree…the Republicans would be running nasty, unfair attacks against any conceivable candidate. And I agree with Jonathan Martin to this degree…insofar as the attacks on Obama incorporate criticisms of his Semitic middle name and tie that to terrorism, McCain is going to be charged with using racist, or ethnic, attacks.
Here is what the attacks on Hillary Clinton would have looked like:
In 1999, the Clinton adminstration cravenly offered pardons to 16 hard-core, remorseless terrorists of the Puerto Rican terror group Armed Forces for National Liberation – the FALN. (Two of them rejected the deal.)
During the 1970s and ’80s, the FALN waged a war against the people of the United States that included 130 plus bombings. Their most heinous attack was the January 1975 lunchtime bombing of Fraunces Tavern here in New York City. It killed four people, including my father, Frank Connor, 33.
That charge has, by the way, much more substance than any connection between Barack Obama and former weatherman, William Ayers. But let’s stipulate that the two cases have a lot of surface similarity. Both cases involve an effort to suggest that the Democrat is soft on terrorism and has ties to actual domestic terrorists. The difference is that the charge against Hillary Clinton isn’t coupled with rhetoric about her middle name, or constant messages about how we don’t really know who Hillary Clinton is and where her true sympathies lie.
When you attack the Clintons for pardoning members of FALN, you are questioning their judgment, not their loyalties. The William Ayers ads cannot be taken in isolation, but must be seen in the larger context of the McCain-Palin strategy.
“They are trying to throw out these codes,” said Representative Gregory Meeks, a Democrat from New York.
“He’s ‘not one of us?’” Mr. Meeks said, referring to a comment Sarah Palin made at a campaign rally on Oct. 6 in Florida. “That’s racial. That’s fear. They know they can’t win on the issues, so the last resort they have is race and fear.”
“Racism is alive and well in this country, and McCain and Palin are trying to appeal to that and it’s unfortunate,” said Representative Ed Towns, also from New York.
I’d ask Jonathan Martin if he thinks a Florida audience would react to charges against Hillary Clinton that her husband pardoned FALN members by screaming ‘traitor’ and ‘kill her’? I don’t think that is very likely. And it’s not just me who thinks the McCain-Palin team is dangerously fanning racial hatred. Look at axis-of-evil speechwriter David Frum:
Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for a man who may well be the next president of the United States, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting.
I’m not suggesting that we remit our opposition to a hypothetical President Obama. Only that an outgunned party will need to stay cool. A big part of Obama’s appeal is his self-command. It’s a genuinely impressive quality. Let’s emulate it. We’ll be needing it.
What Frum doesn’t mention is that ‘Those who press this Ayers line of attack’ are John McCain and Sarah Palin, and not some unhinged off-the-cuff underlings. It is McCain and Palin that have allowed themselves to be introduced at rallies by people spitting out ‘Hussein’ as an epithet. It’s Sarah Palin that said the following recently in Colorado.
“Our opponent,” Ms. Palin told donors in Englewood, Colo., “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.”
She added, “This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America,” she said. “We see America as a force of good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism.”
Somehow, I just can’t picture Sarah Palin saying the same thing about Hillary Clinton, or John Kerry, or Al Gore.
Again invoking Mr. Obama’s intermittent encounters with Mr. Ayers, Mr. McCain asked a crowd in Albuquerque, N.M., on Oct. 6, “Who is the real Barack Obama?” Someone in the crowd screamed in reply, “a terrorist!” Mr. McCain grimaced, but kept going.
I don’t even know that John McCain grimaced but, if he did, I don’t understand why he grimaced. Someone connected the dots he laid out there. He should have smiled at a job well done. Perhaps focusing on the racist or ethnic component of this lets McCain and Palin off too easy. After all, the root of this attack is so strained and so reaching that the whole concept should be ridiculed. William Ayers is a professor in the Illinois university system. They cut him a check. Is the whole Illinois university system unpatriotic? William Ayers wrote a grant request for the Chicago public school system. That request was granted by the Annenberg Foundation. Is the Annenberg Foundation a secret Muslim fifth-column organization?
We need to be honest. This attack on Barack Obama is an attempt to play on his exotic name, tie it to domestic white terrorism, then tie it all back to the 9/11 hijackers, and to make the American people distrust their next president. This line of attack would not work and would not be attempted against a white candidate with a Christian sounding name. Call it what you want, but it’s unfair and it’s dangerous. It’s reckless and irresponsible. And it’s unworthy of a great nation.