How is it unfair if it's true? Sure Obama wants to parry and deflect
attention from these associations. He prefers not to discuss them, wishes
they would go away. He understands as well as anyone that they testify to
his own judgment in the past and to his honesty about them now. Judgment and
honesty lie at the heart of character.
They're past history, and therefore irrelevant.
On the contrary, they go hand-in-glove with the extreme leftism of his
Senate voting record (No. 1, to Ted Kennedy's No. 2 and Joe Biden's No. 3).
He is hardly the moderate mainstreamer he presents to the voters with his
Mr. Smoothie rhetoric. He got his start in the company of radicals and the
corrupt - and if the press won't vet the past of "this fellow of strange
associations" (in the words of Hollywood actor Jon Voight), then McCain and
Palin must. You might look at it as providing a service to the voters.
The voters seem to be making up their minds the other way - in
favor of Obama.
Maybe. But mid-October trends can change - as those such as Jimmy Carter
(against Gerald Ford) and Bill Clinton (against George Bush I) have
demonstrated. Obama cannot come clean about his early years, any more than
John Kerry could. Truth would blow their careful cover stories. Fact would
belie the fictions.
So Obama is lying?
Obama is the issue - his associations, his straightforwardness about them,
his judgment in maintaining them over long periods, his character. Sarah
Palin sees Obama as trying "to talk his way into the White House." John
McCain says regarding Obama, "Perhaps never before in history have the
American people been asked to risk so much based on so little" - so little
in tangible legislative accomplishment, so little straight talk about his
dubious associations.
Yet why do those associations really matter?
No one has put it better than Charles Krauthammer: "The window these
associations give on Obama's core beliefs." And: "He doesn't share Rev.
Wright's poisonous views of race nor Ayers' views, past and present, about
the evil that is American society. But Obama clearly did not
consider these views beyond the pale. For many years he swam
easily and without protest in that fetid pond."
Without fuller explanation from Obama himself, it's hardly a stretch -
hardly extreme - to conclude he swims there still.