Just (Another) Misjudgment

Carol Platt Liebau | October 10, 2008 10:19 PM

The Obama campaign says it was just a misjudgment for its Muslim outreach coordinator to meet with Hezbollah and Hamas supporters. If she had known these people would be at the meeting, we're told, she would never have been there.

This strikes me as a continuing theme of the Obama campaign: Cozy up to someone unsavory (but seemingly advantageous at the time), then proclaim ignorance about the details of the person's history, and distance oneself as needed. Then hope that friends in the press will under-cover it.

It's the same pattern we've seen with Bill Ayres, Rashid Khalidi, Jeremiah Wright, Father Pfleger, Tony Rezko -- and now Mahdi Bray of the Muslim American Society (who was seen pumping his fist in support of Hezbollah and Hamas at a rally) and Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (a group named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case).

Obviously, there's nothing illegitimate about soliciting the views of solid, pro- American citizens who happen to be Muslim. But like others in Obama's past, Bray and Awad don't seem to fit into that category.