Does Ayers Matter Or Not?

Friendly media continue to say yes:

Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters. Yet let the McCain campaign raise the issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association.

But associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque and self-contained as Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late politically to be raising this issue. But that does not make it, as conventional wisdom holds, in any way illegitimate.

Charles Krauthammer is joined in this view by Fox News' John Gibson:

Gibson's closing rhetorical question telegraphs its obvious answer: Barack Hoover Obama lies about his intimate mentorships with Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, William Ayers, and Rashid Khalidi because he obviously considers those alliances to be political liabilities.  It would be no different than if it came out that John McCain got his political career started with critical assistance from the Ku Klux Klan.  D'ya think THAT would be a "past association" that the Enemy Media would be reluctant to publicize, and that McCain wouldn't have wanted anybody to know about.

Yes, yes, I know, he'd never have had a political career to begin with if that had been the case.  American politics are infuriatingly shot through with such partisan one-way streets.  But that just underscores how this one can be a TWO-way street, or could have been if Maverick had had the tough-minded common sense to make it so.

Krauthammer again:

McCain has only himself to blame for the bad timing. He should months ago have begun challenging Obama's associations, before the economic meltdown allowed the Obama campaign (and the mainstream media, which is to say the same thing) to dismiss the charges as an act of desperation by the trailing candidate.

McCain had his chance back in April when the North Carolina Republican Party ran a gubernatorial campaign ad that included the linking of Obama with Jeremiah Wright. The ad was duly denounced by the New York Times and other deep thinkers as racist.

This was patently absurd....Nonetheless, John McCain in his infinite wisdom, and with his overflowing sense of personal rectitude, joined the braying mob in denouncing that perfectly legitimate ad, saying it had no place in any campaign. In doing so, McCain unilaterally disarmed himself, rendering off-limits Obama's associations, an issue that even Hillary Clinton addressed more than once.

Or, as I have oft written, it's the right message, but McCain is an ill-suited messenger.

Nevertheless, Team Sith has another smashup combo ad out that is not quite as meandering as its immediate predecessors:

I'm not sure exactly why Barry's working for and with Ayers was "convenient".  The Weatherman terrorist was more of a mentor to B.O. than he ever was a patron.  It also cuts Obama a pass on his ideological simpatico-ness with the unrepentant, orthodox communist, a factor in their alliance which is at the heart of what makes it such a political liability for The One.  In short, how did latching on to Ayers (and vice versa) specifically boost False Messiah's political career more than any other Marxist alliance would have?  And don't all people assume that pretty much every politician is "ambitious"?

The second half of the spot is much better, successfully encapsulating the Democrat Financial Logic Bomb as Team Sith's braintrust assured us their candidate was incapable of doing.  A quite palatable blue plate special that would have satiated the mental appetite of the electorate if it had been offered a month ago (at least), instead of now when the collective patient has lapsed into a coma from the hunger and the suicide-inducing poison fed into it by the Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Enemy Media axis (known hereafter as the Legion of Doom).  It almost makes me shrug that he is still marking Uncle Jeremiah as being off limits, as if Maverick did bring him up now, he wouldn't be any less timidly "nuanced" and half-assed about it as he has about Ayers.

I guess the ultimate answer to this post's headline is, "Yes, if Sailor had brought it up long before now."  As it is....well, I'm not sure if there was ever a time in American history when politics was an "honorable, civil" undertaking.  If so, John Sith McCain is definitely a man out of time - in more ways than one.