Sunday, October 05, 2008

don't pull your punches

  Comments by call Paul Begala  showed the danger of the McCain campaign’s attack on the “ guilt by association,” front.  They got argues that McCain was also associated with some strange people in 1981, through serving on the same board as some of them.

That is precisely why McCain and Palin have to be much more specific about the nature of the association between William Ayers and Obama. It is not that they were merely on the same board, but the air is gave Obama the job as head, chairman of the Annenberg challenge grant.   This was Obama’s only real executive experience, and it was a failure.  By its own estimate, the organization accomplished little with over $100 million. And he didn’t just show up together in meetings. Obama approved billions of dollars going through  Ayers’ organization. This organization at a radical, anti-American agenda, that talk to school children in public schools. Some of the board members thought that this arrangement represent a conflict of interest. Obama dismissed it, voting with those who allowed Ayers to both sit on the board distributing the grant that he’d written and receiving money from that grant.

 Fortunately for Obama he wasn’t the mayor of a small town, where blowing $100 million on radicals indoctrinating children in public schools and showing no results for it, might be considered something of a problem.

The McCain campaign continues to pull its punches. They merely raise an eyebrow. They use the word “associates,” which invites the kind of counter argument that Begala outlines. Obama is an unknown quantity. He has a thin legislative record and a voting record that in spite of  unusually sparse attendance  and an unusually high number of “presents” still puts him at the extreme left of the Senate.  If, as is expected, the Democrats have a  filibuster proof majority in the Senate and control of the House, we will see a specter not seen in decades: complete control of the  elected branches of government by one party. Therefore it is extremely important to examine what he has done in his life to predict how he will use the enormous power of the presidency. On the evidence of his time at the Chicago challenge grant, we are in for some unpleasant surprises. The McCain camp is not only within its rights to bring up these issues, it is its duty.



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