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Friday 5 December 2008

Obama & Ayers

John Dickerson offers the most balanced account of the "domestic terrorist" spat that I've seen so far:

Voters are cynical. Obama doesn't want them to be, implores them not to be at almost every campaign stop, yet in this episode he benefits from their cynicism. If [he] weathers the Ayers controversy, it will be in part because voters judge his association with Ayers, and his weak answers about that association, to be nothing more than a politician's garden-variety duplicity...

Obama has not been candid. When asked about Ayers in a debate, he said he was "a guy who lives in my neighborhood." This is true, but misleadingly so and has a whiff of the big weasel. The two men served together on the board of an anti-poverty group, and Ayers contributed $200 to Obama's re-election campaign for the Illinois state senate in 2001. So Obama was dissembling. But for this to be politically damaging it has to be a whopper of a fib—and it just isn't. 

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