Inform Your Consent

Get ready for four straight weeks of the grimiest trench warfare you’ve yet to see in this campaign.  The numbers don’t look good for McCain-Palin, and word is, the gloves are coming off.  

“We’re going to get a little tougher,” a senior Republican operative said, indicating that a fresh batch of television ads is coming. “We’ve got to question this guy’s associations. Very soon. There’s no question that we have to change the subject here,” said the operative, who was not authorized to discuss strategy and spoke on the condition of anonymity . . . 

McCain’s only positive commercial, called “Original Mavericks,” has largely been taken off the air, according to Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political ads . . .

McCain hinted Thursday that a change is imminent, perhaps as soon as next week’s debate. Asked at a Colorado town hall, “When are you going to take the gloves off?” the candidate grinned and replied, “How about Tuesday night?”

If  you hadn’t already read up on a Chicago professor named Bill Ayers, you might want to start this week.  Ayers, now a professor in Chicago, was once a member of the radical anti-Vietnam war group “Weather Underground.”  Here’s some background:

In an article that by chance was published on Sept. 11, 2001, The New York Times wrote about Mr. Ayers and his just-published memoir, “Fugitive Days,” opening with a quotation from the author: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Three days after the Qaeda attacks, Mr. Ayers wrote a reply posted on his Web site to clarify his quoted remarks, saying the meaning had been distorted.

“My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy,” he wrote. But he added that the Weathermen had “showed remarkable restraint” given the nature of the American bombing campaign in Vietnam that they were trying to stop.

Most of the bombs the Weathermen were blamed for had been placed to do only property damage, a fact Mr. Ayers emphasizes in his memoir. But a 1970 pipe bomb in San Francisco attributed to the group killed one police officer and severely hurt another. An accidental 1970 explosion in a Greenwich Village town house basement killed three radicals; survivors later said they had been making nail bombs to detonate at a military dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. And in 1981, in an armed robbery of a Brinks armored truck in Nanuet, N.Y., that involved Weather Underground members including Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, two police officers and a Brinks guard were killed.

So, where does Barack Obama come into this story?  A quarter of a century later, according to a front page New York Times story published Saturday.  Barack Obama first met Bill Ayers, by then a professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, in 1995.  Starting in 1995, they served together on a board in charge of the Chicago Annenberg Project, which oversaw a citywide school reform project funded by philanthropist Walter Annenberg.  According to the report, they each attended six board meetings until Obama left the board in 2001.

While the New York Times report concludes that Ayers and Obama have not been close friends, nor does Ayers advise Obama in any way, it found that the Obama campaign has sought to downplay their contacts.  The most damaging of their contacts was the year they first met, and when Obama first made a run for the Illinois state senate.

It was later in 1995 that Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn hosted the gathering, in their town house three blocks from Mr. Obama’s home, at which State Senator Alice J. Palmer, who planned to run for Congress, introduced Mr. Obama to a few Democratic friends as her chosen successor. That was one of several such neighborhood events as Mr. Obama prepared to run, said A. J. Wolf, the 84-year-old emeritus rabbi of KAM Isaiah Israel Synagogue, across the street from Mr. Obama’s current house.

In 1997, the Chicago Tribune asked Obama, then a freshman state senator, what books he was reading.  He cited one by Mr. Ayers, “A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court,” which Obama called “a searing and timely account of the juvenile court system.”  

Sarah Palin, who proudly read her copy of New York Times on Saturday, is now hitting Obama for “palling around with terrorists.”  McCain won’t be far behind her; it’s only a question of whether he wants to gamble on such a low blow in Tuesday’s townhall debate format.  

Guilt by professional association with Ayers is a tactic the Obama campaign should not be too complacent to tear down.  This is the Obama campaign’s swift boat moment.  It may not be enough to simply stay above the fray.