Lynn Sweet is misleading about the Obama-Ayers link (after McCain campaign made mistakes)

Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times offers "McCain misleading public in role Ayers played in Obama political career". It helps illustrate a problem the McCain campaign has had that the Obama-supporting MSM has tried to drive a truck through. Namely, when speaking about the Bill Ayers-Barack Obama connection they haven't presented the matter in ultra-precise, lawyerly terms.

First, Sarah Palin said that Obama was "palling around with terrorists". The media played dumb, calling her on the plural, when that plural was apparently a reference to Ayer's wife Bernardine Dohrn. The MSM also pointed out that "palling" implied frienship and rushed to pretend that Obama and Ayers weren't close. They also pointed out that Obama threw Ayers under the bus, which might indeed have happened two or three years ago.

In other words, the media applied a Clinton-level parsing to her comments rather than dealing with the gist of those comments. If she'd said that Obama had previously had a long collaboration with an unrepentant terrorist the media would still have found something to object to, but at least the McCain campaign wouldn't be leaving themselves open to the media's attempts to mislead.

Another mistake the McCain campaign has made is the one Sweet discusses. McCain said that Obama launched his political career chez Ayers, or words to that effect. If you take a look at the Sweet article you'll see that she's gone through that claim with a fine toothed comb, desperately concentrating on the trees of the other meetings Obama held in Hyde Park to avoid looking at the forest of Obama's long collaboration with an unrepentant terrorist.

Politics · Wed, 10/15/2008 - 21:35 · · Importance: 1