Even the National Review, the most conservative journal of all, thinks the Ayers pitch is foolish..
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The Chicago Way"
My pals over at the Corner are very excited by the last-minute attempt to transform Bill Ayers into the Willie Horton of 2008. Well, good luck
In 1988, crime was a huge and rising problem - and Democrats still by and large resisted the effective crime control policies being developed at places like the Manhattan Institute and that would achieve such great results in the 1990s. So Willie Horton, the furloughed rapist and murderer, symbolized in very graphic terms something important and significant about Michael Dukakis the candidate.
But Bill Ayers? Does anybody really seriously believe that Barack Obama is a secret left-wing radical? And if not, then what is this fuss and fury supposed to show? It's like Ronald Reagan's opponents trying to beat him by pointing out that Birchers once supported him.
Negative campaigning only works when it offers a new data point to support a convincingly drawn hostile image.
So try this instead: The real problem with Barack Obama is not that he's a bomb-thrower, but that he's a product of the "Chicago way."
[T]he Chicago Way leads through the most politically corrupt city in America, in a politically corrupt state, where muscle trumps reason, where Democratic warlords brazenly promote their offspring into public office, where even souls are offered up for sale. ...
How, for example, could change agent Obama endorse the boss of the Chicago machine, Mayor Richard Daley, after Daley's friends and drinking buddies, white guys with mob connections, received $100 million in city affirmative action contracts, a crime that sent one of them to federal prison?
The mayor said there is no such thing as a machine. Does Obama truly believe there is no machine that runs Chicago and Cook County? Then he should declare it. And, if so, then how does he explain the Daley hacks sitting in federal prison for rigging thousands of city jobs?
McCain could ask about the machine trolls Obama endorsed per Daley's direction. And what of Obama's own political mentor, the legendary city sewer inspector/Illinois Senate President Emil Jones (D-ComEd), who upon retirement will convert almost $600,000 in campaign cash and stuff it into his pockets, and begin cashing a fat public pension, as his son, Emil III, takes Daddy's place in the legislature, courtesy of the Democratic bosses.
Is this the change we've been waiting for?
McCain could ask about Obama's real estate fairy, the convicted influence peddler Tony Rezko, who is now apparently cooperating with federal investigators probing the dealings of Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who also campaigned as a reformer. Rezko is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 28. How was the Rezko-Obama real estate deal, the one that Obama himself described as "boneheaded," never made a subject of a Senate Ethics Committee investigation?
Obama is not some wild-eyed radical. He's a normal Chicago politician. That's the problem.
Unfortunately for our team, it's probably not a big enough problem ....
frum.nationalreview.com |
