The Party That Can't Win

Somehow, this doesn't seem like enough anymore.

Stepping up the Republican ticket’s attacks on Senator Barack Obama, Gov. Sarah Palin on Saturday seized on a report about Mr. Obama’s relationship with a former 1960s radical to accuse him of “palling around with terrorists.”

The dire economic stories of the past three weeks have shifted the tenor of the race from "change" to "blind change." Voters will not be concerned with who they're voting for, only who they're voting against.

“This is not a man who sees America as you see it, and how I see America,” Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, said in Colorado, according to a pool report. “We see America as the greatest force for good in this world. If we can be that beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy and can live in a country that would allow intolerance in the equal rights that again our military men and women fight for and die for all of us.

Dick Morris cleverly observed a few months ago that this is a race between an unelectable candidate and the party that can't win. While I still believe that Obama is unelectable, that comes with the caveat that voters have to know that his short political career was made possible by partnerships with America hating radicals. That point must be driven home by a powerful third party campaign like the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry four years ago, and for some reason, conservative powerbrokers are uninterested in investing in such an effort. Lacking a truth squad on the Obamafia, it appears increasingly likely that the GOP as the party that can't win will be the story of this election.

“Our opponent though, is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

It's ironic that the effort to tag Barack now with responsibility for his relationship with 60's bomber Bill Ayers is justified by a New York Times story that was designed to inoculate Barack - to offer him protection from this sort of attack - from responsibility for his close alliance with the Ayers family.

The article to which she referred, in The New York Times on Saturday, traced Mr. Obama’s sporadic interactions with Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weathermen who later became an education professor in Chicago and worked on education projects there with Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee for president.

The fact of the matter is that Barack was made the head of the Ayers controlled Chicago Annenberg Challenge when he had no background in education or any other reasonable qualification for the job. That credential was his only argument - except for his important work as a community organizer - for a state senate seat the following year.

The article said: “A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers.”

That one phrase, indicating that Barack "played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers," is as deep as the Times got in its search for the evidence as to why Barack felt compelled to deceive voters about his relationship with Ayers.