[Vision2020] If a Republican candidate had launched his political career at the home of an abortion-clinic bomber

[No Weatherman]

Obama & Friends: Judge Not?
By Charles Krauthammer

Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the
race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any
presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with
three more execrable characters. Yet let the McCain campaign raise the
issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty
campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association.

But associations are important. They provide a significant insight
into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a
potential president as new, unknown, opaque and self-contained as
Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late
politically to be raising this issue. But that does not make it, as
conventional wisdom holds, in any way illegitimate.

McCain has only himself to blame for the bad timing. He should months
ago have begun challenging Obama's associations, before the economic
meltdown allowed the Obama campaign (and the mainstream media, which
is to say the same thing) to dismiss the charges as an act of
desperation by the trailing candidate.

McCain had his chance back in April when the North Carolina Republican
Party ran a gubernatorial campaign ad that included the linking of
Obama with Jeremiah Wright. The ad was duly denounced by the New York
Times and other deep thinkers as racist.

This was patently absurd. Racism is treating people differently and
invidiously on the basis of race. Had any white presidential candidate
had a close 20-year association with a white preacher overtly
spreading race hatred from the pulpit, that candidate would have been
not just universally denounced and deemed unfit for office but written
out of polite society entirely.

Nonetheless, John McCain in his infinite wisdom, and with his
overflowing sense of personal rectitude, joined the braying mob in
denouncing that perfectly legitimate ad, saying it had no place in any
campaign. In doing so, McCain unilaterally disarmed himself, rendering
off-limits Obama's associations, an issue that even Hillary Clinton
addressed more than once.

Obama's political career was launched with Ayers giving him a
fundraiser in his living room. If a Republican candidate had launched
his political career at the home of an abortion-clinic bomber — even a
repentant one — he would not have been able to run for dogcatcher in
Podunk. And Ayers shows no remorse. His only regret is that he "didn't
do enough."

Why are these associations important? Do I think Obama is as corrupt
as Rezko? Or shares Wright's angry racism or Ayers's unreconstructed
1960s radicalism?

No. But that does not make these associations irrelevant. They tell us
two important things about Obama.

First, his cynicism and ruthlessness. He found these men useful, and
use them he did. Would you attend a church whose pastor was spreading
racial animosity from the pulpit? Would you even shake hands with —
let alone serve on two boards with — an unrepentant terrorist, whether
he bombed U.S. military installations or abortion clinics?

Most Americans would not, on the grounds of sheer indecency. Yet Obama
did, if not out of conviction then out of expediency. He was a young
man on the make, an unknown outsider working his way into Chicago
politics. He played the game with everyone, without qualms and with
obvious success.

Obama is not the first politician to rise through a corrupt political
machine. But he is one of the rare few to then have the audacity to
present himself as a transcendent healer, hovering above and bringing
redemption to the "old politics" — of the kind he had enthusiastically
embraced in Chicago in the service of his own ambition.

Second, and even more disturbing than the cynicism, is the window
these associations give on Obama's core beliefs. He doesn't share the
Rev. Wright's poisonous views of race nor Ayers's views, past and
present, about the evil that is American society. But Obama clearly
did not consider these views beyond the pale. For many years he swam
easily and without protest in that fetid pond.

Until now. Today, on the threshold of the presidency, Obama concedes
the odiousness of these associations, which is why he has severed
them. But for the years in which he sat in Wright's pews and shared
common purpose on boards with Ayers, Obama considered them a
legitimate, indeed unremarkable, part of social discourse.

Do you? Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class
temperament. But his character remains highly suspect. There is a
difference between temperament and character. Equanimity is a virtue.
Tolerance of the obscene is not.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/09/AR2008100902328.html?hpid=opinionsbox1