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That’s Not Change, That’s More Of The Same

Even though all of this will amount to little more than a sideshow, the return of Ayers as the center of a minor campaign controversy baffles me for some of the same reasons why the Wright controversy early in the year baffled me.  None of this stuff was a secret, and anyone paying the slightest attention […]

Even though all of this will amount to little more than a sideshow, the return of Ayers as the center of a minor campaign controversy baffles me for some of the same reasons why the Wright controversy early in the year baffled me.  None of this stuff was a secret, and anyone paying the slightest attention would have already encountered the whole story.  If you think membership on the same board constitutes some close working relationship between the two, you have already been scandalized; if you think it is a pretty minor connection, you just find rehashing it one more time to be a waste of time. 

What few people seem to take away from the limited Obama-Ayers connection is that, just as he did with Wright and Trinity United and just as he has done with everyone who has become an embarrassment to him, he dropped Ayers like a hot rock the minute it became necessary.  The liability of having dealings with Ayers in practical terms exists only if voters believe that Obama somehow shares Ayers’ radical politics, just as the real liability of the Wright connection existed only if people came to believe that he actually shared Wright’s most incendiary views.  Few people seriously claim that, Obama explicitly denies it, and I’m not sure that the people who claim it really believe it.  This is why I don’t understand the Obama campaign’s concerted effort to pretend that Obama and Ayers didn’t know each other or that Obama knew nothing of Ayers’ past crimes–this is like saying, “I knew nothing about this irrelevant information.”  If it’s irrelevant, which it basically is, why act as if it matters whether he knew about it or not?  The reality that Obama abandoned many of these associates and allies directly contadicts the fear that Obama is somehow still in league or sympathetic with them.   

John Kass is probably one of the only people to understand how Obama operates; one of the others has been Ryan Lizza.  I’d like to think that I have also more or less recognized the same thing that David Sirota saw in Obama months and months ago, which is his avoidance of confronting power and his aversion to risk.  His preference for consensus-building and his habit of using conciliatory language, which annoyed so many progressives early on, show him to be the opposite of a radical; he has no interest in getting at the root of our current problems, but generally wants cosmetic changes and wants to tweak how things are managed.  Flipping on the FISA legislation and signing off on the bailout are just two prominent examples from this year of how he yields to establishment consensus; his less-than-outspoken opposition to the war inside the Senate, his half-a-loaf withdrawal plan and his endorsement of the Iraq Study Group proposals are more examples of his desire, as Kass says, to go along and get along.     

Kass has made it clear all campaign long that Obama is neither radical nor corrupt himself, but he simply looks the other way when surrounded by those who are.  That may not be very inspiring, but it isn’t the sort of complicity that McCain wants it to be.  Of course, as we are being reminded this week in the Best of S&L, McCain has sometimes done more than just look the other way when surrounded by corrupt associates.  Lizza reminds us that Obama is an aspiring member of the establishment, and Lizza’s story is filled with the accounts of the once-upon-a-time patrons and backers of Obama whom he left behind (at least as they see it) as he ascended ever higher.  The dissatisfied former patrons and allies Obama has left in his wake bear a striking resemblance to the small army of enemies Palin made as she rose up in Alaska politics.  Obama has no compunctions about cutting off old allies when they begin to threaten his future–nothing terribly unusual about that, but Obama adds his own flair when he declares that Jim Johnson never worked for him or Wright isn’t the person he knew.  Sirota has argued persuasively that Obama yields to powerful interests, which bothered him particularly in connection with Obama’s trade and economic policies, but whatever area of policy you’re in you can come away with the consolation or disappointment that Obama will accommodate himself to the status quo.  This is the real reason why trying to portray him as the terrorist’s pal or as a raging anti-American black nationalist (and, again, I have to stress that it is the anti-Americanism of Ayers and Wright that agitates the people who obsess about them) is so profoundly stupid.  To say, as Robert Samuelson once said of Obama, that he represents the sanctification of the status quo is to expose the main theme of Obama’s campaign as empty and meaningless.  That the people running the McCain campaign cannot understand this basic truth is perhaps an even more damning indictment than all of the charges of dishonesty and dishonor that are now properly being hurled at them.

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