Anyone who has watched this campaign has known this was coming. And despite reports over the weekend that Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain is going to “reboot” his campaign and decrease inflammatory rhetoric, these comments by a Virginia GOP chief comparing Democratic Sen. Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden and the McCain campaign’s use of the controversy to raise the Ayers issue suggest that the fundamentals of McCain’s campaign have not changed:
The chairman of the Virginia Republican Party has compared Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden because of the Illinois senator’s past association with Bill Ayers, who has confessed to domestic bombings as a member of the Vietnam War-era Weather Underground.
Virginia Democrats, and some Republicans, are outraged, saying these are the latest in a series of inflammatory statements that the GOP has made against Obama in Virginia, a state that has emerged as a crucial battleground in the election.
Note that some Republicans are outraged as well. If this kind of rhetoric is allowed to continue it’s not much of a stretch to imagine some deranged person out there feeling they need to save the Republic. What could be worse than associating Obama with bin Laden? Note the McCain campaign’s denunciation of the comments which are undercut by a comment suggesting that Obama is an enabler and/or fellow traveler of terrorists:
According to a report in this week’s Time magazine, the Virginia party chairman, Del. Jeffrey M. Frederick (R-Prince William), told Virginia volunteers working for GOP nominee John McCain that Obama and bin Laden “both have friends that bombed the Pentagon.”
“That is scary,” Frederick said while providing talking points to GOP volunteers in western Prince William County as they prepared for a door-to-door canvass.
Several McCain surrogates have blasted Obama for his association with Ayers, but few, if any, have invoked bin Laden.
Yesterday, Frederick said he stood by the comparison, even though bin Laden planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the Pentagon that killed 184 people and Obama was a child and hadn’t met Ayers when the Weather Underground planted a bomb at the Pentagon in 1972. No one was hurt in that blast, in which a bomb exploded in a restroom and caused flooding and damage to computer tapes containing classified information. Ayers did not participate in the bombing at the Pentagon but admitted to involvement in other blasts…
….Gail Gitcho, a McCain spokeswoman, also denounced Frederick’s remarks, calling them “not appropriate.”“While Barack Obama is associated with domestic terrorist William Ayers, the McCain campaign disagrees with the comparison that Jeff Frederick made,” Gitcho said.
The McCain campaign is still doing the image link: Obama-terrorist-associated-with. They don’t mention bin Laden but, if people draw their own inferences…
McCain will reportedly present a new economic plan today and news reports will likely use the narrative that he’s returning to issues on the stump and at the debate. But while Obama is still being portrayed as being the best bud of terrorists, the McCain campaign will essentially remain a practitioner of a modern form of McCarthyism. And what does that portend for the style of a McCain White House in an era when Americans need to be brought together?
UPDATE: An opposing view: Mark Levin argues that Obama’s associations do matter.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.