American Issues Project

The legendary Spanish poet and author Miguel de Cervantes said, ”Tell me what company you keep and I’ll tell you what you are.”  Well, the company Sen. Obama keeps is downright troubling.  Of course, the mainstream media has neglected to cover Sen. Obama’s lesser points and so the stories of his associations with anti-American terrorists like William Ayers have gone largely untold.  But the American Issues Project launched a new ad examining the relationship between Sen. Obama and unrepentant terrorist William Ayers. 

Hope is Not A Foreign Policy 

The new ad coming out today about the Obama-Ayers connection got me wondering about who the sponsoring group is, and about what it was Obama had originally said. So, I did some poking around and this is what I found:

The ad is not produced by the McCain campaign. It was funded by the "American Issues Project" The AIP is an independent group, co-chaired by Ed Falior, former senior advisor to McCain. It's a brand new 501(c)4, a non-profit not required to disclose its donors. The group spent $3 million on the ad.

It took some determination, but I found the full quote from which two words were used in the ad. The quote is not originally from Obama; Obama was quoting journalist Alexander Cockburn. The original quote reads as follows:

“Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn became respectable fixtures in mainstream liberal Chicago years ago.”

~ Alex Cockburn, 3/2/2008, quote used on Obama's website as of 6/10/2008, since removed.

Obama's team, responding to the ad, tried to implicitly change the subject back to McCain and his houses:

"The fact that John McCain dispatched his paid consultant to launch this despicable ad from a so-called independent committee shows how desperate he is to change the subject from his shocking disconnect with the economic struggles of the American people."