Bill Ayers

I don't get it. Some outside group runs a weird, false ad linking Barack Obama to Bill Ayers. And Obama responds. But maybe they are so afraid of becoming John Kerry that they overdid it. And not just a little.

First, the substance of the ad is a problem. It attacks John McCain, seemingly in response to the original ad. But John McCain didn't run the original ad. These guys are rebutting some clown and linking the clown to McCain.

Second, the fact that Obama is running a false attack ad requires McCain to respond. And the central points of that ad will be about that falsehood.

Third, in all likelihood, the buy that Obama is responding to is small. So Obama's ad ends up elevating Ayers as an issue.

Fourth, they are doing this in Virginia. So in the media market of the Pentagon and the Captiol, the Obama campaign is, in essence, running a false attack ad against McCain about someone attacking buildings that nearly everyone knows someone who works in.

Are you kidding me? The Obama campaign is lying about a situation involving bombing landmarks in people's lives?

This is just inexplicable. They are jumping at shadows. That doesn't make smart politics.

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."