These last days before the election are crucial. This is only the beginning of this Ayers thing - they'll hammer this until the end. Hannity's been spewing this shit for a long time, waiting for GOP/McCain to jump on it - blaming M$M for not asking about it --- and there's a reason they're playing it now. Whether they planned all along to do this, or whether they are just that desperate now matters not. What does matter is the focus and whirlwind that could result from this, especially as more McCain/Palin rallies whip their supporters into a frenzy and draw even more M$M news coverage to it all, will distract from Obama's message concerning the important issues (economy). As one of the links below points out, McCain/Palin's "incendiary charge draws media and voter attention away from the worsening economy."
Obama can't be derailed now, and we can help keep him on message by refuting these claims with clear and concise talking points and staying on message ourselves.
Now more than ever, Obama needs volunteers who are willing to phone bank, talk to voters door to door and write letters to their local newspapers. Get your talking points in order, as I suspect after this week, we will be encountering a lot of folks with questions about Ayers.
From Obama's "Fight the Smears" website:
The Truth about Barack Obama and William Ayers
Smear groups and now a desperate McCain campaign are trying to connect Barack to William Ayers using age-old guilt by association techniques. Here’s the truth: the smear associating Barack to Ayers is
“phony,” “tenuous,” – even
“exaggerated at best if not outright false.” William Ayers is a
professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with whom Barack served on the board of an education-reform organization in the mid-1990’s. According to the
Associated Press, they are not close: “No evidence shows they were “pals” or even close when they worked on community boards years ago …”
Smear groups and the McCain campaign are trying to connect Obama to acts Ayers committed 40 years ago – when Barack was just eight years old. Here’s what the
New York Times reported on the connection:
But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”
Barack has
publicly denounced Ayers’ radical actions from the 1960’s:
Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost forty years ago is ridiculous.
Fight back with the truth: make sure anyone who has seen this smear also sees this page.
And some more important points from Kos via TPM (posted here at DU yesterday, too):
Another Republican Clears Obama on the Ayers Nonsense
By astral66 - October 7, 2008, 2:40PM
From a wonderful diary up on Daily Kos:
This NPR piece speaks to the Republican funded cause that Obama and Ayers worked on together. And that:
"It was never a concern by any of us in the Chicago school reform movement that he had led a fugitive life years earlier," said former Illinois state Republican Rep. Diana Nelson, who worked with both Obama and Ayers over the years. "It's ridiculous. There is no reason at all to smear Barack Obama with this association. It's nonsensical, and it just makes me crazy. It's so silly."
First, Obama began working with Ayers and others (Republicans, Independents, and Democrats) at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Well, what is the Anneberg Challenge? Who is Annenberg? Well according to NPR,
The Obama campaign says he first met Ayers in 1995, when Obama became chair of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a $50 million fund that awarded grants to groups trying to implement new programs to improve inner city education in Chicago.
Walter Annenberg, a lifelong Republican and former ambassador who was appointed by Presidents Nixon and Reagan, funded an ambitious program to reform urban education in many cities in the mid 1990s. Ayers was an important member of the group that developed and wrote the grant proposal to the Annenberg Foundation.
Second, there were people of all political persuasions working on this effort with this "terrorist" Ayers and who saw him as acceptable and Obama was no closer than any of the others.
...no one on the board or on the Annenberg Challenge staff remembers Obama being any closer to Ayers than to any other member of the board. The Annenberg board also included several civic, business and education leaders, many of them Republicans...
Cont'd at:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/10/another-republican-clears-obam.php
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