TimesLeader.com

October 11, 2008
Obama: GOP attacks won’t work

McCain questions Obama’s association with a former member of Weather Underground group.

MARGARET TALEV and WILLIAM DOUGLAS McClatchy Newspapers

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Barack Obama on Friday defended his character against mounting attacks from John McCain, daring his Republican opponent to run as negatively as he wants in the final weeks of the race while predicting that, in light of the financial crisis, “it will not work.”

click image to enlarge

Obama

Select images available for purchase in the
Times Leader Photo Store

Both candidates responded to the stock market meltdown with new policy proposals. McCain, in Wisconsin, suggested waiving a tax rule requiring that investors begin selling off their IRAs and 401(k)s when they turn 70 1/2 . Obama, in Ohio, pitched temporarily lifting lending fees and extending fixed-rate loans to small businesses through a Small Business Administration disaster relief fund.

But the dramatic personal nature of the campaign overshadowed those developments.

“We know what’s coming; we know what they’re going to do,” Obama told supporters in Chillicothe and later in Columbus.

McCain’s campaign announced a national TV ad that asserts Obama worked with a “terrorist” when it was politically convenient and then lied about their relationship.

The man, Bill Ayers, is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago who in 1995 hosted a candidate event for Obama and was involved with two mainstream charitable groups in which Obama also had been active. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has praised Ayers as a leading citizen who helped shape the city’s innovative schools’ program.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, when Obama was a child, Ayers belonged to the radical anti-war group Weather Underground, which advocated violence and placed bombs at the Pentagon and the Capitol.

McCain’s accusation is that Obama understated what he knew about Ayers’ past or his beliefs when it suited him. There’s no evidence that the two men are close or that Ayers has any connection to Obama’s presidential campaign.

At a rally Thursday, McCain himself used the word “terrorist” to describe Ayers, and many McCain supporters were whipped into a lather as they voiced fear and indignation at Obama’s ascent. Many participants chanted “liar, liar” when Obama’s name was mentioned.

At a Friday morning rally in La Crosse, Wis., McCain seemed to dial back the tone. He didn’t mention Ayers, and perhaps his most negative words were to paint Obama as “a Chicago politician.”

But McCain’s campaign on Friday also organized for the second time this week a conference call featuring John Murtagh, whose family home was firebombed in 1970 because his father, as a New York Supreme Court justice, had presided over a Black Panthers trial.

Murtagh’s father was also threatened in an open 1970 letter signed by Ayers’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn — also a former radical from the Vietnam War era, now a law professor at Northwestern University. Murtagh said he’s convinced the couple wanted to kill or hurt his family.