You don’t need a weatherman to known which way wind blows

Published 7:43 pm Monday, October 13, 2008

By Staff
Time magazine wants me to believe the economy trumps race, with worried white voters turning toward Barack Obama, whose "foreignness" became the new race card.
I'd like to think that's true, but then I read my e-mail and see all the fairly unbalanced TV talking heads going on and on about people like Bill Ayers and I start to wonder, even knowing that's their point.
I know most residents are not going to be curling up with Rolling Stone's scathing 14-page indictment of John McCain's record, "Make-Believe Maverick."
The Republican nominee himself spent Oct. 10 not promoting a vision for America, but trotting out Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt to expose Obama's "direct ties" to ACORN.
Our financial system isn't out of the woods despite a $700 billion bailout and all the pork larded on top of that in unnecessary earmarks that in any other context would be considered outright bribery.
Unemployment is rising, the economy is slowing and the question isn't if we're in for another recession, but how deep and long it will last.
Our troops are fighting wars on two fronts, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The terrorists I'm worried about who struck us on 9/11 have been allowed to regroup on the frontier of nuclear-armed Pakistan, where they are presumably plotting fresh attacks.
It's hard to imagine larger or more urgent issues in a presidential campaign.
Emboldened AIG executives, meanwhile, wasted no time, just money, by blowing $442,000 at an exclusive California resort to celebrate the insurance giant's $85 billion federal bailout.
The Federal Reserve on Oct. 8 agreed to loan the American Insurance Group Inc. $37.8 billion more.
McCain and Sarah Palin are determined that we talk about no issues but Obama's acquaintances, since more Americans see Obama offering solutions than the Arizona senator, although he promised out of the blue Oct. 8 to somehow balance the budget by the end of his first term.
The media can't help itself with McCain's devotion to distraction from the economy and McCain's 90-percent support of eight years of wrong-headed Bush administration policies to character – Obama's specifically.
Look how far back they have to exhume guilt-by association charges that were already pretty thoroughly covered in the primaries, as was McCain's role in the Keating Five.
These fresh attacks, clear and simple, are what you resort to when you're out of everything else except to Swift-boat your opponent.
The press instinctively cover what candidates say, even knowing it's not in the public interest to waste a pivotal point in American history where the conversation should be about the war on terror, the economy, health care and any number of things that will define the next White House.
Even presenting bogus allegations in skeptical tones means giving them the credence of a wider audience, like Oct. 4 in Carson, Calif., when Palin casually claimed Obama is "palling around with terrorists."
The media couch such reporting to convey that such remarks are pure mudslinging and cyncial tactics, but some of it sticks as doubt, which is why campaigns carry on such conduct even when polls show smears are not what concern voters.
Take Ayers, for example.
He's a University of Illinois at Chicago professor who co-founded the militant group The Weathermen in 1969.
When Obama was 8.
They took their name from the Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and were a radical offshoot of the 1960s activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
Their first offensive, a series of "Days of Rage" riots in Chicago in 1969, drew a few hundred militants; several were shot and 287 arrested.
Subsequent attacks on government offices, banks and police departments led the FBI to declare the Weathermen a domestic terrorist group.
Three members died when a bomb they were building exploded in the basement of a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970.
The group renamed itself the Weather Underground and went into hiding before disbanding in 1976.
Charges against Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, were dropped in 1974, when I was in high school.
Ayers and Obama served on a Chicago charity board in the 1990s.
Ayers hosted a campaign event for Obama during his 1995 state Senate bid and contributed $200 to his 2001 re-election campaign.
Like many radicals from those days, Ayers apparently rechanneled his rage to become what he is today, a public school reformer.
A bomb at San Francisco police headquarters that killed an officer Feb. 16, 1970, was never officially linked to the Weathermen.
On June 9, 1970, New York Police Department headquarters were bombed to protest the invasion of Cambodia and the fatal shooting of Black Panther Fred Hampton.
On March 1, 1971, the U.S. Capitol was bombed to protest the invasion of Laos.
On May 19, 1972, Weathermen attacked the Pentagon to protest the U.S. bombing of Hanoi.
I'm not defending them, but I don't see any relevance to the 2008 presidential campaign, except to sow mistrust of the Democratic nominee.
The federal budget deficit just set a new record, $438 billion , up from $162 billion last year and exceeding the 2004 mark, $413 billion.
Who would want to talk about a record like that?