Sarah Palin, unable to make the case for her own fitness to hold high office, has kicked off the widely expected, 11th-hour smear campaign against Obama as a friend of terrorists, namely ex-Weather Underground leader William Ayers. On the trail Palin mentioned this NY Times piece by Scott Shane, ignoring of course Shane’s main conclusion: that the Obama-Ayers connection is tenuous and there is no evidence — none — that Obama has ever shared the Weather Underground’s worldview. Quite the contrary.
(Palin’s remarks included this ready-for-SNL gem: “If we can be that beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy and can live in a country that would allow intolerance in the equal rights that again our military men and women fight for and die for for all of us.”)
Let’s be clear. Violence-addled romantics like Bill Ayers did more to undermine the prospects of the American left in the ’60s and ’70s than the FBI ever could have. It is truly saddening to ponder the decline from the superbly democratic language and analysis of the Port Huron Statement in 1962 to the Marxist-Leninist thuggery of the Weather Underground and its allies. Today, however, Ayers is a milquetoast educational theorist and author; that Obama crossed paths with him during his days as a Chicago community activist is unremarkable. The fact is that Obama has called Ayers’s former activities “detestable,” and correctly so. On the stump and in his books, Obama has made his own democratic commitments, and abhorrence of violence, abundantly clear.
Palin’s remarks are simply the latest attempt to “otherize” Obama, as Nicholas Kristof has put it. But even Charles Krauthammer, in a column full of backhanded compliments, has announced that Obama has “a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament.” Americans in huge numbers have come to understand this. The lies of the McCain-Palin camp can’t reverse it.
“I’ve always felt a curious relationship to the sixties,” Obama writes on page 31 of The Audacity of Hope. In the passages that follow, he discusses how the polarization of the ’60s era in many ways continues to define our own. This is the context behind the Ayers smear, and Obama is anything but blindsided by it. Looking back at his own days of rebellion, Obama writes:
Eventually, my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I’d begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into cant: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized.
Pundits continue to tell us that Americans “don’t know who Barack Obama is,” but to me, it’s entirely clear in passages like these. We’ve also heard that Obama is a kind of Rorschach, a slate onto which people project their own wishful images. That’s true to a point: think of how many people can directly relate to the passage above, identifying similar points in their own political journey. I certainly can.
“This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America,” says Sarah Palin, ungrammatically. Fuck you, governor. Obama sees America exactly as I and millions of others do. And we’re going to make him president.
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