Evidently, the McCain-Palin campaign didn’t cancel its subscription to The New York Times despite its accusation last month that the newspaper was “150 percent in the tank” for Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Sen. John McCain’s vice-presidential running mate, is citing the paper again and again in her increasingly heated attacks on Obama.
In particular, she refers to a story in the Times Saturday that looked at the connections between Obama and William C. Ayers, the former member of the Weather Underground, an anti-war group that carried out several bombing in the 1960s and 1970s.
“I was reading … a copy of The New York Times,” Palin usually begins as she speaks to friendly crowds, mere mentioning of the newspaper’s name eliciting boos from her listeners. She goes on to give a somewhat selective account of a story by Scott Shane.
Palin points to the story as proof that Obama pals around with terrorists, and she suggests that Ayers played a significant part in launching Obama’s political career.
She does not mention the story’s point that in Chicago “Ayers has largely been rehabilitated.” He is seen there as an educator and a writer on education, a leader of school reform efforts.
Nor does Palin make reference to the story’s overall conclusions.
While asserting that Obama has “played down” his connections to Ayers, the story states that the two men “do not appear to have been close.”
And it reports that Obama has never expressed sympathy for anything that Ayers may have believed or done while he was with the Weather Underground. To the contrary, Obama has called Ayers’ actions then “despicable.”
Obama and Ayers came together when Obama became chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge in 1995. Ayers was on the board.
From 1995 to 2000, the group distributed to public schools nearly $50 million in funding from the Annenberg Foundation, a charitable venture begun by billionaire Walter H. Annenberg.
In 1995, Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, a former member of the Weather Underground who is now a lawyer and a law professor, also held a fund-raiser at their home for Obama, who was seeking a seat in the Illinois State Senate.
Referring to that event, Palin calls Ayers one of Obama’s “earliest supporters” and says that Obama “held one of the first meetings of his political career in Bill Ayers’ living room.”
The Times notes that there were “several such neighborhood events” and that the Ayers gathering may not have been the first.
Obama also served for a time with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a foundation that makes grants to fight poverty.
However, the story reports there seems to have been little contact between the two men since 2002.
Palin has continued to allude to the Obama and Ayers connections, even though she has been criticized for stretching the truth.
“It’s important for Americans to know,” Palin said Sunday. “It’s really important for Americans to start knowing who the real Barack Obama is.”
Conservative groups not officially connected to the McCain-Palin campaign have also pointed to Obama’s association with Ayers.
One video produced by the American Issues Project states that Obama’s political career “was launched in Ayers’ home.” And it says that two served together on a “left wing board.”
The group is headed by Ed Failor Jr. He worked on the McCain campaign before leaving last year during a funding crisis.
Click here to sign up for the Muckety Newsletter
0 Comments
There are no comments yet, be the first by filling in the form below.
Leave a Comment