Campaign Hatchet Jobs

Obama whined about Stanley Kurtz's hatchet job on him and his association with Bill Ayers and wanted to lower the hatchet on Kurtz.

The podcast in question is here. You don't have to support Obama to know Kurtz is totally full of shit.

An earlier screed by Kurtz regarding the Annenberg Challenge is here.

Walter Annenberg, the founder of TV Guide and Seventeen, died in 2002 at the age of 94. He was hardly a radical; in fact, he was a longtime Republican and a close friend of the Reagans.

Why the Obama campaign didn't just send a representative to counter Kurtz is a mystery. It was a big mistake.

Instead they sent an email. That is much less effective than going one-on-one with Kurtz.

I have always thought the Ayers angle was grasping at straws in terms of truth. Yes, Ayers did what he did, and yes, Obama had an association with him, but that doesn't mean Obama endorses what Ayers has stood for regarding his years with the Weather Underground. I don't think the opponents pushing the Ayers line even care about the "judgment" factor; what they want to do is lump Obama in with terrorists and play the 9/11 card.

Because Obama had a relationship with Ayers, it is very hard for him to counter the talking points, to separate his libertarian/right-leaning politics from Ayers' radical left politics. The right-wingers want to tag Obama as a far leftist, but in fact he is not. It's laughable to paint him as a Marxist or a communist. He has more in common with his critics' politics than he does with Ayers. He worked at the University of Chicago, for God's sake, the heart of right-wing ideology in the United States and has advisers who are from the same university and surrounds himself with neocons. THOSE are the associations voters should be worried about, for Obama is not only not a "leftist" or a liberal, he's not even a Democrat. If by a miracle he got in office he would be open to some of the Republicans' more extreme economic policies. But what the GOP and hacks like Kurtz want to do is say because of his association with Ayers, Obama is soft on terrorism.

Whether this is ultimately effective remains to be seen.

In short, so much of Obama's past can so easily be twisted by the GOP and their 527s and mouthpieces like Stanley Kurtz, which is another reason why he should have never been the nominee for president.