Palin told a group of donors at a private airport, “Our opponent … is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” She also said, “This is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America.” Palin, Alaska’s governor, said that donors on a greeting line had encouraged her and McCain to get tougher on Obama. She said an aide then advised her, “Sarah, the gloves are off, the heels are on, go get to them.”
He’s not kidding. In a poetic turn of events, the New York Times’ belated reporting on the Obama-Ayers connection, told in a “nothing-to-see-here” tone, has given Palin a hook to tweak her critics in the media and go after Obama for his associations. She’s doing it again in remarks at a Colorado rally today:
There’s been a lot of interest in what I read lately. Well, I was reading my copy of today’s New York Times and I was really interested to read about Barack’s friends from Chicago. Turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man who, according to The New York Times was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol.’ These are the same guys who think patriotism is paying higher taxes. This is not a man who sees America as you and I do – as the greatest force for good in the world. This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country. This, ladies and gentlemen, has nothing to do with the kind of change anyone can believe in – not my kids and not your kids. The only man who can take on Washington is John McCain.
The Obama campaign is predictably whiny:
Governor Palin’s comments, while offensive, are not surprising, given the McCain campaign’s statement this morning that they would be launching Swiftboat-like attacks in hopes of deflecting attention from the nation’s economic ills. In fact, the very newspaper story Governor Palin cited in hurling her shameless attack made clear that Senator Obama is not close to Bill Ayers, much less ‘pals,’ and that he has strongly condemned the despicable acts Ayers committed 40 years ago, when Obama was eight. What’s clear is that John McCain and Sarah Palin would rather spend their time tearing down Barack Obama than laying out a plan to build up our economy.
Condemned him strongly, that is, during any time when he wasn’t attending cocktail parties at Ayers’ house, serving as head of Ayers’ non-profit Chicago Annenberg Challenge, calling Ayers “mainstream,” and remaining silent when he said he wished he’d done more in his efforts to bomb domestic targets in the 1960s.
