I'm finding the popping up of this William Ayers/Weather Underground question to be quite relevant, as I picked up a book the other day called "Bomb Squad" (ironically written by two former staffers from Ted Koppel's "Nightline"). The book details a year in the life of the NYPD bomb squad, but also includes for perspective quite a bit of history on bombs in New York. That's where the revelations start to kick in for me as a child of the 1970s.
(More below)
It is hard to imagine in this post-9/11 national culture of paralyzing fear (and I'm sure older Kossacks are in touch with this), but -- gasp! -- we did have domestic terrorism in the 1970s. Quite a bit of it, as it turns out. In New York City in 1970 alone, there were nearly 375 bombs planted in the city.
(Sidebar question: What has happened to our society since then? If we have even one pipe bomb found in downtown New York now, all the cable networks go into red alert status and act like it's a national emergency. The answer, of course, is our media culture and national obsession on the self, but that's fodder for another diary.)
The Weather Underground, with William Ayers, were one of the groups that pursued these tactics. So questions are not out of line. But, by far, the most active purveyors of the bomb-planting phenomenon in the 1970s was FALN, the Puerto Rican independence movement. Hmm, did either candidate on stage tonight have any connections relating to FALN?
Again, our national short attention span problem plays a major role here, but you need to go back to only 1999 -- when America already knew terrorism was a rapidly emerging issue and Bill Clinton claimed to be very serious about combating it -- to find a day in August when Bill suddenly, and against the advice of his Justice Department advisers, pardoned 16 members of FALN who had been involved in their bombing campaign of terror.
This act prompted national bi-partisan outrage, including a 95-2 comdemnation by the Senate, but it did help one party. Hillary Clinton was running for Senate in New York, with its large Puerto Rican population block, and had been approached shortly before this time by a leading Puerto Rican political leader in New York who asked for movement on the FALN issue and gave her a detailed packet of material to give to her husband. She eventually came out against the pardons given by her husband, but it took three weeks of a shitstorm brewing from all political sides for her to make her statement.
The point is, if you're going to bring up someone knowing William Ayers, you also have to bring up this much more serious and damning connection of convenience between the Clintons and FALN (and that's not evening broaching the subject of Bill Clinton's Weather Underground pardons)
I'm guessing those conservative Democratic voters in Pennsylvania who might find this Ayers emergence to be a question-raiser for Obama would be far more mortified in the current climate surrounding the terrorism issue to have a fresh reminder of the FALN affair brought to them by the Clintons. I don't know if the Obama campaign should go there, but you know damn well the Republicans will be all over it should she somehow advance to the general election. Talk about needing to be vetted.
In closing, though, the even bigger point for me is this: When I am reminded of the details of history of Bill Clinton's presidency, I just don't want to go back to the psycho-drama that existed for the nation for yet another go-round. There were good things that happened during the Clinton presidency, but they are so unfortunately obscured by the constant flow of baggage that came with the Clintons. Just like this campaign has shown, they can not lead effectively because they can't keep from tripping up over personal issues related to ego and abuse of political power that only distract the country.
Hillary has often (wrongly) complained of a double-standard when it comes to media coverage of the Democratic race this year. But, without question, if Obama had a flaw as blatant as the FALN episode with its political implications in his past, this race would have been over a long time ago. That's the real double-standard -- don't let Hillary successfully play the victim one more time.