On October 4, the New York Times did a good job of examining the Ayers flap, and commentators like Chris Matthews would do a much better job of exposing the absurdity of the smear if they read that piece and highlighted key parts to help them more intelligently interview the accusers.
Moreover, the commentators should stick with what may be the most effective challenge. I'd ask, "If Obama is anti-American, you would think that somebody would have caught him saying something at least a bit anti-American--do you have any evidence that he has ever said something anti-American?" The evidence exhonerating Obama that appears in the Oct. 4 article can help to intensify the poignancy of this question; that article shows that people who were close to him not only never heard him say anything remotely anti-American but also knew that true leftists thought he was too conservative.
In "Obama and the '60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths," Scott Shane reports evidence in opposition to the charge that Ayers was instrumental in making Obama a board member of any organization. According to Deborah Leff, a president of the Joyce Foundation, she is the person who recommended Obama for Chairman of the Annenberg Foundation to "two other foundation heads, Patricia A. Graham of the Spencer Foundation and Adele Simmons of the MacArthur Foundation." In an interview with Shane, she told these women that Obama would "make a good board chairman" of the Annenberg Foundation. Shane further reports that Ms. Leff said, "Mr. Ayers was not present and had not suggested Mr. Obama."
One of the most inflammatory charges against Obama is that Ayers kicked off his campaign for the Illinois Senate by hosting a neighborhood coffee in his home. This charge implies that Ayers was a big supporter of Obama's and that they were closely involved with each other. Actually, the meeting was for State Senator Alice J. Palmer, who planned to run for Congress and wanted to begin to introduce Obama as her successor. A. J. Wolf, the emeritus rabbi of a local synagogue, argued that the first kickoff was held at his house.
From 2002-2002, the two men also were on the seven-member board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago charity that had supported Mr. Obama's first work as a community organizer in the 1980s. A board member, R. Eden Martin, a corporate lawyer and president of the Commercial Club of Chicago, "could recall nothing remarkable about their dealings with each other."
A New York Times report (Sept. 11, 2001) quoted Ayers as saying that he wished he had done more bombing. So he is characterized as an unrepentant terrorist. In his website, he argues that his memoir says nothing of the kind and that he condemned terrorism. His contention deserves to be fact checked.
Back to my proposed best counter-challenge to Obama's critics. None of the above people and a many others who have been interviewed have ever heard Obama profess anti-American sentiments. Actually, if any thing, the obviously leftist people who knew him argue that he frustrated them more than once by being too conservative for them. Among the people who worked closely with Obama, were Bradford A. Berenson, who worked on the Harvard Law Review with Mr. Obama and who served as associate White House counsel under President Bush. He's backing McCain, but he attests that when he and Obama worked together on the Harvard Law Review, Obama was a "pragmatic liberal" "whose moderation frustrated others at the law review whose views were much farther to the left. And Tom Hayden, well known leftist, has expressed this kind of frustration with Obama's moderate and sometimes conservative views.
There is strong evidence above that the charges against Obama are absurd. And there is only the association of Ayers and Obama on boards and at one political meeting in Ayers house that the Right has to support it's case. There is no evidence of "palling around," of Ayers launching Obama's campaign, or of Ayers expressing radical views in Obama's presence, and the strongest case the Right seems to have against Mr. Ayers, that he still professes approval of the bombings, also seems unfounded. In short, there's no there there, no case against Mr. Obama.
The pundits need to get educated about this evidence for Obama and against the smear. Then they need to challenge the Right by asking them to produce evidence of one anti-American comment that anyone has ever overheard coming from Obama's mouth. And when the Michele Backmann's of the world evade that question by spouting charges that the above report and others like it dispute, the media should argue that these charges are made up, without foundation and are a threat to the democratic process.