The Company You Keep

Remember the old saying? You can tell a man by the company he keeps.

On the other hand, you can say that you can’t judge a book by its cover.

So the question facing US voters this Fall is whether it matters that Barack Obama counts among his supporters Sixties radical terrorists like Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dorhn.

Maybe it wouldn’t matter if Ayres and Dohrn had renounced their radical follies, but they haven’t. As Hugh Hewitt writes,

Guy Benson, a young journalist friend of mine who works for Chicago’s Sandy Rios Show in my network and hosts his own weekend radio show, went digging, and what he found was the tape from a 2007 reunion of the SDS, on which both Ayers and Dohrn talk at length about how they view America today[.]

What you hear in the tapes is unreconstructed left-wing extremism, with the United States as incipiently fascist, the belly of the beast.

So the question is: can we trust the judgment of a politician who freely associated with these left-wing terrorists? We can deal with his down-the-line big-government-for-every-problem philosophy. It’s wrong, and it hurts millions of people every day. But it is still mainstream.

But of even more concern than his ideas is the fact that his judgment about people and ideas is terribly flawed. It had to have been not to have been able to see the quite obvious anti-American extremism of Ayers and Dohrn or to have objected not just to a handful of Pastor Wright’s sermons but to much of the material published in his church’s bulletin.

We’ve been here before, of course. In the 1950s conservatives raised the question about liberals who had been Communists in the 1930s, and maybe still were. Could we trust them?

The response of liberals then and ever since was telling. How dare you question our patriotism, they said. How dare you accuse us of being Communists. Anyway, you have no right to ask. Anyway, even if we did associate with Communists, what of that? How dare you accuse us of guilt-by-association. They decided that the whole thing was a McCarthyite “witch hunt.” And ever since, whenever anyone raises a question about the allegiance of a liberal, the McCarthyite bloody shirt is waved and we get to see on TV Senator McCarthy looking and sounding sleazy at the Army McCarthy hearings in the 1950s.

Of course, if a Republican senator had ever been within a country mile of an abortion clinic would-be bomber, his career would be toast. All the fine distinctions and the questions about guilt by association would mean nothing in such a case. Nor should they. We expect Republican senators and presidential candidates to have good judgment and we expect to judge their whole lives when they run for President of the United States.

But enough of the finer points. The problem for Democrats is that the Reagan Democrats just aren’t going to vote for a man like Obama. They just don’t trust a guy that has palled around with terrorists. Hewitt:

The Democratic voters of Pennsylvania, like those of Ohio, are the core of the old Democratic Party, the party of Roosevelt, Truman and JFK...


They aren’t going to buy the Obama package, no matter how wonderfully wrapped...


It has nothing to do with race, and it isn’t because they question Obama’s patriotism.


But they don’t and won’t trust his judgment. And they will never be friends with his friends.

That, as they say, is a problem for Democrats in a year when they ought to win the presidential election going away.