Associations

Charles Krauthammer points out that Barack Obama’s long associations with extremely questionable people like Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers speak directly to Obama’s character. What they say is not good.

First, his cynicism and ruthlessness. He found these men useful, and use them he did. Would you attend a church whose pastor was spreading racial animosity from the pulpit? Would you even shake hands with — let alone serve on two boards with — an unrepentant terrorist, whether he bombed U.S. military installations or abortion clinics?

Most Americans would not, on the grounds of sheer indecency. Yet Obama did, if not out of conviction then out of expediency. He was a young man on the make, an unknown outsider working his way into Chicago politics. He played the game with everyone, without qualms and with obvious success.

Obama is not the first politician to rise through a corrupt political machine. But he is one of the rare few to then have the audacity to present himself as a transcendent healer, hovering above and bringing redemption to the “old politics” — of the kind he had enthusiastically embraced in Chicago in the service of his own ambition.

Second, and even more disturbing than the cynicism, is the window these associations give on Obama’s core beliefs. He doesn’t share the Rev. Wright’s poisonous views of race nor Ayers’s views, past and present, about the evil that is American society. But Obama clearly did not consider these views beyond the pale. For many years he swam easily and without protest in that fetid pond.

Yes, these associations do matter. Obama only abandoned these men when they became a political liability to him. Up until then, he cheerfully used them to advance his own career. Obama’s choice of friends tell us of the utter self-absorption, the ruthlessness and the blind ambition of Barack Obama. The media is obviously in the tank for Obama and are drowning out the McCain campaign almost entirely now, but these things still matter.