GOP won’t play nice with Obama

Given the wholesale failure of the Bush presidency and the bankruptcy of Republican ideology, Sen. John McCain’s only shot at the White House is to caricature Democratic nominee Barack Obama as an elitist girly-man who can’t keep America safe. Unfortunately, Obama’s given GOP propagandists a fair amount to work with. Although the national press mostly ignored it during the great anti-Clinton crusade, his Chicago past is replete with potential embarrassments.
One example: Remember when everybody got huffy at ABC’s George Stephanopoulos for asking Obama about William Ayers, the Weather Underground radical who bombed the Pentagon to protest Vietnam? Obama described him as an “English professor” and slight acquaintance who happened to live in his neighborhood. That was disingenuous at best. Ayers is a professor of education and a prominent figure in Chicago school circles, and sufficiently well-known that Mayor Daley publicly defended him from Stephanopoulos’ insinuations.
Moreover, one of Obama’s earliest Chicago jobs was as the director of a controversial school-reform organization in which Ayers was a major player. Obama’s earliest political fundraiser in 1995 was held at Ayers’ home. They appeared together in forums at the University of Chicago for whom the school’s public relations contact was, yes, Michelle Obama.
I’m prepared to believe Ayers has matured. And Obama isn’t responsible for acts Ayers committed when Obama was 8 years old. So why does it matter? Partly because a publicity photo for Ayers’ 1993 book “Fugitive Days: A Memoir,” telling the story of his anti-Vietnam radicalism, shows the bespectacled professor wiping his feet on an American flag. He also boasted about never going to prison despite terrorist acts. Obama favorably reviewed the book in the Chicago Tribune.
Partly, too, because while the Clinton campaign was too dainty to use such inflammatory imagery, Republican operatives won’t be.
Republican TV ads depicting Hillary Clinton calling Obama “naive” are merely the opening gambit. Things are sure to get very rough before it’s over. The national media will join in.
Maybe I’ve lived too long in the South, ground zero in the GOP’s “Southern Strategy.” And maybe Obama can transcend it all with feel-good rhetoric about “change,” perhaps not the most original political slogan but something everybody wants. I’d also bet a lot that the only way he offers Hillary the vice-presidential nomination is as political theater after she’s privately agreed to turn it down. Why would she choose vice president over Senate majority leader, a more powerful job definitely within her reach? Were I Obama, I’d take a long look at Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel: a strong conservative, an Iraq-war skeptic from the get-go, a Vietnam combat veteran and a serious man.
So how does Obama get around the “naive” business? Not by dissembling, but by fighting back. Consider Jerusalem, for example. You wouldn’t call the hardline Likudnik position “naive.” Words like “delusional” and “tribal,” however, do come to mind. Sacred to all three monotheistic religions — Christianity, Judaism and Islam — Jerusalem was a divided city from 1948 to 1967, when the Israelis conquered it by force. Its hundreds of thousands of Palestinian residents, whose ancestors have lived there since Biblical times, are not considered Israeli citizens and cannot vote.
Meanwhile, Israelis keep stealing Palestinian land for illegal settlements as the Arab slums fester and decay. So long as these things are true, there can never be peace or justice. The great majority of Israeli citizens understand that. So do most American Jews.
So does Obama. Instead of mimicking McCain’s cartoonish neoconservatism, he owes it to the American people to explain that ignoring reality isn’t evidence of strength, but stupidity.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons can be reached at [email protected].