The Deal, Sealed?
By TIMOTHY EGAN
NYT
This was the one where Bill Ayers finally came up. The “old, washed up terrorist” in John McCain’s words, who went from entitled brat with bomb fantasies to Chicagoan of the year to Willie Horton with an earring and a PhD.
The braying kooks on the far right demanded it. Sarah Palin threw slabs of Ayers’ sirloin to angry crowds, delivered in that crinkly-nosed, oh-honey-I-shrunk-the-kids style. And even Senator Obama said as much, with his say-it-to-my-face taunt of last week.
And when, a half hour or so into the third and most riveting of the three presidential debates, it finally came up — relieving us for a moment from a fast-escalating panderfest to Joe the Plumber — it fell flat.
At a time when a vanquished conservative president is nationalizing the banking system as his closing act, when millions of American lives are going off financial cliffs, when two wars strain the very thought of Pax Americana, we got this media-fed moment on Bill Ayers.
“We need to know the full extent of that relationship,” said McCain. Oooooh! That’ll change the election.
“It says more about your campaign than it does about me,” Obama replied, professorial as ever.
And that was it. Little wonder that independent voters in CNN’s flash poll favored Obama 57 percent to 31.
(Continued here.)
NYT
This was the one where Bill Ayers finally came up. The “old, washed up terrorist” in John McCain’s words, who went from entitled brat with bomb fantasies to Chicagoan of the year to Willie Horton with an earring and a PhD.
The braying kooks on the far right demanded it. Sarah Palin threw slabs of Ayers’ sirloin to angry crowds, delivered in that crinkly-nosed, oh-honey-I-shrunk-the-kids style. And even Senator Obama said as much, with his say-it-to-my-face taunt of last week.
And when, a half hour or so into the third and most riveting of the three presidential debates, it finally came up — relieving us for a moment from a fast-escalating panderfest to Joe the Plumber — it fell flat.
At a time when a vanquished conservative president is nationalizing the banking system as his closing act, when millions of American lives are going off financial cliffs, when two wars strain the very thought of Pax Americana, we got this media-fed moment on Bill Ayers.
“We need to know the full extent of that relationship,” said McCain. Oooooh! That’ll change the election.
“It says more about your campaign than it does about me,” Obama replied, professorial as ever.
And that was it. Little wonder that independent voters in CNN’s flash poll favored Obama 57 percent to 31.
(Continued here.)
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