Obama Says He Won't Be Swiftboated [Nice Deb]

O RLY???

Newsweek reports:

The Obama campaign is planning to expand its research and rapid-response team in order to repel attacks it anticipates over his ties to 1960s radical Bill Ayers, indicted developer Antoin Rezko and other figures from his past.

David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, tells NEWSWEEK that the Illinois senator won’t let himself be “Swift Boated” like John Kerry in 2004. “He’s not going to sit there and sing ‘Kumbaya’ as the missiles are raining in,” Axelrod said. “I don’t think people should mistake civility for a willingness to deal with the challenges to come.”

Civility?

Since when is comparing a fellow Senator to a terrorist, or publicly accusing your own grandmother of racism, considered civil?

If you ask me, the “rapid response team” flubbed those. So I’m thinking, maybe it is a good idea to “expand” the team, in order to increase the possibility that their next response to substantive criticism (swift-boating), is not totally obnoxious, and an insult to our intelligence.

Also, Barry’s running out of friends and relatives to throw under the bus.

As expected, the eeeevil VRWC is lying in wait, ever ready to ambush innocent liberals:

Operatives such as David Bossie, whose Citizens United group made the Willie Horton ad that helped sink Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential bid, are sharpening knives as expectations mount that Obama will be their target in the fall.

They say that like there’s something wrong with it.

Bossie says he is assembling material for TV spots about Obama’s ties with Ayers, a Chicago professor and unrepentant former member of the Weather Underground, a group that bombed several government buildings to protest the Vietnam War. The Ayers issue bounced around right-wing media for months, but it received broad exposure at last week’s debate on ABC, when Obama was asked a question about their relationship. Obama, who lives near Ayers in Chicago’s Hyde Park, attended an event at Ayers’s house when Obama ran for the state Senate in 1995—and served on the board of a nonprofit with him for several years. “Obama is aware of the acts Ayers committed when he was 8 years old and has called them ‘detestable’,” says spokesman Ben LaBolt, adding that Obama occasionally bumps into Ayers in his neighborhood “but has not seen him for months.” At a recent dinner party, according to one guest who asked not to be identified discussing a private gathering, Ayers “ridiculed” the notion that Obama shared his left-wing views: “He thought the idea that there was a political connection between them was absurd.” (Ayers declined to comment.)

So they’ve got some rock-solid evidence that Obama doesn’t share any of Ayers’ leftist views. Phew, that’s a relief.

Good job, team!

Cross posted at Nice Deb.

posted by xgenghisx at 01:56 AM

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