Who is Bill Ayers? Who cares?

The McCain campaign has spent a lot of time during this last week trying to associate Obama with Bill Ayers.  Here is the problem with this tactic: no one under the age of 50 has ever heard of this guy.  The very few who have heard of him aren’t that concerned.

So who is Bill Ayers? Basically, back in 1969, when he was 25 years old, Ayers co-founded a radical anti-war group called the Weather Underground.  The group set off some bombs which killed some people and came to be known as a domestic terrorist organization.  Ayers went underground for a while and finally turned himself into authorities in 1980.  He is now a distinguished professor of education theory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." The Weathermen took their name from this line in Bob Dylan's song Subterranean Homesick Blues.

It turns out that Obama and Ayers live in the same neighborhood and are acquaintances.  Palin has claimed that because of this association, Obama “pals around with terrorists.”  This claim is just ridiculous enough that it makes Palin look like the scary person rather than Obama.  Sure, it may play well with the 20% of the electorate who hate all Democrats and will vote Republican no matter what, but it does nothing at all to widen the appeal of the McCain-Palin brand.

Here are the problems for McCain:

1. Ayers is ancient news.  His activities occurred roughly 35 years ago.

2. Hardly anyone knows who Bill Ayers is. He did not have a high profile through the 80s, 90s, or 00s.  I somehow managed to get through college and grad school without ever having heard of him.  Maybe that is a terrible indictment of my education, but my sense is that I am not unusual in this respect.

3. No one seriously believes that Obama shares Ayers’ views.

4. The whole story is just too complicated to explain in under 10 minutes, so it is not suited to an American presidential campaign.

5. Ayers somehow just doesn’t seem like such a scary figure anymore.  People are likely to wonder how terrible a person he can be if our government is content to let him pursue a career as a distinguished professor at a major university.

6. Bringing up associations from the 60s just makes McCain look like a man who is in touch with the past and allows Obama to say things like “I was eight years old” when Ayers was active.

The McCain campaign is trying to make something out of nothing and the American people can sense it.  The net result is that McCain loses credibility.