You (Really) Don’t Need a Weatherman - Hertzberg calls out the McCarthyism of linking Obama to Ayers

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You (Really) Don’t Need a Weatherman

On the magazine’s Campaign Trail podcast, recorded the morning after last Wednesday’s Philadelphia debate, I sputtered that the attempt to hang William Ayers around Barack Obama’s neck was “McCarthyism.” But I didn’t get a chance to elaborate, either on the podcast or in this week’s Comment.

McCarthyism is a term rarely heard since the Cold War ended, but, like “red-baiting,” it used to get tossed around on the left entirely too loosely during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. There were those who failed to understand that it’s not red-baiting to point out that a person is a Communist—if that person really is a Communist. McCarthyism is a little more complicated. It wasn’t McCarthyism to deny a government worker who was a member of the Communist Party access to classified materials. It wasn’t McCarthyism for the A.C.L.U. to bar Communists from membership. It wasn’t McCarthyism to fire a person from a public-school teaching job for being a Communist if that person was using his or her position to propagandize to students. Similarly, it wasn’t McCarthyism to call somebody a “Communist sympathizer” if that somebody sympathized with the salient features of Communism, such as one-party rule, totalitarian repression of alternative opinions, the abolition of civil liberties, and murderous gulags. But it was, and is, McCarthyism to try to comprehensively ruin a person’s life solely because that person was once a Communist (or a Fascist, or a racist, or a radical Islamist)—or even if that person is still a whatever-ist but doesn’t actually do anything about it.

The central feature of McCarthyism, however, was accusing people of being Communists or Communist sympathizers who were not, in fact, either. And one of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s favorite evidentiary techniques for carrying out this particular form of character assassination was “guilt by association.”

Guilt by association is another tricky term. The Communist Party is an association, and being a member of that association does indeed makes you guilty of being a Communist. A garden club is also an association. But being in a garden club with a Communist doesn’t make you a Communist. And being in a garden club with an ex-Communist doesn’t even make you an ex-Communist.

Which brings us to William Ayers.

The relevant facts:

1. Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, were prominent members of the Weather Underground nearly forty years ago, when Barack Obama was a child. They are now, respectively, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an associate professor of law at Northwestern. They long ago abandoned the political ideas they supported in their youth, which speaks well for them, but they never acknowledged that those ideas were mindless and vicious, which does not. They live in the same Chicago neighborhood as Obama.

2. When Obama first ran for state senator, in 1995, the incumbent he hoped to replace introduced him to Ayers and Dohrn at a social gathering in their home. Ayers later donated two hundred dollars to his campaign fund.

3. For three years, ending in 2002, Ayers and Obama were both on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a local foundation that gives grants to anti-poverty and arts programs. Ayers is still on the board, which currently has nine members, mostly bankers, lawyers, academics, and businesspeople.

4. There is absolutely no evidence that Obama ever sympathized with the politics of the Weather Underground, and there is overwhelming evidence (read his books) that he didn’t and doesn’t.

McCarthyism is not a charge to be levelled lightly. Even so, I conclude from these facts that attacking Obama because of his “association with” Ayers constitutes McCarthyism. Any uncertainty on this point disappears when one considers that George Stephanopoulos, who should have known better, justified making an “issue” of that association by telling Obama that it came under the heading of “the general theme of patriotism in your relationships.”

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2008/04/you-really-dont.html