Obama's friends are a cause for concern, concludes the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer.
What is more important, decades of close alliance with Reverend Wright, a bigoted, anti-American racist, William Ayers, an unrepentant terrorist bomber, America-hater par excellence and a self-described communist and Tony Rezko, convicted of 16 counts of political corruption and Obama fund raiser to the tune of $250,000 or Obama's campaign statements separating himself from these people?
Today, on the threshold of the presidency, Obama concedes the odiousness of these associations, which is why he has severed them. But for the years in which he sat in Wright's pews and shared common purpose on boards with Ayers, Obama considered them a legitimate, indeed unremarkable, part of social discourse.Do you? Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect. There is a difference between temperament and character. Equanimity is a virtue. Tolerance of the obscene is not.
Obama & Friends: Judge Not?
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 10, 2008; Washington Post
Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters. Yet let the McCain campaign raise the issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association.
But associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque and self-contained as Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late politically to be raising this issue. But that does not make it, as conventional wisdom holds, in any way illegitimate.
