Jerome 'Swiftboat Palin' Corsi
Obama strikes back at ‘Swift Boat’-style attacks from Palin
ASHEVILLE, North Carolina: Senator Barack Obama hit back at the McCain campaign and the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Governor Sarah Palin, a day after Palin made an issue of Obama’s ties to Bill Ayers, a founder of the radical Weather Underground.
In his remarks on Sunday and in his television advertising campaign, Obama has sought to preempt what he referred to as “Swift boat”-style attacks on his character, attacks like Palin’s in Colorado and California over the weekend. He was referring to the 2004 Bush campaign’s character attacks on John Kerry’s military record. Obama also described McCain as “erratic” in an advertisement released Sunday.
“They’d rather try to tear our campaign down than lift this country up,” he told several thousand supporters at a rally here Sunday. “That’s what you do when you’re out of touch, out of ideas and running out of time.”
Palin has been particularly aggressive of late. On Sunday in Omaha, Nebraska, she called him “someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a terrorist,” in reference to Ayers, a radical anti-war activist in the 1960s and ’70s. The Weather Underground, also known as the Weathermen, was organized in 1969 by Ayers and other members of the Students for a Democratic Society who split from SDS. The group disbanded in the mid-1970s. Ayers, now 63, is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Obama’s focus on Palin carries some risks, as the campaign has tried to shy away from directly engaging her and to keep the focus on McCain and linking him to the Bush administration. But the crowds at Obama’s events have been enthusiastically greeting his remarks.
