Here.
Okay...I use the word "discovered" a bit loosely--the way one might "discover" a Big Mac at McDonald's. But now that I have your attention, the point is that most voters don't have a clue that Obama writes in his memoir that the very first time he attended Trinity United Church, he heard Rev. Wright rant that "white folks' greed runs a world in need."
As you may recall, Obama said, following Rev. Wright's infamous press club appearance in April, that "The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago." The racist Rev. Wright quote included in Dreams from My Father contradicts this statement. While some bloggers and opinion journalists were quick to draw attention to this passage in Dreams from My Father shortly after the Wright story broke in March, this quote was never reported on NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, or PBS, according to Nexis.
I bring attention to this fact because McCain and Palin are saying that Obama's statements about his relationship with Bill Ayers call into question Obama's judgment and truthfulness. While Obama has misrepresented his relationship with Ayers and never told the whole truth about that relationship (when did Obama learn that Ayers was an unrepentant domestic terrorist, and what did he say to Ayers about it?), I don't expect a smoking gun to emerge proving that Obama is lying about Ayers. We're never going to find a picture of Obama reading a newspaper story about Ayers's terrorism.
On the other hand, in Dreams from My Father--an audio version of which may be purchased for $17.13--we have Obama's recollection of listening to a radical Rev. Wright sermon, which proves the Rev. Wright he got to know 20 years ago was strikingly similar to the Rev. Wright of those more infamous sermons--fodder, perhaps, for a campaign ad.
Would McCain be accused of flip-flopping if he were to bring up Wright? Sure, but Obama flip-flopped on the relevance of the Keating scandal. McCain can always point out that Hillary Clinton and Obama himself have said that Wright is a legitimate issue, and the DNC went after McCain merely for being endorsed by John Hagee.
The press of course will say that it is racist to point out that Obama listened to Rev. Wright make racist remarks in the first sermon he ever attended. But most people realize that if McCain had chosen a racist pastor to be his mentor for 20 years, it wouldn't make any one a racist to point that out.
Exit quotation: "There are reasons not to talk about Ayers, Wright, Khalidi, etc. - not to talk about Obama and radicalism. But there are reasons for doing so, too. And I ask this: If not now, when? (If not us, who?!) After November 4, it will be too late. Isn't now the time to talk about it, discuss it, air it? Let Obama address it? What are campaigns for?"
