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Putting Off Ayers How Obama benefits from the cynicism he decries.

By John DickersonPosted Friday, Oct. 10, 2008, at 7:56 PM ET

John McCain wants you to consider whether Barack Obama's association with unrepentant terrorist William Ayers makes him fit to be president. Actually, that's not quite right: McCain and Republican Party leaders would prefer we didn't waste time considering this question. They want you to simply reject Obama out of hand for his past ties. If that doesn't work, they hope to raise doubts about Obama's character in the past (why would he associate with someone like that?) and in the present (why hasn't Obama been straight with us about Ayers now?).

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At the moment, this strategy appears to be working only with Republicans. Obama's poll numbers continue to improve. Voters want to hear about solutions to the current economic crisis, and this line of attack has nothing to do with that. The press is covering the Ayers association not as a question of character but as a symbol of McCain's increasing desperation.

But there's another reason this strategy isn't working: Voters are cynical. Obama doesn't want them to be, implores them not to be at almost every campaign stop, yet in this episode he benefits from their cynicism. If Obama weathers the Ayers controversy, it will be in part because voters judge his association with Ayers, and his weak answers about that association, to be nothing more than a politician's garden-variety duplicity.

The McCain campaign faces a high bar in making the Ayers charge stick. It's not trying to sway partisans—they're already outraged. Instead, this is a pitch to undecided voters, and they're thinking about something else right now. The Dow just had its worst week in history and the global financial markets are collapsing. You want to talk about what, senator?

So why didn't this strategy die on the planning board? Because people do care more about character than they let on. They may want to hear about policies, but many make voting decisions in their gut. McCain is appealing to this instinct by raising two key questions about Obama's association with Ayers: Should he have hung out with him at all, and should he have been more candid about it when asked during the campaign?

Now, if you're a purist, you might say Obama should have run from Ayers the minute he learned about his past. Perhaps he should have behaved as courageously as Joe Biden says he did when he met Slobodan Milosevic. (Biden told the Serbian leader to his face that he was a war criminal.) Obama didn't do this. At some level, he decided it was OK to have professional associations with a person who was once a domestic terrorist and didn't seem to regret it.

Obama and his aides recognize this is an untenable position. So this week they have offered some late-in-the-game clarifications. Obama didn't know about Ayers' past—and when he did learn about it, he assumed Ayers had been rehabilitated. (His aides say Obama now doesn't believe Ayers has been rehabilitated.)

From a political standpoint, finding out whether Obama and his aides are now telling the truth leads down a rabbit hole. The press can't determine what Obama knew and when he knew it about Ayers' past or Ayers' level of rehabilitation. Only a revelation on those fronts would create the conditions for a big political moment of exposing Obama as a fraud. McCain can press the issue, but Obama's statements muddy the case, which means more time for the McCain team spent on Ayers and less offering a positive approach to the economic disaster.