Fear

Fear:

I see that the Obama campaign has decided to attack a writer from National Review. His offense?

...the campaign's "Action Wire" has been waging large-scale campaigns against critics. That includes tens of thousands of e-mails to television stations running Harold Simmons' Bill Ayers ad, and to their advertisers — including a list of major automobile and telecommunications companies.

And tonight, the campaign launched a more specific campaign: an effort to disrupt the appearance by a writer for National Review, Stanley Kurtz, on a Chicago radio program. Kurtz has been writing about Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, and has suggested that papers housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago would reveal new details of that relationship.

...

"Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse," says the email, which picks up a form of pressure on the press pioneered by conservative talk radio hosts and activists in the 1990s, and since adopted by Media Matters and other liberal groups.

"It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves. At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz's lies," it continues.

The campaign mentions, and objects to, one specific claim of Kurtz's, for which I've never seen hard evidence:

Just last night on Fox News, Kurtz drastically exaggerated Barack's connection with Ayers by claiming Ayers had recruited Barack to the board of the Annenberg Challenge. That is completely false and has been disproved in numerous press accounts.

So: they don't dispute that they served on the board together? They don't dispute that the relationship was far deeper than Obama acknowledged in his 'just a guy who lives in my neighborhood' remarks? Yet Stanley Kurtz is a "slimy character assassin" because he says that Ayers recruited Obama onto the board of the Challenge? But that is the point at which Obama could reasonably claim ignorance of Ayers' history. That's no assassination: even if that claim were true, it wouldn't be damning, and if it's not true, it's not a heavy blow.

This campaign is deeply sensitive to the Ayers situation. They've actually tried to get the Justice Department to investigate a group running an ad about it, even though they apparently have no factual disputes with the ad.

They're afraid of this. Why? It's been in the public sphere for months.