Above Ground

Yesterday morning, as millions were going to the polls, Bill Ayers emerged from his home to give a short interview for the Washington Post. Ayers had this to say:

"Pal around together? What does that mean? Share a milkshake with two straws?" Ayers said in his first interview since the controversy began. "I think my relationship with Obama was probably like thousands of others in Chicago. And, like millions and millions of others, I wish I knew him better."

I can honestly say I'm glad he didn't know Obama better. But at least this story dismisses all the dire warnings, innuendo, and bullshit we've been hearing from Sarah Palin for the last month.

Regardless of Palin's efforts, these attacks were ineffectual. Maybe they even backfired. Why did McCain even agree to such a strategy? Well, Newsweek's postmortem on the McCain campaign has this tidbit:

Palin launched her attack on Obama’s association with William Ayers, the former Weather Underground bomber, before the campaign had finalized a plan to raise the issue. McCain’s advisers were working on a strategy that they hoped to unveil the following week, but McCain had not signed off on it, and top adviser Mark Salter was resisting.

I guess that's what you get for picking a "maverick." I wonder if McCain has any regrets? Bill Ayers certainly has regrets about his own past:

"I wish I'd been wiser," he said. "I wish I'd been more effective. I wish I'd been more unifying. I wish I'd been more principled."

In other words, he wishes he had been more like Barack Obama.