The question Obama want answer about Ayers

Fox News:

Barack Obama's campaign on Thursday tried to fend off a withering attack from his opponents surrounding the Democratic candidate's relationship with former domestic terrorist William Ayers, co-founder of the radical Weather Underground group in the turbulent Sixties.

But there are still questions over when Obama truly learned about Ayers' radical background.

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor told FOXNews.com that the Democratic presidential candidate was unaware of Ayers' past when Ayers hosted a political event for Obama in 1995, when he was an Illinois state senator.

Vietor said it was a small, meet-the-candidate event -- an assertion Obama and his advisers have consistently made throughout the course of his presidential campaign.

But Vietor said that he did not know when Obama learned of Ayers' connection to the Weather Underground, which claimed responsibility for bombings at the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol and a New York Supreme Court justice's home in New York City.

Obama has been criticized for not being clear on exactly when he was informed of Ayers' terrorist past, and for maintaining a working relationship with Ayers, who lives in Chicago and is an education professor at the University of Illinois.

Questions were raised during an interview with Time Magazine on Wednesday when Obama's communications director, Robert Gibbs, appeared to waffle on the issue, saying: "I don't know when Barack Obama found out, I don't know at what point. It's something that I would be more than happy to ask him."

Vietor said Gibbs' comments were not meant to suggest that Obama might have known about Ayers' extremist past.

On Tuesday Gibbs was first asked if Obama knew Ayers was a terrorist at the meet-and-greet at Ayers' home. "The answer is still [that] he didn't," Gibbs said. "And that's what [David Axelrod, another spokesman] said yesterday."

On Thursday, the McCain campaign continued to seize on Obama's association with the Ayers by launching a 90-second Web video that accuses the Democratic candidate of hiding his true relationship with Ayers.

"They've worked together for years," the narrator in the ad states. "But Obama tries to hide it. Why? Obama launched his political career in Ayers' living room. Ayers and Obama ran a radical education foundation together."

"Barack Obama should put an end to the lingering questions that Americans have about his associations with Bill Ayers," said Republican strategist Margaret Hoover.

"That he won't only increases our suspicion that he is trying to hide the fact that he has had ongoing associations -- whether through positively reviewing Bill Ayers' book, by continuing to serve on boards with him, though interactions at the University of Chicago -- with an unrepentant terrorist," Hoover said.

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Obama's evasions suggest that the answer would not be helpful to his campaign.

However, even the media is on the the evasions now and demanding answers. You get the feeling that the Obama campaign is having Nixon like meetings about a limited hangout strategy the way they are handling this issue. It is time to pull the media troops out of Alaska and send them to Chicago and finally take a look at Obama and his radical past including his association with socialist and communist in Chicago.

Exactly what is Obama's attitude toward socialism? Did he belong to a socialist group in the 1990s? I know that the association will probably not matter to most Democrat voters but we deserve to have a debate on what his philosophy is in that regard.