When liberals use guilt by association

Jeff Jacoby:

EARLY in his 1980 campaign for president, Ronald Reagan spoke at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Miss., a town infamous for the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. In the course of remarks dealing mostly with economics and education, he said: "I believe in states' rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level."

Reagan should have known better than to use a phrase like "states' rights," however innocuously, in a place like Mississippi. His campaign appearance wasn't a veiled appeal to segregationists - Reagan was no racist - but for more than a quarter-century, that is how his detractors on the left have spun it. Bob Herbert wrote in The New York Times last year that Reagan went to Mississippi "to assure the bigots that he was with them."

It's an ugly calumny - and a good example of guilt by association at its most poisonous.

A more recent example occurred in 2000, when George W. Bush made a campaign stop at Bob Jones University, a school known for anti-Catholicism and a ban on interracial dating. Other than that single brief visit, Bush had no tie to Bob Jones. He hadn't studied there, never supported it financially, didn't share its racial or religious views. Nevertheless, he was sharply criticized for his appearance. The media declared it a "defining moment" of Bush's campaign, and many of his critics (including then-rival John McCain) pronounced him guilty by association of aligning himself with Bob Jones's noxious teachings.

One other illustration: the bludgeoning of Samuel Alito during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2006. Senate Democrats led by Ted Kennedy pummeled Alito over his membership in the long-defunct Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a conservative group in which Alito had never played an active role. A former ROTC cadet, he had joined the organization in support of its call for restoring the military program to Princeton. But because it had also blasted racial and gender preferences in admissions, Kennedy and other Democrats insinuated that Alito must be a bigot.

In none of these cases was there anything like the long relationship that Barack Obama had for so many years with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the incendiary, America-damning pastor he described for years as his mentor, his sounding board, and his friend. In none of them was there anything comparable to Obama's significant involvement with William Ayers, the domestic-terrorist-turned-extremist-professor with whom Obama worked closely at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, channeling more than $100 million into radical education projects.

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It is a game the Democrats play well, but it pales in comparison to their own hypocrisy on such comparisons. What Ayers did was indefensible and most people would find it creep to be associated with him on any level. In Chicago, many were comfortable with him including Obama. There should be a lesson here for Obama. The Chicago way is not the American way many times.