Why the Ayers Attacks Won’t Work
October 9th, 2008
So as I’m sure you’ve read elsewhere, it seems that McCain’s latest tactic is to try to hit Obama for his past association with William Ayers. I can understand why McCain wants to attack Obama, but I really don’t expect this to work. To explain, I’m going to crib heavily off Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book The Tipping Point.
In order for the Ayers allegations to “tip” and become widely accepted and talked about, according to Gladwell, there are three aspects that need to be met:
- The Law of the Few: Ideas and other social phenomena are largely spread by a very few people.
- The Stickiness Factor: Whether or not something like this takes off depends on how “sticky” it is.
- The Power of Context: Any idea won’t “tip” unless the context — social, political, geographic, or otherwise — is ripe for it to do so.
I think the Ayers allegations will fail to “tip” because they fail to meet at least the last two of those three criteria.
For starters, the idea just plain isn’t sticky. Despite the McCain camp’s attempts to paint Obama as an unknown commodity, he’s been in the news almost constantly for the last two years, and he showed up on the public’s radar as early as 2004. Thus, he’s pretty well known by the general public, at least as well as dozens of other political household names. By now, most people — even undecideds — have already formed a lot of opinions about him, so attempts to redefine him in the eyes of the general public are going to be very difficult to pull off, unless they fit in with those already-formed opinions. Along that vein, even if the association with Ayers were deeper than appears to be on the surface, to the casual observer it just won’t make sense. When Obama gives speeches in public or appears in debates, he just doesn’t come across to most people as some kind of anti-American radical. If there’s a problem with Obama’s demeanor, it’s that he’s level to the point of being almost boring. The context just isn’t there. To convince the general public that Obama “pals around with domestic terrorists,” they’re going to need a hell of a lot more evidence than what they have right now, and/or a serious assist (e.g., misstep) by Obama. I don’t expect they’re going to get either one. And almost as importantly, raise your hand if you had even heard of William Ayers before this hubbub hit the first time around. I know I didn’t (I was only vaguely aware of the Weather Underground), and I suspect that’s true of most Americans.
And that “first time around” bit brings up another, even simpler way to know that the Ayers ploy isn’t going to work. It’s been tried already, by Hillary Clinton, and it has already failed. So in addition to not having much traction, it’s already yesterday’s news.
Now contrast that against some of the allegations made against John Kerry in 2004: that he was a “flip flopper” and a “war criminal.” Those smears stuck, because the context was already there for them to stick, and because Kerry himself helped make them stick. With respect to the “war criminal” allegation, there was already a good deal of resentment against Kerry, particularly among veterans, left over from his Winter Soldiers testimony and his activities with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. You had a ready-made army of foot soldiers out there willing to spread the message. And, of course, on the flip-flopper side, there was the infamous “I actually did vote for [it] before I voted against it” gaffe. Serious people, and anyone who knows how Congress works, knew what he meant, but he gave his detractors the perfect ammunition to make that attack stick. I just don’t see Obama making a similar mistake, and I don’t see that the context is already there among undecideds to make these attacks against him stick.
I expect that attacks over Reverend Wright would gain a bit more traction, but still would ultimately prove unsuccessful because, as mentioned above, it just doesn’t “fit.” To anybody who’s heard Obama’s speeches and seen him in the debates, he just doesn’t come across as a racist, anti-American radical. Guilt-by-associaton attacks really only work when the associations make sense to people, and to most, Obama seems nothing at all like the type of person who ascribes to the more fiery sermons of Rev. Wright.
Now that’s not to say that nobody’s going to buy into this stuff. Of course some will. But the overwhelming majority of those already weren’t going to vote for Obama under any circumstances anyway. So I just don’t see how this is going to help McCain. At this point, among the majority of Americans, he’s not going to be able to make it stick, and he’s just going to look desperate.
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