Posted By: Stonecipher

Oct. 10, 2008

This is why I like Joe Biden:

The above clip was from Biden's speech in Liberty, Missouri yesterday. And this is where years of political experience comes in handy. Biden recognized that John McCain set his own trap last week when he suddenly began launching attacks at Barack Obama for his connection to University of Illinois-Chicago Professor Bill Ayers, but then failed to bring up the issue in the 2nd debate between Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain.

40 years ago, when young Barry Obama was just 8 years old, Bill Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground, a radical and violent leftist group.

The problem is that by the time Obama met him, he was a well respected University Professor who happened to live in Hyde Park, the same neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago that Barack Obama lives in. Obama was unaware of Ayers' history.

Even after the two met, their ties were very loose. Ayers hosted a neighborhood coffee for Obama's 1996 run for the Illinois State Senate and then he made a $200 donation to Obama's re-election fund in April of 2001. The two served together on the board of the Woods Fund, an anti-poverty group, from 1999 to 2002.

Since 2002, according to the New York Times, there is little public evidence of their relationship. Apparently, the last time the two had any contact what-so-ever with each other was back in 2005 when they bumped into each other on the street.

This is the best McCain can do - attack Obama for a guy he ran into on the street three years ago. That might be a tough sell - especially coming from the a guy who split well over $1 million from Charles Keating with four other U.S. Senators. Keating traded that cash for political favors from McCain and the rest of what is now known as the Keating Five.

So what's worse? $200 from a guy a candidate barely knows, who has never been a consultant or even an influence on the candidate's policy, or six figures from a guy who gave it to the candidate specifically for political favors that directly led to 21,000 people having their life savings wiped out? You're playing with fire Mr. McCain. Be careful.

And that brings us back to the trap that Joe Biden watched John McCain set for himself last week. Once that trap was set, all the Senator from Delaware had to do was bait it, which is exactly what he did in that speech in Liberty, Missouri.

He challenged McCain to actually bring up Ayers to Obama's face in the last debate and that puts McCain in a very tough position.

If McCain fails to bring it up Wednesday night at Hofstra he will have side-stepped the trap, but it will be easy for the Obama Campaign to question the legitimacy of the McCain/Palin claims that Obama's relationship with Ayers should be cause for concern.

The question will be "if you think the issue is so important to the American people, Mr. McCain, why did you fail to bring it up in the final debate - the last real chance for the voters to hear the candidates, side-by-side, discussing the most important issues of the day?"

On the other hand, if Sen. McCain does take the bait, and falls into the trap, Obama will have plenty of ammunition with which to ridicule the Senator from Arizona for bringing up such loose ties to a man involved in an incident that occurred 40 years ago in the face of all of McCain's failures in respect to his ethical judgment.

Not only can Obama bring up the Keating Five and the deregulation McCain supported for Mr. Keating, but he may also be able to throw Sarah Palin's Troopergate back in his face. We'll find that out later today when an independent investigator presents his findings to a legislative hearing in Alaska.

And all of this is before we've even discussed the shadiness of McCain's current top campaign officials...but that will take too long to get into right now, so we'll save it for next time. Stay tuned to The Stonecipher Report.