Obama could still stumble

Spectral figures and troubling alliances form the silhouettes behind the gleaming light of Barack Obama’s resurgence from the political darkness.
His campaign steamroller brought to a near halt in the miry residue of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s invective, Obama entered Tuesday as the exhausted hare to Hillary Clinton’s energized tortoise. He finished the day with a landslide win in North Carolina and an exhilarating late-night rally that almost brought him Indiana.
The race for the Democratic nomination ended that night, notwithstanding a presumed Clinton victory in delegate-starved West Virginia and other footnote states in coming weeks. Idling and on the verge of springing to life, meanwhile, is the Republican attack machine. Fuel to keep its pistons pumping is plentiful and cheap. It exists partly in the form of a power couple of the radical intellectual elite.
People younger than 40 likely can recall little if anything about the Weather Underground and two of that group’s foremost members, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, but those names are familiar in households where conservative talk radio is a primary information source.
Ayers boasts in his memoir of bombing New York City police headquarters, the Capitol building and the Pentagon in the early 1970s, all in protest of hunger. He persists in relishing the events, telling the New York Times in 2001, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Dohrn earned her slice of infamy for her part in the bombings, gaining from J. Edgar Hoover the distinction of “the most dangerous woman in America.” Ayers now is a distinguished professor of education at the University of Chicago while his wife, Dohrn, is director of the Legal Clinic’s Children and Family Justice Center of Northwestern University.
Their connection to Obama is thought tenuous by some, ominous by others. Obama’s coming-out party after his selection as heir to an Illinois state Senate seat was held at the home of Ayers and Dohrn. Obama also served with Ayers on the board of a Chicago foundation. Obama dismisses the connections as coincidental.
That is sufficient politically only in a temporary sense. Once his party nomination becomes official, he can expect the GOP machine to accelerate. Ayers and Dohrn then will be propelled from the periphery to the forefront. As Swift Boat veterans and Willie Horton demonstrate, campaign ghosts sometimes cast lethal shadows.
Whether his links to the Weather Underground are meaningful, Obama’s pre-Tuesday stumbles could be a precursor to a harder fall in autumn.