By: Politico

In early July, the McCain presidential campaign released an ad titled “Love.” The spot juxtaposes John McCain’s wartime heroics against a montage of images from the counterculture of late-’60s America: Freewheeling hippies walk city streets dressed outrageously, while a couple kisses in public. The message is clear: McCain put his country first; liberals loved themselves, not America.

The ad, one of the few by McCain’s campaign to invoke the specter of ’60s radicalism, never gained the same traction and press attention as an ad released later that month likening Barack Obama’s celebrity to Paris Hilton’s. But now the ’60s have returned with a vengeance, as McCain and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin repeatedly try to use Obama’s relationship with Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers to discredit the Democratic candidate.

Much to the consternation of McCain-Palin advisers, however, the Ayers connection has failed to resonate with most voters, and polls suggest that, for independents and moderates, the negative attacks actually have soured them on the GOP ticket. As commentators have pointed out, Obama’s ties to Ayers are rather thin. At the same time, voters are focused on the economic meltdown and express little interest in Obama’s relationship to a man even McCain dismissively labeled “an old, washed-up terrorist.”

The failure to make the Ayers charge stick suggests that a more significant cultural and generational shift is afoot: The American electorate is saying goodbye to the culture wars of the 1960s. McCain-Palin arguments about the Weather Underground carry little weight with most voters in a nation now four decades removed from the ’60s. That era’s social turmoil has faded from America’s political consciousness, and millions of voters have few direct memories of those cultural wars. If they know about the Weather Underground at all, it’s probably because they heard it was named after a line in a Bob Dylan song, “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” They may also know the Weather Underground as a website for weather reports (www.wunderground.com).

There’s a generational changing of the guard at work as well: Obama is the first major-party presidential nominee who was born in the 1960s, in contrast to Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and George W. Bush, all of whom were born in the 1940s. As Obama himself has repeatedly said, he was 8 years old when Ayers committed his “detestable acts” of bombing U.S. government buildings.

Another reason the Obama-Ayers theme hasn’t gained altitude is the success of Democrats in overcoming their historical disadvantage on national security issues. Obama wears a flag pin, won Gen. Colin Powell’s endorsement and associates with venerable advisers including former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and Gen. Jim Jones, former NATO commander. By showcasing his toughness, Obama has blunted the charge that he’s been “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country,” in Palin’s infamous words.

Moreover, the war on terror has replaced the cultural and political wars of the ’60s in voters’ minds — thus, the connection to Ayers feels forced and out of touch, coming in this campaign from deep left field.

The political style and ideas of Ayers’ Weather Underground bear little resemblance to the most recent brushes with terrorist attacks on American soil. The education reformer from Chicago embraced a brand of violent anti-government extremism in the 1960s, but his desire to foment worldwide revolution against “pigs” and U.S. “imperialism” is a distant cry from Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s far-right, anti-Big Government conspiratorial views and Osama bin Laden’s Islamic radicalism.

The Weather Underground, lest we forget, was a desperate attempt to spark a violent revolution in opposition to the Vietnam War and U.S. oppression of the developing world. In 1969, Ayers and his small band of allies penned a babbling 16,000-word manifesto that borrowed heavily from Chinese communists and Leninism and “raised obscurity and thickheadedness to new heights,” former New Left leader Todd Gitlin wrote in his memoirs.

Students for a Democratic Society President Carl Oglesby recalled that Ayers and his fellow Weathermen “knew they were crazy.” They adopted a “Butch Cassidy and Sundance attitude” and a tongue-in-cheek fanaticism in which they railed against the social order — attacking police officers, smashing store windows and holding “criticism/self-criticism” sessions drawn from Maoism.

Ayers’ brand of radicalism is so distinctly rooted in late-’60s Americana that it’s hard to take seriously his injection into the 2008 presidential campaign. Before founding the Underground, he was an anti-war activist with the American Federation of Teachers and a member of the Ann Arbor Children’s Community School (School buttons read: “Children are only newer people”). He told a group of Weathermen in late 1969 that “the basic struggle in the world today is the struggle of the oppressed people against U.S. imperialism” — an archaic formulation from another era.

Launching a hapless revolutionary movement, three of Ayers’ colleagues managed to blow themselves up in a Manhattan town house in 1970 while trying to build pipe bombs.

And while some Weather Underground members killed a guard and two police officers during a horrible Brink’s truck robbery in 1981, the McCain campaign acts as if Ayers were the supreme leader of a thousands-strong guerrilla outfit that still threatens the U.S. government, as opposed to a violent, if relatively impotent, offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society.

Despite incessantly invoking the Ayers-Obama trope using grainy TV footage, robocalls and printed fliers, the McCain campaign’s charge is so clumsy and farfetched that it has largely fallen on deaf ears. The American electorate isn’t listening to the attacks, because it has turned a page on the culture wars of the ’60s, even if the McCain-Palin campaign hasn’t noticed.

Matthew Dallek, a visiting assistant professor at the University of California’s Washington Program, writes a monthly column on history and politics for Politico.

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