My colleague Michael Calderone has a story up about the Times decision to publish a front-page piece Satuday about Bill Ayers.  

In it, Times editor Bill Keller offers a curious explanation for why they decided to go with the story.

He told Politico that the paper was motivated to report out the Ayers link because the McCain campaign has been pushing it — not the other way around.

“We’ve reported the Ayers relationship before, and we had it on our to-do list for a while to take a more comprehensive look,” Keller said in an e-mail. “When the McCain campaign began to make it a major focal point of ads and stump speeches, we decided the time was right.” 

Maybe the McCain campaign had been pushing it behind the scenes with the Times, but Keller’s timeline is off here.  Sarah Palin didn’t begin hitting Ayers until Saturday, the day of publication, and when she did, she used the Times piece as the peg for her attack.   And the campaign didn’t go up with an actual TV ad on Ayers until today.