The way he’s handled it appears to have been a net negative for him.

His mistake, which has angered me for weeks, was simply to point out that Ayers and Obama guided the same foundation, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. He left it to the American people to put 2 and 2 together — that if Ayers was a driving force in the organization, it’s probably pretty far outside mainstream values.

In this, McCain made the same mistake that President Bush has made throughout his presidency: do the right thing and just assume that its so obvious the American people will see it. Well, I’ve got news for you, Senator McCain: the American people aren’t that smart.

He could have handled it much better, were it not for his stupid insistence that Obama’s relationship with Jeremiah Wright was not a legitimate issue. Stanley Kurtz, seemingly the only journalist in America to bother digging into the issue, pointed out almost two weeks ago that CAC money went to “education reform” programs that shared the same anti-American Afrocentrism as Wright. And that Obama reviewed the proposals:

We know that Obama did read the proposals. Annenberg documents show him commenting on proposal quality. And especially after 1995, when concerns over self-dealing and conflicts of interest forced the Ayers-headed “Collaborative” to distance itself from monetary issues, all funding decisions fell to Obama and the board. Significantly, there was dissent within the board. One business leader and experienced grant-smith characterized the quality of most Annenberg proposals as “awful.” (See “The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: The First Three Years,” p. 19.) Yet Obama and his very small and divided board kept the money flowing to ideologically extremist groups like the South Shore African Village Collaborative, instead of organizations focused on traditional educational achievement.

Instead of hammering on Obama for associating with an unrepentant terrorist, the McCain campaign should have been hammering on what the two of them were working on together. As Kurtz pointed out, this should have been fair game even under McCain’s standards:

John McCain, take note. Obama’s tie to Wright is no longer a purely personal question (if it ever was one) about one man’s choice of his pastor. The fact that Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Wright’s anti-Americanism means that this is now a matter of public policy, and therefore an entirely legitimate issue in this campaign.

Of course, I don’t know whether McCain avoided this out of his misguided notion that Wright was off limits, or because he thought the “unrepentant terrorist” refrain would carry more impact. Either way, it was a bad mistake.

Then again, it might have made little difference. Obama would simply deny he knew the details of the proposals he funded, and the mainstream media (and in turn some of the public) would have simply taken him at his word, regardless of the documentation Kurtz has showing otherwise.