Imagine for a second that a militant Web site believed to reflect al Qaeda's thinking published an essay making the case that a Barack Obama presidency would best advance the terror group's goals. What would the reaction be from John McCain, Sarah Palin and the Republican National Committee?
One imagines plenty of neoconservative McCain advisers pushing for the news to become an instant talking point. The GOP running mate already has accused the Democratic nominee of "palling around" with America's enemies. "We were right," they would crow, perhaps throwing a "Right on!" to whichever mouth-breather in the crowd first called Obama a "terrorist" or invoked his middle name. One imagines Steve Schmidt already has a ready-to-deploy Web ad featuring Obama's face morphing into Osama bin Laden's.
The situation that emerged was precisely reversed, though. An al Qaeda-linked Web site said the Islamic extremists should "support McCain" because he would advance the group's goal of bankrupting America through perpetual war. The message from the al-Hesbah Web site, which some believe reflects al Qaeda thinking, was reported by the Washington Post and Associated Press.
The reaction from Obama and the Democratic National Committee to this stunning piece of news? Silence. Not one of the five dozen e-mails the Obama campaign and DNC sent reporters since Wednesday morning, when the story broke, mentioned the near-endorsement. Neither Obama nor his running mate Joe Biden mentioned it on the campaign trail, and campaign surrogates wouldn't discuss it on cable news shows.
"I think what the Obama campaign is doing is smart," Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, said in an interview Thursday. "Anyone who would put any kind of validity or conscientious purpose behind an al Qaeda web endorsement, would really be, I think, crossing a line."
Clemons speculated there would be "a lot of neoconservative advisers" in McCain's orbit who would push him to use an al Qaeda endorsement to attack Obama if the situation were reversed, but he speculated that McCain himself would veto that line of attack. He said other groups McCain has tried to link to Obama, like Hezbollah or Hamas, are "fundamentally different" from al Qaeda, which is "more insidious" and not recognized anywhere as a legitimate political organization.
Even political activists on the very far left "want to see al Qaeda wiped out," said Clemons, who discussed which candidate al Qaeda would prefer in a BloggingHeads discussion with Juan Cole in March. The consensus was that extremists probably would prefer a President McCain largely because of his desire to continue the occupation of Iraq.
An Obama spokesman, contacted by RAW STORY, said the campaign wouldn't discuss the story at all, not even to delve into its reasoning behind ignoring it.
The decision to stay above the fray and let what many see as non-story slip by unnoticed allows the Obama campaign to maintain its focus on economic issues, where polls show voters favor the Democratic candidate. It also sets Obama apart from McCain's decision earlier this year to criticize Obama over kind words a Hamas spokesman had for the Illinois senator. Obama slammed McCain for making the association, accusing him of "losing his bearings".
Rather than similarly letting the story slip from the headlines, McCain's campaign convened a hasty conference call Wednesday morning. Foreign policy advisers Randy Scheunemann and Jim Woolsey made the confounding accusation that the endorsement of McCain was actually meant to bolster Obama's candidacy.
Scheunemann said, going on to list barely-approving quotes of Barack Obama given by Hamas, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, which he manfully said he wasn't going "to characterize." Woolsey, for his part, peered into the mind of what he called "one individual Islamist blogger from one terrorist Islamist blog" and determined that he was "clearly trying to damage John McCain" and "not speaking from his heart."
A source familiar with the DNC and Obama campaign's decision to ignore the issue said the story wasn't relevant to anything happening in the campaign right now.
"The fact that the McCain campaign wanted to hold what was a batshit crazy conference call to blow up the story for everyone to write about shows how badly their campaign is run," the source told RAW STORY.
McCain's advisers continued to argue their candidate's strength against al Qaeda based on his endorsement of the surge in Iraq, which contributed to driving some elements of al Qaeda out of that country. Myriad foreign policy experts -- and the Obama campaign -- have argued that the Iraq war has allowed al Qaeda to regenerate in Afghanistan and Pakistan; Obama has said rooting out al Qaeda there would be his primary goal.
Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has not released a tape expressing his own views since this spring. CIA analysts concluded that the tape he released before the 2004 election was designed to bolster President Bush's re-election efforts. Even McCain acknowledged the video's impact.
"I think it’s very helpful to President Bush," McCain said at the time, while stumping in Stamford for U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays. "It focuses America’s attention on the war on terrorism. I’m not sure if it was intentional or not, but I think it does have an effect."
This video is from MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast October 22, 2008.
Imagine for a second that a militant Web site believed to reflect al Qaeda's thinking published an essay making the case that a Barack Obama presidency would best advance the terror group's goals. What would the reaction be from John McCain, Sarah Palin and the Republican National Committee?