There is nothing dishonorable about drawing attention to Barack Obama’s ties to Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, or Bill Ayers. In each relationship, Obama displayed a willingness to tolerate corruption or radicalism if it helped him get ahead in politics. The mainstream media is usually quick to detect this kind of pattern in ambitious pols, but they’ve been too preoccupied painting halos around Obama’s head to notice it in him. 

Let’s take them one by one. Obama joined Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in the late 1980s, during his community-organizer days. National Review’s Byron York has reported that Obama was having a hard time getting black churches involved in his community-organizing efforts, and that other black pastors had told him he wouldn’t have much luck until he joined a church.

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The New Republic has reported that Obama joined Trinity around this time because he “was taken with Wright’s worldview.” The reporting of NR’s Stanley Kurtz has revealed that in the late 1980s, Wright’s worldview entailed a burning hatred of Western capitalism and a belief that black assimilation into the middle class was a form of self-enslavement to an irredeemably racist system.

Obama claims he wasn’t in church when Wright delivered some of his most inflammatory sermons — including his infamous “God damn America” speech the Sunday after 9/11 — but it is impossible to believe that Obama belonged to Jeremiah Wright’s church for more than 20 years without realizing that the man was an anti-American black nationalist. Of course, when Wright’s radicalism became a liability to Obama’s presidential ambitions, he un-joined Trinity and cut Wright loose, just like that.

The public was treated to a different verse of the same song when Obama’s unbelievably corrupt friend Tony Rezko was convicted on 16 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, soliciting bribes, and money laundering. Rezko’s primary business since 1990 was the buying and selling of political influence. It’s how he came to be first in line for government grants to convert run-down buildings into low-income housing, which he then let deteriorate into slums.

Obama entered into his own land deal with Rezko in the summer of 2005. Rezko bought the property adjacent to the Obama’s dream home and sold him a strip of land on which to build a fence. Obama paid a fair price, but by this point the Chicago papers had run more than 100 stories about the federal investigation into Rezko’s influence-peddling. Obama called his decision to deal with Rezko a “bone-headed move,” but claimed he didn’t know about the corrupt behavior. If so, he was the last person in Chicago.

Now Obama wants us to believe that he didn’t know about Bill Ayers’s terrorist past when he was working with Ayers in the 1990s. As a leader of the radical Weather Underground, Ayers participated in multiple bombings that he says he does not regret. He spent 11 years as a fugitive from justice. Obama and Ayers first met in 1995. In an interview for a book published that year, Ayers described his political views: “I am a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist.”

Ayers’s defenders say he has redeemed himself through his work in the field of education, and Obama worked with Ayers on an educational project called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. But Ayers is not interested in teaching kids to read or write. Again, Stanley Kurtz has done the legwork and shown that Ayers’s work in education is merely an extension of his radicalism: He wants to teach kids to follow in his own leftist footsteps. 

The Obama campaign (and its fellow-travelers in the press) argues that these stories should be filed under “guilt by association.” But so many of Obama’s associates are guilty, it raises legitimate questions about his judgment. At different times in his life, Obama looked at Wright, Rezko, and Ayers, and each time he answered, “You know, that’s someone I can do business with.”

The campaign has also countered by talking up McCain’s involvement in the “Keating Five,” a group of lawmakers investigated during the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s. If the public is paying any attention, that tactic is bound to run into problems. For one thing, the Senate Ethics Committee cleared McCain of serious wrongdoing and merely criticized him for “poor judgment.” (McCain himself called his involvement with Keating “the worst mistake of my life.”) For another, the lead investigator for the committee recently declared, “I investigated John McCain for a year and a half… and if there is one thing I am absolutely confident of, it is John McCain is an honest man.”

McCain is going to have to do more than criticize Obama for his Chicago ties if he wants to check his recent slide in the polls. But McCain should not let the press dictate to him which of those associations he is allowed to discuss. All of them are legitimate targets (even if McCain bizarrely won’t talk about Wright), and taken together they make up a pattern: Obama has never met a leftist he didn’t like.