Your humble Blog Goliard has been closely following recent discussion in The Corner, and he agrees with Rich Lowry that Jonah Goldberg came up with a good way of making the case on Bill Ayers. A big reason that even folks like Peggy Noonan have been shrugging so far about the Ayers issue is that the case has not been made this well, not yet.

The most common wrong way to make the case has been to simply try to startle people with the association on its own: “OMG! Obama knows a guy who was a domestic terrorist! Boo!”

It can be done much better. One way is the way Jonah suggested: to roll this into a campaign against the Democratic Congress.

Another right way would be to keep hammering away at the continuing pattern of deception and deceit that we see from the Obama campaign, as they keep trying to spin and sweep away his Chicago associations. (It’s the coverup that’s supposed to always get you in the end, right?)

Yet another right way would zero in on the purpose of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge itself. The problem with Obama’s participation in that is not that it brought him into contact with Ayers. That’s small potatoes. The problem—the really big problem—is that the CAC was Ayers’ pet project, designed to spend tens of millions of dollars teaching young Chicagoans how to follow in Ayers’ immoral, destructive, America-loathing footsteps.

Barack Obama was asked to help lead this project.

And he said yes.

In that role he dutifully funneled money to Ayers and to his socialist and Maoist and radical friends. The importance of this must be emphasized: Obama wasn’t just a pal of an unrepentant Weatherman criminal. He put himself in a position to place millions of dollars into that man’s hands, and did so without any evident twinge of conscience.

To whom will he give money—billions this time, not millions—if we put him in the White House?

One more right way to approach Ayers would be to not mention him in isolation, but always as part of a pattern: an illustration of just how central the radical Left is to who Obama is and where he comes from. He got his radicalism literally with his mother’s milk, and then from Communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis, from the radicals he attached himself to at Occidental, from Professor Said and the Columbia gang, from his Alinskyite and ACORN colleagues, from political sponsor and mentor Ayers, from spiritual mentor Wright…any one of these could be excused, but it adds up. It really adds up.

And it’s easily enough distilled into a zinger, which I offer to Senator McCain free of charge:

“Senator Obama has spoken movingly about his love for his country. I take him at his word on that. But would it have killed him to make some friends who love America too?”

And further:

“When you elect a President, you don’t just choose an individual. One man can’t run the executive branch all by himself. A new President brings with him a team, a large team. People like Wright and Ayers have always been key players on Obama’s team. Will that suddenly change when he reaches the White House? Will all his old friends and longtime supporters who are Marxists and racists and raving anti-American lunatics be scrupulously kept out of his administration, at every level in every department? My friends, I don’t know Barack Obama well enough to say for sure…and neither do any of you.”

In sum, while Rich Lowry is again right when he says that the Ayers connection is not a “magic bullet” (the other points he makes in this Corner post are also solid), it is far from a sideshow. Especially since we are dealing with a candidate about whom we truly know so little, compared with most any other major-party Presidential nominee any of us have seen in our lifetimes.