I'm not satisfied with Obama's response to the guilt by association attacks against him, much less bloggers' and pundits' sympathetic responses. The only response that worked well was his speech on race. In it, he was a statesman. He empathized accurately and deeply with both sides and, in so doing, brought us together and increased his standing in the polls. He needs to do that again. He needs to slip up into his statesman role and lead us again.

What's wrong with his current responses? He drones on about how negative the attacks are. While that's true, it's like calling a prosecutor's attacks negative. Of course, they're negative. That's what they're supposed to be. If you step in the shoes of the befuddled middle of the road voter who is worried about, for instance, Obama's association with the mad bombing radical, Ayers, calling this attack negative sounds only defensive. From the puzzled voters' point of view, this lable actually helps a bit to confirm the truth of the attack. Sometimes, Obama argues the facts. He shot himself in the foot when he tried to argue that he wasn't in church when Wright damned America. The hole he had dug got deeper. Even when he marshaled his best facts--his commitment to the church community, etc.--he wasn't terribly persuasive. The underlying problem is that the public always suspects that there are more facts, more damning ones lurking int he wings. It's the smoke and fire logic. As too many use-of-cliche-challenged politicians have said far too many times, that dog won't hunt. Or at least, it won't most conclusively beat the competition.

To me, the best response begins with exposing the underlying logic of guilt by association, the dynamic of it that is so effective with too many people. What led me into this response to was an article I read months ago that discussed Hillary's troubles with guilt by association. I learned that, in all the years that Hillary was investigated--not just attacked in the press--for her Whitewater real estate dealings, no charge against her was made. Only the most extremist commentators said that she did anything wrong. Rather, the middle of the road foks only said that she was associated with someone who, in other dealings, did something wrong. That realization led to an exploration of all of the guilt by association attacks against Obama.

Regarding all of them, few people have made a specific charge. They only say he's wrong for being associated with Ayers, Wright, and the corrupt developer in Chicago. Of course, there are people throwing red meat to their extreme constituents, for instance, alleging that Obama is a closet reverse racist or anarchist. But most pundits and politicians who seem reasonable to the middle of the road voter only say that Obama was wrong to associate with Wright, Ayers, and others. For instance, Clinton herself only argued that he should have left the church. He shouldn't have been associated with Wright. Those sorts of people also weigh in on how weak and unconvincing Obama seems in responding to those charges; that weak response feels like a kissing cousing of the most damaging wrong doing in politics, a cover up.

Here's the hidden power of guilt by association. Notice first that what's difficult to see is that, if the guilt by association accusation is the only kind of charge being alleged, it would seem that it would have no impact. And there would be no huge outpouring of blogs and mainstream articles about gotcha politics, much less Obama's electability. After all, there is nothing at all wrong with being associated with someone who's done something wrong. I can hear readers' inner wheels spinning. But there is something wrong. Actually, there's nothing wrong with having a relationship with someone who's done something wrong. Otherwise, for instance, everyone in the criminal justice system would be under suspicion. Think about it. There isn't and connection. But then why do these accusations have such power?

There power is that they imply wrongdoing. This may be too obvious to mention, but I don't think so. The implicit accusation is that, if Obama was associated with Wright, he must hate white America. If he associated with a militant, he must be militant. That kind of implied accusation is what guilt by association is all about. That's what gives it its power. And it can now seem plain that, when Obama argues the facts and calls the accusations negative or even despicable, he's not putting his finger on the problem people are having. He's not bringing out into the light of day the implied accusation and addressing it. Here's how I'd advise him to do that. Here's the outlines of a speech he could write much better than I, one that's analogous to his speech on race.

Senator Clinton represented many Americans when she said that I should have left Rev. Wright's church. I've argued that he was like a crazy uncle, somebody I cared about because he did many good things for me and the community. Some people still worry about my association with him. I think that's because they haven't brought their most upsetting worry out into the open, nor have I. That's been my mistake in handling all of these attacks against me.

These attacks are working with some people the same way Joe McCarthy's attacks worked. He would stand up before America with a blank piece of paper, and say things like, I have a list of names of known communists whom you were associated with. He didn't even have to have any evidence at all that the accused was even associated with a communist. That's how much power he had to scare people into believing that a bunch of progressive and patriotic Americans were radicals determined to undermine America. And the people who did have associations with communists, well, he didn't have to even claim that they had tried to undermine America or that they believed that America should be subverted. That's how afraid America had become. That's how much we back then succumbed to guilt by association tactics. We're vulnerable to that. And as long as we are, we will be in danger of allowing this subversive kind of tactic to hijack our elections.

We've got to build up our immunity to these guilt by association tactics. Here's how we do it. Whenever anybody says that somebody else is guilty by association, we've got to demand of them that they make a specific charge. In the case of my association with Rev. Wright, they've first got to make the implied charge, that I too am a radical, that I believe that HIV was a demonic attack against black people launched by the government or whatever. In the case of Mr. Ayers, they've got to charge me with also believing that public buildings should be bombed or something else along the lines of what Mr. Ayers believed.

Then we've got to demand that they bring forward some other evidence to prove whatever charges they want to make. For instance, now the extreme right wing of the Republican Party in the person of Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich are saying that I have Marxist ideas. Okay, show me somewhere in my speeches or conversations with others where I've promoted Marxism. Let's bring this charge out in the open and air it. If you think you've got solid evidence, give it to fifteen top reporters at the major newspapers, and I'll sit down with them and go over it for as long as it takes for them to be convinced one way or the other. This is one way to put guilt by association politics on trial and finally convict it and get rid of it.

Attack politics also works, because people have in mind that some accusations are eventually proven. But most of them will quickly fade if we address them directly as suggested above. And it's vital that we do, because they terribly mislead voters and, thereby, undermine our democracy much more than any of the supposed wrongdoing of all the political candidates in America who have ever been accused of guilt by association.

We can all be forgiven for either practicing this tactic, failing to respond decisively to it, as in my case, or succumbing it, as in the case of some voters. After all, our entire country is so vulnerable to the logic of guilt by association that we once let Joe McCarthy and his supporters undermine almost the entire country. We don't want to go to the opposite extreme and fail to listen to charges and fail to check them out. But we must become educated about the hidden power of the guilt by association tactic and how to see through it and defeat it.