Barack Obama’s middle name was attack fodder once again Wednesday when John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin were introduced at a rally here in Lehigh, PA. Before John McCain and Sarah Palin took the stage, William Platt II, the head of the Lehigh County GOP, referred to Obama — not once, but twice — by his full name.
“The No. 1 most liberal senator in the United States of America was, you guessed it, the ambassador of change, Barack Hussein Obama,” Platt said as the crowd booed. Opponents have used Obama’s middle name to label him as Muslim and anti-Semitic.
Last time that reference was made at a McCain event in February, McCain condemned it on stage shortly after. But this time McCain didn’t denounce the comments, but campaign spokesman Paul Lindsay issued a statement saying “We do not condone this inappropriate rhetoric .”
At a rally for Palin in Estero, Florida, last week, another speaker used Obama’s middle name. “On Nov. 4,” yelled Lee County (Fla.) Sheriff Mike Scott, “let’s leave Barack Hussein Obama wondering what happened!”
At the same time, McCain campaign is trying to tie Senator Obama to William Ayers (now 63), a founder of the Weather Underground, a radical left anti-Vietnam War group that bombed the US Capitol and Pentagon in the early 1970s. Mr Ayers hosted a meeting at his house in 1995 to introduce Senator Obama to neighbors during his first run for the Illinois Senate. They also served on a non-profit anti-poverty board together.
Citing a New York Times story about Obama-Ayers relationship, Sarah Palin commented on three campaign rallies on October 4 that Barack Obama was "palling around with terrorists"
In this charged atmosphere it is not surprising that crowds in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have repeatedly booed Obama and yelled “off with his head,” and at a rally in Florida where Sarah Palin appeared without Mr. McCain, a man yelled out “kill him.”
On Friday a woman at a meeting held at Lakeville South High School in a suburb of Minneapolis told McCain that she could not trust Obama because he was an “Arab.”
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