Are there voters who'll care about Bill Ayers?

One might think that after televised debates and countless news stories, the American electorate would know everything there is to be known about Obama.

But Clinton and her aides have contended from the beginning of the campaign that while all the points on which Republicans will attack her are well-known, there’s more still to be discovered about Obama.

Presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain seemed to imply the same argument in his interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews Tuesday night when he said, referring to Obama, “I don’t really know him.”

Obama's supporters annoyed
Since Clinton discussed the Ayers connection Wednesday night, Obama and his allies have voiced annoyance that he was asked about Ayers.

Obama told Stephanopoulos it was wrong to see his connection to Ayers as significant “regardless of how flimsy the relationship is.” He said it was false to suggest Ayers’s ideas “could be attributed to me.”

Obama’s supporters at Moveon.org started an anti-ABC petition drive claiming that ABC’s debate interrogators Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson were “obsessed with distractions that only political insiders care about.”

To some degree, the Obama campaign itself was keeping the ruckus alive Thursday night, sending out an e-mail reminding reporters that President Clinton had issued pardons to Weather Underground convicts Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans.

If Obama ends up as the Democratic nominee and if Bill Ayers is, as Moveon.org contends, merely one of the “trivial questions” that don’t matter to voters, then it will be futile for the Republicans to try to use the Ayers connection against Obama in the fall.

But a Democratic primary open only to registered Democrats such as the one on Tuesday in Pennsylvania can’t be a fully adequate test of that proposition since no Republicans will be voting in it.

Picking the president: The candidates Click to visit that candidate's MSNBC page or click the XML symbol for an RSS feed. John McCain                Barack Obama

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