I wouldn’t call it a good thing when your candidacy is endorsed by a terrorist organization… but it’s even worse that Obama’s campaign is apparently flattered by the endorsement.
In the spin room following the debate, I asked Barack Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, to respond to a report that a top Hamas official had endorsed Obama.
“I have no idea about that, I have not heard that,” Axelrod replied.
I told him that the words were spoken by Ahmed Yousef, and offered to read him the quote, which I I proceeded to do from my Blackberry: “we like Mr. Obama. We hope he will (win) the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, great man with great principle…”
Axelrod focused on the Kennedy portion of the quote, and was “flattered” by the comparison.
“I like John Kennedy too,” Axelrod said. “That’s about the only thing we have in common with this gentleman from Hamas. We all agree that John Kennedy was a great president, and it’s flattering when anybody says that Barack Obama would follow in his footsteps.”
Michael Goldfarb says it all:
Note the slipperiness. Axelrod first distances himself from the “gentleman from Hamas,” but in the next breath he embraces the gentleman/terrorists’ comparison to Kennedy, pronouncing it “flattering.” Only recently Obama declared that “nobody has spoken out more fiercely on the issue of anti-Semitism than I have.” Apparently there’s an exception for when anti-Semites compare Obama to Kennedy. Then all bets are off!
Perhaps the Obama campaign would be equally flattered by an endorsement from Osama bin Laden if the endorsement compared Obama to MLK.
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