Obama and Jeremiah Wright, McCain and Charles Keating, Palin and Pastor Muthee. Should we judge these candidates by the company that they keep? Is that unfair guilt by asscociation? I think that candidates should be judged by both the company they keep and why they keep them.
Having personally stood with many people on account of whom I have been called a “bad Jew”, a “betrayer of my people” and a “potential enemy of my country”, I am particularly sensitive to this issue. But if we only stand with the people of whom we already approve, how do we build the bridges which improve things with those of whom we do not? Or as the late Ytizhak Rabin responded when asked how he could sit down with Yassir Arafat, “you can only make peace with your enemies.” That doesn’t mean that we can sit down with everyone always, and how we choose makes all the difference in the world.

It matters who candidates decide to spend time with, as it does for all of us. And it also matters why they are with them. The mere fact that a person, whether me with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia or our candidates for the Presidency, spends time with someone is not synonymous with an endorsement of that person and everything for which they stand. And the ability to make that distinction marks the difference between the sickening gotcha politics being played by both sides in this race, and making an honest accounting of the people with whom we hang out and whether or not it is really worth it.
For example, I am far more concerned about Barack Obama’s twenty year relationship with Jeremiah Wright than I am about his episodic and tangential connection to Bill Ayers even though the latter actually committed very serious crimes. Why? For three reasons: because Wright remains entirely unrepentant about the venomous hate speech which has defined a significant piece of his ministry, because Obama did not repudiate that speech until political expediency forced him to do so and because calling someone your pastor, makes a powerful claim about the esteem in which you hold them.

And even though Pastor Muthee, seen on YouTube, stood at a pulpit with then Wasilla Mayor Sarah Palin, and slammed “Israelites” for their “control of the economy”, I am far less worried by that than I am by the “poor judgment” (so said the Senate Ethics Committee) displayed by John McCain when he intervened, however minimally, on behalf of Charles Keating. Why? Because both the nature of the relationship, and what motivates it, are far more troubling in the latter case than in the former.
We are facing huge challenges in this country right now – challenges far bigger than who stood with whom, when. But why they stood together, what their expectations were in maintaining the relationship and what that suggests about the kinds of relationships, partnerships and advisors either candidate will maintain if elected is worth noting.
No one act, or even an ongoing friendship, should define any candidate. But how they manage that relationship, bring us into their confidence about why it was worth it, or how they made a mistake in the past about it – their answers to those questions should inform our thinking about who deserves to be our next president.