McCain Says Ayers Will Come Up in Tomorrow’s Debate

by Chris Good - 10/14/08 12:08 PM ET

After repeated calls from conservatives to get more aggressive, and after Barack Obama himself prodded McCain to “say it to my face,” John McCain says Obama’s association with former Weather Underground member William Ayers will likely come up at tomorrow night’s debate.

McCain did not specify whether he himself would bring up Ayers, or whether he thought CBS’s Bob Schieffer, the debate’s moderator, would ask a question about the 1970s radical, but the Arizona Republican seemed to hint that it would come from Schieffer.

“I was astonished to hear him say that he was surprised for me to have the guts to do that, because the fact is that the question didn’t come up in that fashion, so I think he’s probably ensured that it will come up this time,” McCain told conservative talk-radio host Mark Reardon on KMOX, a St. Louis-based AM talk radio station.

Listen to the interview here.

Obama told ABC’s Charles Gibson last week that he was surprised McCain did not “say it to my face” in the last debate, after Gibson asked the Illinois Democrat what he thought about attacks on his past and record that McCain and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) had launched earlier that week on the campaign trail, and the fact that McCain did not repeat those attacks during the debate.

Those attacks included Palin accusing Obama of “palling around with terrorists”–a clear reference to Ayers–and other direct references to the former Weather Underground member.

McCain, in the KMOX interview yesterday, repeated what is becoming his staple line on Ayers: that he “doesn’t care about some old washed-up terrorist,” and that what’s more important is whether Obama is telling the truth about his relationship with the radical, whose group orchestrated bombings in the 1970s.

“Look, Mark, it’s not that I give a damn about some old washed-up terrorist and his terrorist wife that on 2001 said they wished they’d bombed more,” McCain said.

“What I care about and what the American people care about is whether he is