You can understand why The Young love Obama. It's the life story that speaks to so many. Unlike boring normal people raised in the green gulags of suburbia whose experience is completely typical of American life, and therefore irrelevant, Obama was brought up in cool far-flung places. He may not connect with the eleven billion bitter gun-clinging God-bothering hill folk who clot the nation between the holy poles of New York and LA, but he appeals to every kid in college with a Che poster and a vague sense of anger that he's not a biracial hipster going to college in Hawaii.

Boring old people have their doubts, of course; that comes with the wrinkles and the saw-palmetto supplements. They wonder about his preacher, whose thunderous and corrosive sermons, to paraphrase Obama, might be summed up as "Yes We Farrakhan." But then they think back to the Sundays on which their much-beloved pastor took the pulpit and blamed the government for fluoridated water on Communists and Masons, and admit it: opened your eyes.  So who's to point fingers?

But then there's the association with that Bill Ayers character. One of the Weathermen. Told kids to kill their parents. Well, that was a metaphor, a figure of speech; he really meant that kids should kill someone else's parents, preferably if they wore a uniform. But that was so long ago, and he's all respectable now.

As we've been told, it's almost impossible to travel in the right - sorry, the better circles in Chicago without bumping into Professor Ayers at the market in the arugula aisle, the Blockbuster video store (haranguing the clerk for not having "Hair" on VHS, probably) the foundation board room,  where people of all political stripes meet. Why, some of them want a 70 percent capital gains tax, and others want an 80% rate. Hurrah for the big tent! And it stands to reason that you can't do the cocktail party circuit without running into at least one academic who was devoted to the destruction of America in his youth, but has mellowed to the point where he now just wants to give it a really bad rug burn.

Really, friends: who among us hasn't had to deal with former terrorists in your social circle? At first it's a bit awkward, of course; you're introduced to someone at the fundraiser for the National Association for Local Associations, and he looks familiar - heck, his face and his profile look familiar, and for a moment you recall the Pine-Sol aroma of your childhood Post Office. Odd. Why? You think  he was one of the Michigan Six, those free-spirited anarchists who planted pipe bombs in Salvation Army Christmas kettles, but the more you talk you realize he was one of the North Dakota Two, who put explosive devices in military day-care centers.

Well, imagine your embarrassment.  At least you were warm and interested and solicitous; these are survivors of a fascinating, difficult time in American history.  Let those among us who haven't spent an evening chatting merrily with an unrepentant Marxist cast the first I. F. Stone.

*  *  *

No doubt there are many who balk at Obama's old associations, but are disinclined to point them out. There are no enemies on the left, even the enemies of the reputation of the left. What's worse than actually being a Communist? Pointing out someone was a Communist.  As 4,296 movies and TV shows and documentaries have shown us, it is one thing to be a devotee of a collectivist ideology that strips away liberty, but quite another to suggest that soap producers are not obliged to sponsor their work.  It's certainly unacceptable to choose not to hire someone because he likes the taste of Uncle Joe's boot polish. Nowadays it is impolite to regard the 60s radicals as anything but colorful iconoclasts; history has been smudged and fudged to the point where the counterculture is now regarded as the actual culture.  

If there's something wrong with Obama's connections with radicals old and new, then there's something wrong with the grand narrative that puts Ho Chi Mihn up there with George Washington, and salutes the radicals for their brilliant re-imagining of the American experience.

If this is a fallen nation, it doesn't need a savior. If the radical boomers weren't the most important members of the most important generation in human history, then their ideological inheritors aren't fulfilling a long-promised mission to remold America. Or, as Ayer's cohort might put it, stab the beast in the belly with a fork. It would mean we are obliged to move ahead cognizant of our glories as well as our flaws, instead of pretending we can reboot America and sunder every rope that moors us to our traditions.

Really, where's the fun in that?