FLASHBACK: Peter Collier on The Sixties at 40.

Because it is still so unassimilated—“a cadaver,” soixante-huitard André Glucksmann recently said, from which people of all political points of view break off chunks at will—the Sixties continues to shadow our politics like a mean dog. John Kerry got bit when he cluelessly decided to “report for duty” in 2004. More recently the Sixties lunged at Barack Obama in the person of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, negrifying him when he wanted to be post-racial and ideologizing him when he wanted to be post-partisan, and ending abruptly his attempt to hope-a-dope an electorate desperate to believe.

If Wright’s rancid ideas about Amerikkka, right out of the Sixties Black Power play book, were not burden enough, Obama also had to account for Billy Ayers, who helped found Weatherman out of SDS after a series of carcinomic political cell divisions had gorked that organization. This nihilistic group, which took its name from Bob Dylan’s line “You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows,” inspired some opposition from the ancien régime of the New Left (one of whose members famously said, “No, and you don’t need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes are”). But in constantly “upping the ante,” Weatherman expressed the temper of the time. And no one in the group better embodied the era’s penny-ante Neitzscheanism than Ayers himself. (“Guilty as hell, free as a bird, America’s a great country” was how he summarized his life in the Sixties and after in a talk with me and David Horowitz not long after emerging from the terrorist underground and heading toward the tenure track at the University of Illinois.)

There is justice in Obama’s plaintive objection that he was, after all, in knee pants in the years when Weatherman was on its little bombing spree. All he knew about Ayers was the conventional wisdom about all such unreconstructed “activists” from the Sixties: that they are solid progressives with social consciences who, like the candidate himself, believe in change. Indeed, given the way the era is portrayed by Professor Parini and all the others, why should Obama have thought anything else?

Hillary Clinton was also blindsided by the Sixties, although in a slightly more roundabout way. The hit came from Obama-supporter Tom Hayden, who as the New Left’s acknowledged Everyman, was uniquely qualified to pronounce the anathema. After Hillary’s victory in Pennsylvania, Hayden reminded readers of The Nation of her own “roots in the Sixties”—how she had chaired a Yale Law school movement against the Vietnam war; joined the defense of Bobby Seale during his New Haven murder trial in 1970; and, after law school, spent her summer vacation in the Bay Area working in the fellow-traveling law firm of Robert Treuhaft, which specialized in defending Black Panthers during their war against the cops. Then, having finished this little exercise in Sixties red-baiting, Hayden stipulated that these causes she had once espoused were, of course, “noble,” and charged that she had betrayed her former self by dissing a man, the Rev. Wright, “who represents the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days.”

Staining her with the Sixties and then rubbing in that stain by accusing her of betraying the Sixties: it was one of those sinuous intellectual maneuvers that shows why Irving Howe once said of Hayden that he gave opportunism a bad name.

Read the whole thing. 12 years later after the above article was written, examples abound at how the sixties continues to impact American politics: